As announced on simplygames.tumblr.com (a  local game event blog ran by Yu Chang Seng of MDeC), Norihiko Hibino gave a talk at APIIT-UCTI on Thursday morning. The event was free and open to the public. Norihiko Hibino is co-composer for - among other games - the Metal Gear Solid series and the Zone of the Ender series. He is also, as picture shows, an accomplished saxophone player.

More details after the jump.

The restive crowd waiting for the event to start. It’s attended by mostly students, whom joked to me the only way to differentiate between them and the lecturers are the ties.

The guest arrived.

Albert Quek of the UCTI Game Development course ushered Norihiko and helped him set up.

The audience got curious when they realized Norihiko not only brought a saxophone, but also prepped it ready. Note the Mac: he was very definite in the lecture that he prefers the Mac over PC.

The talk began.

As detailed, he worked on plenty of games besides MGS and Zone of the Enders. For MGS, he said he specifically worked on MGS2, MGS3, Portable Ops and Peace Walker. He was amused many of the students knew of Bayonetta. The audience was very quiet over Ninja Blade, which Norihiko considered to be a good game.

He spoke about Gem Impact, his company that creates music. He emphasizes that you can’t just hire an orchestra and do a recording to get the job done; there’re plenty of things to do to make sure the music done is good.

He noted casually that he likes to try a lot of things. Among the other business he ran are GEM Planning which handles food, and VIP Bar which is an exclusive bar that serves high-paying clientele. The VIP Bar was created because of the economic crunch, and contradictory as it may sound, catering for high-paying customers only made the business sustainable.

He demonstrated some of his works, creating animation and composing music for simple iPhone games and openings for Japanese variety shows. For the iPhone game, he pointed out that while quality seems low, it is efficient because it was done in Flash. Norihiko maintained a theme in his talk where he stressed that when the project does not call for high quality graphics, there is no need to deliver it. One example was the Japanese variety show intro; it was low in visual quality because the idea of the show was to sell fun and variety, not high-quality graphics. The most important thing for him is that the project was fun.

He spent some time going over what it takes to succeed.

Here, he equates the work he does in GEM Impact as similar to preparing food. He cites “food must be cut down into proper sizes so people can eat it. Some people in video games, they make their food [proportions] too big to eat”.

Afterwards, he prepared a show by having slides of Ninja Blade autoplay with  background music, while he plays a sax accompaniment.

The combo was interesting, because the Ninja Blade soundtrack was an ominous piece with Japanese-style drumming (typical game music), and his sax play has a soulful relaxing feel to it. In some parts, the sax actually does sound like the Snake Eater piece.

The crowd clapped and whooped in appreciation at the end of the performance.

After this was QnA. Below is the summary.

1. How do composers work with game programmers?
   1. To Nobihiro, there are two kinds of programmers: those who work on sound assets, and those responsible for sound drivers.  The sound driver programmers require more attention, as they are the ones who determine what sounds are possible in-game. As a composer, he would need to understand how sound would work in the game, thus he needs to work more closely with the sound driver programmers.
2. How does a composer work creating sounds for a game?
   1. There are two kinds of sound needed. One is for in-game, and another is for movies. In this case, he treats the movies as a standard case, and the in-game sounds as the situation that requires more attention.
      1. For in-game sounds, typically he needs to know the lengths of each audio, and certain traits about them such as whether it’s a loud or a subtle audio
      2. One typical process is for the game developers to provide a video of an in-game scene to the sound designer, and the sound designer creates the sound based on the video.
3. How do you survive in the market if you become a game programmer and there are no opportunities? (Note: UCTI teaches game programming)
   1. Always think of what you’re doing - as a programmer -  as something bigger than the game industry. (Nobihiro actually lives by this rule, as besides being a composer/sound designer, he also runs businesses dealing with food.)
4. How do you feel about working on high profile games?
   1. His personal opinion is that high profile games have a tendency on focusing on high quality instead of the fun behind the work. There’s a tendency of throwing too much money into a high profile project, and he encourages developers to look for what is fun in projects.
5. How does one create sound based on ideas, especially when the client doesn’t know how to describe the sounds needed?
   1. Usually descriptions are very specific for audio. If it is unclear, the Composer will create concept versions for the Producer to go through.
   2. The good thing about conceptualizing audio is that it can be done really quickly.
6. How is your work schedule like?
   1. “I only compose in the morning”
   2. In the afternoon, he spends his time mixing the audio.
   3. He checks emails at night.
7. Can you identify the differences of working in the US, Japan and Malaysia?
   1. US people like to share. They also work like freelancers, where they’ll gather for a project and leave when the project ends. Being freelancers in mindset, people like to share ideas and skills with each other.
   2. Japanese people focuses on networking and getting a team together that stays together, so it’s very hard for someone new to get into a group.
   3. US developers work in vertical slices, while Japan is still focused on working on projects that uses, for example, 2 years of planning with big milestones all the way to the final master.
   4. Malaysia has friendly people, and they like to introduce people to one another. This is a good culture for sharing skills. However, for businesses there is a need to emphasize building trust. Malaysia is well suited for small projects, but for big projects, the US is a better choice.

At the end, Albert presented a souvenir to Norihiko.

Students gathering to have a picture moment with the guest.