On behalf of the Utrecht School of the Arts – School of Music & Technology I visited the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2012 audio tracks. For colleagues and peers, I’ve made an overview that can be found below.
If you’re designing interfaces, this small table that summarises the chapter contents by Buxton, Gaver & Bly (1991) concerning the use of sound and vision in interfaces might be handy.
| Time | Space | |
| Sound |
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| Vision |
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Refer to: Buxton, W., Gaver, W. & Bly, S. (1991). The use of nonspeech audio at the interface. Tutorial no. 8. In CHI’91 Conference proceedings, Human Factors in Computing Systems, ‘Reaching through technology’ (pp. 85‐90). New Orleans, ACM Press: Addison‐Wesley.
This is the game I’ve been working on after becoming a Doctor! It’s Gluddle by Creative Heroes (Richard van Tol and yours truly) and it’s absurdistic and we’ve done some things differently with audio.
More on Gluddle.com
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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.
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
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.
Just a quick pointer for those who are interested in a symposium about Music Design in the Netherlands. Mind that the symposium will be held in Dutch. I’ll be presenting my research concerning the cooperation between game designers and music designers (sound designers and composers). For more, click more below the flyer.
Mapping the Field Symposium Music Design
Yesterdag Richard and I gave a keynote at the Music Summit of Festival of Games in Utrecht. After visiting many international conferences on audio for games, it’s great to meet all the local peers and professionals. At the bottom of this page, you can find a link to the slides and a special link page.
By the way, it was a great venue, featuring a truly wonderful performance installation by Matthias Oostrik. See the two pictures below I made before the summit started:
Festival of Games in Ottone
Festival of Games in Ottone
[Download the Slides as PDF]
More information and weblinks at FoG.AudioGames.net
See a slideshow below the break.
Saturday June 13. Richard van Tol and I will present developments in game music at the Music@Games Summit of the Utrecht Festival of Games. Attending this summit is free, but registration is required.
