GL33k

GL33k started work on Rocket Arena the very week after completing Prey. GL33k handled all sound design, implementation and audio direction.

GL33k worked closely with the team at Final Strike games and we’ve really enjoyed the experience. Working in isolation on a multiplayer game was quite a challenge but the end result is some of my favorite work we’ve done.

GL33k has been working on Weird West doing the entire audio package. It’s still in development so I can’t say much but the experience thus far has been fantastic. I can’t wait to show more of how this game and the sound are shaping up.

GL33k played a a huge role in bringing the whimsical world of Lucky to life in this XBox exclusive title.

In addition to sound design, GL33k was tasked with primary music composition work. There were a wide array of worlds to tackle, everything from a down home "worm hoe-down" to your classic "Disco Cat Battle" and even a spooky ghost carnival.

Check out some behind the scenes footage here!

Currently in progress!

We’re hard at work creating some of the most exciting music we’ve ever done. We’re finally getting to use some of that gear we bought to make dance music!

Sneak Peak here!

We couldn’t get enough Prey in our lives and went back to work to bring Moon Crash to life!

We were so grateful to be at the audio helm for this incredibly compelling VR title. Old devices, an intriguing storyline, and other worldly twists made this one a really fun project to work on.

Trailer here!

GL33k provided sound design and integration while working on-site and remotely.

GL33k is extremely proud to be a part of the Halo history as we've always been fans of the franchise. It feels amazing to go from playing Halo 3 multiplayer matches during lunch breaks years ago, to being a part of the audio design team for the brand new Halo multiplayer mode Dominion.

Bobby was on the ground at Certain Affinity for the better part of a year, handling implementation for the multiplayer section of this game. It was our first time working with Certain Affinity, and we were thoroughly impressed with their operation.

We worked to support the designers with their new game modes by adding sounds to game mode events and world objects. We also participated in play tests to take notes on how varying numbers of players would affect the mix and overall soundscape. We stayed through the end of the bug fixing phase to support the team on anything audio based and help them interface with Microsoft's audio team at 343 in Redmond.

Overall it was a hugely rewarding experience that resulted in an awesome game and a great new relationship with a top notch studio, Certain Affinity. We would go on to work with them on Halo 4 again when they added us on the team for something slightly different - the Halo 4 map packs Majestic and Castle.

Recognition

Halo community reviewers have recognized our Halo 4 DLC maps as some of the best sounding maps across the Halo franchise.

The audio team at Sony Santa Monica contacted us late in the development of Uncharted 3 looking for help with voice. They needed dialog editing, mastering, localization and integration-- and they needed it to happen on-site at Naughty Dog.

Our man Jimi Barker, an original GL33ker, signed up for the task and shipped out to Santa Monica to work long hours with Naughty Dog and ship a great sounding game.

Jimi relocated his life for months, surrounded by new people and a new engine, including the Scream audio tool, and worked a lot of late nights.

Before Jimi could move back home to Austin, he was offered a full-time position at Naughty Dog. He stayed to work on their next game, the fantastic, dialog-heavy game The Last of Us.

We are super proud of Jimi's success out on the West coast with Naughty Dog, his work on Uncharted 3 and his roots as an important part of the original GL33k crew.

GL33k provided sound design, integration, and coordination of music and voice integration.

We joined the Orcs Must Die team at the end of the development for part one, helping wrap up the game and get it out on time. For Orcs Must Die 2, we had a little more time, but not much considering the huge amount a content in the game.

The game used a combination of Vision, the game engine by Trinigy / Havok and FMOD (with designer), which we got a small taste of the first time around on Orcs Must Die one. With that experience under our belt, we were able to do a little more with creative sound design with modular assets within the FMOD tools versus just plugging in completed assets straight from Pro Tools.

We brought in our friend Chris Rickwood for music and he knocked it out of the park as always, employing the "Harpsichord Metal" approach sound we helped establish as a defining element of the Orcs Must Die experience.

