Game Audio DSP 🎧, AI vs Engines 🤖, Data Validation 📊
🎮 Game Audio & Engine Wizardry
Inside Game Audio: DSP, Synthesis, and Why C++ Still Rules
This in-depth interview walks through the entire digital audio chain—from vibrating air to arrays of floats—and explains how DSP, synthesis, and effects shape the sounds we use in games. Jan Wilczek explores additive, subtractive, FM, wavetable, and sample-based synthesis, and why sample-plus-effects still dominates practical sound design. He also breaks down why C++ and the JUCE framework remain the backbone of real-time audio, and introduces WolfSound’s free official JUCE course for building your first plugin.
AI vs Game Engines: What Lives Between Pixels and Prompts?
This thought experiment sets up two extremes: handcrafted, watt-efficient engines like those behind The Last of Us 2, and compute-hungry generative video models that conjure worlds from a sentence. The author explores what happens if we “walk the line” between them—AI worlds with editable state, conventional simulations with AI polish, or systems translating between opaque AI scenes and traditional 3D assets. With game budgets ballooning and AI costs also spiking, the sweet spot may be in hybrid tools rather than full replacement.
🏗️ Building and Validating Indie Games
Four Hard-Won Lessons for Building a Sustainable Indie Studio
Drawing on 15 years at Suspicious Developments (Gunpoint, Heat Signature, Tactical Breach Wizards), this article lays out four brutally practical rules for surviving as an indie. Stay as small as possible, pick ideas you can prototype fast, and treat playtesting as the main way you “make the game good.” Pricing, the author argues, is a solvable problem if you just ask players what they’d pay. If your goal is still being around to make the next game, this is your playbook.
From Flop to Biomechanoid Repair Shop: Validating Game Ideas with Data
After his last game barely recouped costs, this dev refused to pick his next project on gut feel. Instead, he shortlisted 12 concepts, surveyed players, devs, and creators, then commissioned polished mockups for the six strongest ideas. Each mockup was posted to social platforms and targeted subreddits, driving visitors to email signups as a hard measure of interest. The clear winner—Biomechanoid Repair Shop—shows how visual clarity, subreddit fit, and real commitment signals can guide what game to make next.