Games with a story, need to have that narrative component conveyed in some way. Some do it in text, some in dialogue, some in cutscenes, and sometimes a combination of all of these things. Then there are those few games that drop the player into the world with little to no explaination on objectives, and require the player to use trial and error to figure out how to complete the objective using either visual or audio clues. “The Snow Field” is that such of a game.

The Snowfield represents an attempt to make a simulation-based narrative game according to a special method for developing such games, a method designed to avoid the need for complex A.I. or massive content generation. The idea was not to relying on codified narrative theories or formulas – like three-act structures, etc. – but rather assume “what makes a good story” cannot be systematized and instead must be arrived at organically via extensive user testing.

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The guys at Supergiant Games have had great success with their game Bastion, winning multiple awards and selling over 500K copies to date. The composer, Darren Korb, gave a speech at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference detailing his work on the game having very little resources at his disposal.

Darren Korb, composer on the Warner-published downloadable role-playing game (which was a multiple award winner at the Game Developers Choice awards this week), told GDC attendees how he did a lot with very little.

Check out the full post about it on Gamasutra

A big congratulations to all the nominees this year, and the winners of course. This year the winner of the Excellence in Audio Category went to

Botanicula (Amanita Design)

Tiger Style is the company that brought you their IGF Award Winning title, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. And today they are releasing their next installment which happens to be a nominee for the Excellence in Audio Category, titled, Walking Mars.

Gamasutra did a profile of Tiger Style and their game, which everyone should check out, along with the game itself of course

IndieGames.com did a wonderful piece interviewing the sound designer, Steve Johnson, and composer, Austin Wintory, of Thatgamecompany’s upcoming PS3 title, Journey.

Highly recommend everyone checking out the article, and picking up the title on March 13!

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.
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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.

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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)