Robot Entertainment is one of our favorite developers at GL33k, and Orcs Must Die 2 was a milestone that helped cement our relationship and lead us to work on more awesome games with them like Hero Academy and Echo Prime.

GL33k provided sound design, integration, audio systems design while working on-site and remote.

It's always a pleasure to work with Retro Studios and their audio director Scott Petersen. They are amazing at what they do and they truly bring out the best in us.

We worked on DKCR for nearly a year and a half. We didn't have to learn an entirely new technology pipeline as we'd worked with them in the past. Retro has an amazing set of custom tools that make creating great game audio easier.

The fun challenge for DKCR was nailing down that "Nintendo" sound. Although the Nintendo sound seems simple when you think of classics like the jump sound in Super Mario Bros., this kind of expertly crafted simple is sometimes the hardest thing to do. As sound designers we sometimes battle our own artistic desires. We want to be noticed, we want people to say to themselves "cool sound," however whats most important is supporting game play in a concise and effective manner. Creating something with depth, simplicity, and effectiveness is a difficult yet amazingly rewarding thing to do and something that you have to do every day while working on a Nintendo game.

GL33k provided sound design and integration for Metroid Prime 3.

Working on Metroid Prime 3 was an absolutely amazing experience. The team at Retro are among the most talented people we've had the pleasure of working with. For Prime 3, we were hired to do sound design and implementation. Scott Petersen, Audio Director for Retro took lead and we became his audio team.

Everything we did on Prime 3 was custom and for a 30+ hour game that was quite a challenge! At the beginning of the project we purchased a Kyma (hardware-driven sound design system) to help us create many unique creature voices.

While we focused heavily on creature sounds, UI and world sounds, one of the biggest undertakings was Samus's ship. The ship sounds were assembled from quite a few elements: Scott's stove, Kyma'd whales, simple FM synthesis, and many sample-based Absynth patches. We did around 30 scenes featuring Samus's ship. It was such a cool challenge to keep all of the ship content consistent but still fresh for each appearance.

Working with Scott was an amazing learning experience. Getting to learn from someone with his experience, talent and perspective was invaluable and helped shape GL33k into who we are today.

GL33k provided sound design and on-site integration at Retro Studios.

GL33k provided sound design and integration.

GL33k provided Audio Direction, Design and Integration including work on-site at Junction Point Studios.

Disney and Mickey Mouse are magical brands that we all grew up in awe of. Taking the project on was a no-brainer, regardless of the hurdles we'd have to jump.

Epic Mickey challenged GL33k, bringing Matt in-house as an audio director to resurrect an audio department was being crushed by complex tools, a lagging pipeline and near-impossible memory budget.

We came to the project fresh off a number of big projects using Audiokinetic's Wwise middleware, so we were able to jump into the Epic Mickey Wwise project quickly. The game engine was using a complex marriage of Maya for animation and sound tagging as well as the Gamebryo engine for its abilities with open world game design with Wwise as the cherry on top.

When up against the wall with the memory budget and a huge world filled with characters and moving intractable objects, we came up with new tricks to squeeze the most out of the resources we had available.

When we weren't performing audio integration hackery, we were proud to be working on a game about Mickey Mouse, a character we've all loved since we were kids. We did our best to design a sound package and cinematic experience that honored that legacy.

GL33k provided sound design, music, audio direction and systems design as well as moving our entire studio from Dallas to Austin to sublease studio space from developer RedFly Studio.

Mushroom Men was a very unique opportunity for the GL33k crew. This was one of our first opportunities to do something really out of the box. We were given the opportunity to bring a really REALLY weird world to life, work with Les Claypool and set everyhing in the world to a metronome! There has been quite a bit of press about our involvement in this game so I won't go too in to detail but if your interested you can read more here.

GL33k provided sound design, integration and audio direction.

