Guitar Heroes - by SNDR
In the design research investigation Listen! the multi-disciplinary collaboration between game design and audio design students is researched. The research focuses on gathering more insight in the creative design process of game audio and presents general recommendations and pitfalls for the development of game audio.
Richard and I have added the IEZA framework for game audio on Wikipedia. This way everyone who uses IEZA can contribute to the further development of this framework and add his or her insights.
IEZA framework can be used to conceptualise the communication by means of game audio
The URL is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEZA_Framework
The Dutch Control Magazine has published 6 interesting items on game music. The articles have also been published on the Control Magazine website. The articles have been written in Dutch, but perhaps Google Translate can help you understand the articles. For your convenience, there’s a [T] after the links leading you to an English translation.
The game studio FluffyLogic invites you to create some original music for their new social game Ur Zoo.
The lucky winner’s music will feature in the game and their name will appear in the game credits!
See: http://www.fluffylogic.net/2011/07/ur-zoo-social-game-music-competition/
Pointer to a symposium in the Netherlands:
VIDEOGAME MUSIC: PLAY, FANS, SPACE
13 September 2011
Utrecht University, NL
(more…)
For your information: a lecture in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
28 July the music of Iron Grip, the game by Tim van Geel, componist and designer ISOTX.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tim-van-geel/10/5b0/890
15:30, Dutch Game Garden, Neude 5, Utrecht
Sign up: martine [AT] dutchgamegarden.nl
At the Utrecht School of the Arts, the adaptive music systems research group investigates the design of music for non-linear contexts. Post-graduates that conducted research in this group have formed a company – GreenCouch – and recently they’ve sent me an example movie of one of their projects.
The example movie contains an explanation of the music system used in the Xbox-game Shortburst. It’s pretty self explanatory and shows the flexible system in real-time.
The description of the video:
“cell-based music”, or “horizontal resequencing” in a browser-based, simple, nln-player, with the music for the Xbox-game Shortburst.
The web-version of the nln-player was built with the Schillmania Soundmanager 2 library, php and javascript. The idea was to shift the focus from organising the musical material with, often complex, data-structures, to a very simple model in which the limitations for the composer were greater, but the administrative work and the needed understanding of (meta-)data was much less.
This same framework was used for the implementation of the interactive music in XNA5 for an Xbox game, Shortburst.
More information on www.greencouch.nl and www.nln-player.com
Just a quick pointer to a very profound article about footsteps in games. And check this video about the evolvement of footsteps in games:
Footsteps Retro Sound Study from lost lab on Vimeo.
Visit: http://blog.lostchocolatelab.com/2010/03/footsteps-informal-game-sound-study.html
The obligatory thesis word cloud about immersive audio
The word is out: I hereby present you my PhD thesis! After the final writeup in 2009, it took some time to get my viva arranged in August 2010. Sorry to keep you waiting…but now, it can be downloaded via this blog.
This thesis addresses the role of audio for immersion. Yep, the I-word…almost just as Impossible as it is Irresistible to designers. Yet, I’ve tried to come up with some useful theory for those who want to know more about the design of sound, music and speech in games and the conceptual decisions that are involved.
A short pointer to something we’re working on…Extant! Extant is a free-roaming survival audio game, completely based on sound.
Extant - Zombie Audio Game
We released a tech demo for Extant in October 2010, a few days prior to Halloween. The demo allows players to wander freely through an atmospheric, monster-infested world, exploring sites and buildings while fighting off zombies and collecting pickups such as ammo and medicine.
Extant is based on concepts developed back in 2002 for an audio game prototype named “Dark – A Garden Wander”, created by Sander Huiberts, Richard van Tol and Hugo Verweij. One example of such a concept is Moby, the protagonists dog, who can guide the player to certain areas and objects using an innovative command menu.
Through this tech demo we explore the design possibilities of an audio-only game space that is intuitive, immersive and easy to navigate. We found that a space based on spheres meets such requirements best. For example, players wander around on a spherical-shaped world, in a fashion similar to Mario on a small planet in Super Mario Galaxy. This approach frees designers from having to add spatial obstructions in order to constrain the players’ free movement to a specific area. Spatial obstructions can be quite a design challenge in audio games, since walls are usually silent and one does not want the player to constantly bump into them. Each building and site is circular as well, allowing the player to enter from any direction.
The Extant tech demo can be download for free at the Creative Heroes website.
Discuss Extant at the AudioGames Forum.
