Name That Game - Game sounds quiz

The Video Game Revolution: Name That Game | PBS

I did particularly badly in this - not enough ZX Spectrum classics !

Game editors - Fun and Art ?

This looks fun, but I don't know if anybody is still playing Quake III. Probably a few dedicated people left ?

Simpsons map for Quake III Arena - Boing Boing

As these game editors are so easy to use I'm surprised not to see a lot more experimental or artistic work taking place using them. I'm working on an installation using the Unreal 3 engine right now but haven't seen a great deal of other stuff.

I love this work by Alison Mealey (interview here) that uses Unreal Tournament processes to generate visual art.


Kurt Hentschläger has produced this work 'KARMA/cell' using the Unreal 3 engine.

There's a large array of digital art taking place in Second Life but if anyone knows of other game engine based work - let me know !

Audio-visual-physical

This installation (Light Rain - wowlab)


reminded me of some of my favourite work by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman
- 'Messa di Voce'





When are we going to get this sort of stuff for the eyetoy ?

Sampling, synthesis and software instrument links

Reaktor

Create digital music - Frankenloop and more

Grain delays



Sequencing

Creative Sampling

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec98/articles/creatsamp.318.htm

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan99/articles/creatsamp.743.htm

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1994_articles/jun94/sampling.html

Vst Instruments
http://www.kvraudio.com/

Richard Jacques On Game Music's Past, Present, And Future

Gamasutra - Staying In Tune: Richard Jacques On Game Music's Past, Present, And Future

There's some implicit criticism here from the interviewer of the current trend toward ochestral scoring of games in favour of what is referred to as a more 'iconic' style. I'm not really sure what is meant by this but I'm guessing it's an argument in favour of game music sounding like 'game music'.

I can remember the theme songs of those older games, and part of it is, as you said, probably because I had to play through the levels so many times.

RJ: Yeah, the exposure...

But still, it's somewhat disturbing to me that I can't call to mind the music of recent games, a lot of them. Exceptions are like Halo, but that's partially because you have to wait on that loading screen for such a long time.

I'd certainly support as wide a variety of scores as is appropriate to the games but I think we should remember that game music, like film music, is part of a unified experience. Perhaps if you can clearly remember the themes then it is drawing attention to itself too much ?

I don't think music in games is going to be as memorable or invest itself with real emotional meaning until it is truly 'interactive' and at one with the scene' rather than 'reactive' (see 'Hellgate London" post below!).

KUNG FU PANDA

Courtesy of filmsounddaily a couple of articles on Kung Fu Panda. Even in this streamed example is does sound great !

filmsound daily: KUNG FU PANDA pt.2

Some nice ideas for WHOOSHES (+ don't forget this)
And discusion of working closely with the music in terms of negotiating separate frequency bands to avoid 'sonic mud'.

Hellgate London - Music 'Interactive' or 'Reactive'

Music4games great article on the music for Hellgate London by David Steinwedel.

Where our system shines is in micro-managing music. It allows for constant music cue changes according to the scope of a battle and how it’s going for the player. We can write cues and stingers for specific actions and conditions and switch to them instantaneously. As our audio programmer says, “It’s a good reactive music system.” And he’s right in most cases. However there are times when music needs to be proactive, looking ahead at what’s coming.

Here's the challenge of 'interactive' music. How do you build toward and anticipate an event (as film music does so effectively) when the player is in control, and therefore you don't actually know when that event is going to happen ?

I was playing Half Life 2 : Episode 2 recently. Excellent game and great, very sparing, use of music. However the game / music symbiosis remains clumsy. When the 'bad guys' appear the music kicks in. Great - this works really well, giving a real emotional significance to the encounter (in contrast to most of the game which is played without music). And when I kill the last one the music fades out. But we need this to work better. I want the music to hit a climax at the exact moment of my coup de grace and then subside as the creature falls to the ground. How can we possibly do this with the music? My last bullet is not going to coincide nicely with a beat or barline. No, what the designers need to do is to actually engineer the music / game to work together. Do I really know exactly how many bullets will kill it ? Will I notice the difference between 17 and 19 ? Would it matter if the game engine actually said - well officially this monster should die right now but I'm just going to hold off for .75 of a second until that point comes along and then do it - BANG ! A gold star to the brave composer who suggests that to their producer !

Here's an example from the otherwise brilliant Half Life 2 Episode 2 of the problem.

Mario music crazyness !

Amazing but conclusive proof that some people have far too much time on their hands !



Custom mario levels by IsoTkh
Discovered courtesy of boing boing and Tom Jackson.

Related but unrealated - Mario composer Koji Kondo discusses his approach to composition.
Mario Maestro shares his secrets (GDC 2007)

DSP plugins and real-time mixing for games

Guy Whitmore talks to John Broomhall in develop this month (here) about using the greater processing power of current gen consoles for real time effects. Guy has a permenant place on my list of games audio genius's for his score to 'No one lives forever', probably still one of the most convincing adaptive games scores out there, and certainly the one that first convinced me it was possible. He discusses it on the IASIG site.

It's great to hear them discussing the reasons why the adoptiong of real time DSP and mixing is vital and that is to move away from the very fixed way in which games audio is usually treated.

John Broomhall: As for dynamic mixing – presumably we also want to get funky with fader moves and DSP behaviours (in response to game variables we’re polling) for purely creative, moment-enhancing, subjective-effect reasons?

Guy Whitmore: Yes - I think most dynamic mix decisions would be based on emotional subjective things rather than realism. For me, mixing for games is way too stuck in a literal distance-based approach – everything getting quieter the further away it is, regardless of how important it is. We need a re-think and again, to me, DSP is a very important component, particularly when you’re getting into ‘I want this section to feel dreamy the second time’ or ‘I want the player to suddenly feel the sadness of the character’s feeling’. It’s the same type of emotional choices a sound designer for a movie might make but working in a non-linear context…

If you listen to a film soundtrack there is often a deliberate attempt to highlight the story through a manipulation of the soundtrack, for example by hearing the filmworld through one of the characters' subjective point of view. (Read Randy Thom's 'Designing a movie for sound' for more thoughts on this subject + all of filmsound.org while you're there !). When audio in games is treated as a fixed system we miss out on all of these creative opportunities.

Whilst working on a game I was once pleasantly surprised to come across a game designer who'd actually thought about sound.. At a certain point (when the player was crawling through an air duct above a room full of hostiles - classic !) he wanted all the sound to fade out and just to highlight the players movements and breathing in this confined space. Great idea (he'd obviously recently watched Bressons 'A man escaped') but impossible to do with our then 'state of the art' audio engine without significant amount programming time (and of course that wasn't going to happen was it !).

Over the past few years I've noticed a few specific instances where the audio system has started to become more flexible (in the now ubiquitous 'Shell Shock' effect - volume down + filtered sounds after proximity to an explosion - first noticed by me in the original 'Call of duty' but probably used somewhere before then) so lets hope this is a continuing trend.