First, the Arkham games have fantastic audio. We often refer to them as examples of true "triple A" game audio work, so the bar was set. It can be tricky acquiring and sorting through the existing sounds from previous games to reference or reuse established iconic sounds. This can be difficult without someone at the publisher saying "use these sounds for this, these sounds for that." We want to make decisions that sound awesome in this game without stepping on the toes of any work established in previous games.

Second, we needed to learn a new engine to do the audio integration, the Bluepoint Engine (BPE). Armature Studios has their own in-house version of BPE, and excellent engineers who were always quick to help us with special hooks in code to attach sounds to. Armature uses Wwise audio middleware with BPE, which GL33k has been using for years, so we at least came in with a strong familiarity with that. We needed to work with Armature engineers to smooth some parts of the Wwise integration out and our prior experience came in handy.

Lastly, the game was developed for handheld systems: the 3DS and Vita. Developing audio for handheld systems comes with a bunch of challenges: limited memory, mixing for tiny speakers and headphones, which we’d done a lot of in the past. Wwise is a huge help in that department, too. But then you add in the fact that we’re taking this Arkham franchise, known for ultra high quality audio and trying to represent that on handheld and you add a new dimension to the problem.

Creatively, we wanted to stay as close to the source material as possible while adding something new to go with Blackgate’s unique side-scrolling gameplay. Martin Stig Andersen’s work on the sound for LIMBO inspired us to try a scene-by-scene mix approach to Blackgate. We used Wwise mix states that would swap out as Batman moves through different environments and camera angles. For example, in the Gotham City intro level, the mix would focus on Batman’s movement above all else, then shift to focus on the sound of pounding rain. Then later the mix might focus on the droning hum of industrial machines.

We loved taking on these and other challenges working on Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate and look forward to working with the great Armature Studios again soon.

GL33k provided sound design for the epic cinematic sequences created by Titmouse as well as sounds for menus and other user interface elements.

GL33k provided sound design and integration.

Red Orchestra 2 is a product of an awesome list of game audio people including Chris Rickwood, Aaron Marks, Charles Maynes, and the team GL33k. Each individual got to bring their specific talents to the table and the results really paid off.

Our primary focus was on foley and environmental sounds. We hit up some army navy supply stores, fired up some mics and started working. The environment really came to life through a significant amount of Unreal Kismet visual scripting. We'd had a lot of time with the Unreal Engine previously, and we were really able to use that training to bring the atmosphere feel alive and unnerving.

GL33k provided sound design, integration and music.

GL33k provided voice over casting, recording and editing as Bobby moonlighted on sound design and integration on the game from home.

GL33k provided sound design, integration and music in collaboration with composer Chris Rickwood.

Age of Empires Online is a project that taught us a lot about the refinement of sounds over time. We might have revised the user interface sounds for AOEO more than we revised any other sounds EVER! They just had to be right, because the nature of Age brings about a ton of clicking on user interface elements.

Rickwood was integral in keeping the excellent musical spirit that Stephen Rippy and Kevin McMullan made famous in the original Age of Empires games.

GL33k provided sound design.

GL33k provided sound design.

GL33k provided sound design.

Spry Fox needed fresh sound effects for the Facebook version of their game. We admit we didn't know how big TripleTown would end up being, but we still put everything into getting it to sound great and go along with the vision Spry Fox had for it.

GL33k provided sound design, integration and audio direction.

Stuntman Ignition was our first attempt at doing outsourced audio direction, design, and implementation. We found a dyno shop in East Dallas that housed a lot of crazy modified tuner cars. The guys at the shop were very cool and let us have the run of the place. The project was quite massive and required extensive research on how cars actually work and how to make a game sound exciting. It was a tough project since it was our first time out to bat but we made some great friends and got some fantastic experience along the way.

GL33k created the audio and design, in coordination with game studio Tiny Speck and the programming and design talents of Damien DiFede and Eric Wenske who were on-hand already to work on Matt's iOS music game brainchild COSMIC DJ.