The 14th Annual Independent Games Festival nominees were announced recently, and to begin my coverage of the games in the Excellence In Audio category I will direct your attention to a post by Peter Kirn on Create Digital Media covering the game and it’s inner workings. It’s a great post about how the game was made using Pure Data and libpd as it’s audio engine. I highly recommend you check it out and other posts over at CDM.
Stay tuned for more games from the IGF Audio category.
EDIT: Here is a link to Designing Sound’s interview with the developers.
Jonathan Whiting is an indie game designer based in Oxford. His website hosts many of his games available to play online, or has links to download. He has submitted many games for the Ludum Dare. For the current dare #22 “Alone” he has submitted Craequ which stands as a true example of his design style, and it was made entirely within 48 hours! He has also been featured on many indie gaming websites for his games. Having many interesting games with great audio, I decided to spotlight him as a developer and his approach to audio rather than have to choose any one game at a time to review. Make the jump to get an insight to how this great indie developer makes his games and how he integrates the audio.
Continue reading »
Though we try to keep things geared towards indie games, it’s always good to check in on the big boys every once in a while. One of the best places to do this is the Game Audio Podcast, hosted by Anton and Damian. Their most recent episode (#13) was edited by none other than yours, truly. I highly recommend everyone check out this great podcast about great game audio.
DRWAPS Poster
This post is a follow-up to my original post on “Don’t Run With A Plasma Sword.” With the recent update of their game came a new version of the main title music. I was able to get in touch with the music team at XperimentalZ Games regarding this update and the their general approach to the music for the game. See more after the jump.
Continue reading »
This year the IGF will have a panel of judges decide the winners for each category. They have just announced today more of these panels including the one for the Excellence in Audio category.
The Excellence in Audio Award is a category which seeks to highlight the best musical and sound innovation, quality, and impressiveness in independent gaming.
Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Audio award have gone out to games which took an entirely new and unique to approach to sound in games or otherwise excelled at their craft, including Queasy Games’ abstract acoustic guitar shooter and 2007 award winner Everyday Shooter, 2008 finalist guitar-controller platformer Fret Nice, 2009′s ultra-stylized finalist PixelJunk Eden from Q-Games and Osaka musician/DJ Baiyon, and the 2010 award winning Closure.
The jury consists of the following:
- James Barker (lead designer & engineer at GL33K, the indie audio studio behind games like Splosion Man, Comic Jumper, Epic Mickey & Donkey Kong Country Returns)
- Matthew Burns (founder of Shadegrown Games, behind musical shooter Planck)
- Matt ‘Chainsaw’ Chaney (audio lead at Gunstringer & Splosion Man creators Twisted Pixel)
- Dylan Fitterer (creator of music-puzzle racer and 2008 IGF Excellence in Audio winner Audiosurf)
- Darren Korb (audio lead at Bastion creators Supergiant Games)
- David Lloyd & Larry Oji (respectively, musician and founder of game music site OverClocked ReMix; OCR head and soundtrack director on Capcom’s Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.)
- Emily Ridgway (music director and audio designer on games like BioShock, Brutal Legend & Costume Quest)
- Chris Schlarb (Asthmatic Kitty recording artist & composer on Nifflas’s NightSky & Erik Loyer’s Strange Rain)
"DRWAPS" Title Screen
Great advice comes from where you least it expect it sometimes, such as a auto scrolling platforming game on the iPhone. The title of the game is something we all ought to remember, “Don’t Run With A Plasma Sword.” You get plenty of nice little gems from this game other than it’s name, such as “Don’t pick your nose with plasma sword.” Words to live by. This humorous adventure comes from Montreal based indie developers XperimentalZ Games. A really fun platforming game that adds some unique mechanics and techniques to the genre, DRWAPS is set in the future but with some awesome retro artwork and audio. Continue reading »
Bullet Audyssey Title Screen
There are bullet hell games, and then there is “Bullet Audyssey.” Coming from a well seasoned indie dev, Cellar Door Games, with various works on various platforms released, “Bullet Audyssey” is a musical-bullet-hell game that is truly inspired, and has some great and unique sounds! The description they post with the game on playable sites follows:
“Your galaxy has been invaded by melodic celestial bodies, and you’ve been tasked to save it. Bullet Audyssey is a rhythm-based shoot ’em up where you must “Survive the Beat.” Absorb enemy bullets and fire it back at them, slow down time, upgrade your ship and level up.”
With so many game mechanics and genres rolled into one, the combination had to be balanced just right in order to make it successful, and the guys at Cellar Door Games definitely hit the mark with the music at the center. As you navigate your way around the bullets pixel by pixel, your ship emits an absorption field which zaps the pulsing bullets of their energy (but not their ability to hurt you!) and you fire back the absorbed energy at the “boss” until it or you are destroyed (or the song/level ends). Both the absorption field and the bullets pulse to the beat of the music, and the timing of the bullets firing is also associated with the music, though more loosely. These are just the obvious aspects of how the gameplay and the audio are tied, but there are many more interesting, and quaintly subtle, integrations of the music and the gameplay (and vise versa). All of which not only makes this a great game that has great audio and music, but also a game that is made great because of its marriage to its audio. That being said, this post will cover many aspects of gameplay more than just the quality and content of the audio because of how intimately tied they are.
Continue reading »
Title screen for Nitrome Must Die
With their 100th game, the online developers Nitrome have addressed an issue their “fans” seem to have with them in “Nitrome Must Die.” The premise of the game is two kids who are frustrated with the quality of Nitrome’s games, as addictive as they are, decide to take out their frustration by storming the building of Nitrome’s headquarters and wreak havoc.
Veteran Nitrome composer, Dave Cowen composed the music for this fun rampaging romp. The musical quality of the score is at once solid, and appropriate for the visuals, being a fast pace frenzied shoot-em-up platformer. There is a lot going on in this game visually, and the music does a very appropriate job supporting these visuals and sitting comfortably in the background. This is an important quality to note in a game like this. Because there are bullets, monsters, and penguins (yes, penguins) flying across the screen every which way, the music needed to take a back seat in order to make the game truly
successful. Dave accomplished this supportive role, not just with the melodic nature of the music:
“…for me one of the most important thing to get right is to ensure the tempo of the music sits comfortably with the speed of the game.”
Continue reading »
The 14th Annual Independent Games Festival nominees were announced recently, and to begin my coverage of the games in the Excellence In Audio category I will direct your attention to a post by Peter Kirn on Create Digital Media covering the game and it’s inner workings. It’s a great post about how the game was made using Pure Data and libpd as it’s audio engine. I highly recommend you check it out and other posts over at CDM.
cflickster