Game Jams
AWEDIO JAM
The event was held by Edinburgh Game Symposium, with audio enthusiasts and experts coming together to create a range of sound experiences to the theme time travel. Teams were random and I was placed on the Orange team with a group of wonderfully talented people. I had a general idea of a concept I wanted to work on after it was announced and the team brain stormed to flesh out a fuller idea, which went on to be the project over the weekend.
With the original concept set as time travel the idea we had was to create a piece of musical sound design which starts with all of the musical instruments playing staccato notes that trigger at the same time, and slowly over a short period, they would begin to drift apart. This causes the different instruments to go out of time with each other and you begin to hear all kinds of syncopation. We then introduced overtones to give the sound a strange and full harmony which also drifts in and out of dissonance over time.
The end result is a Max MSP patch that uses the maths behind the Chaos Theory and some of our own parameters to create a generative piece of music. To enhance the time travel idea further we also added delays and reverbs to extend the length of these staccato notes, merging them with others, creating an ethereal sound that loops back on itself over time.
You can see the patch working in the video.
Credit to Ferdinando Valsecchi, Neil McCarroll, Alberto Sueri, and Adrian Barahona Rios. Thanks for all the amazing work guys!
Check out Edinburgh Game Symposium here for more amazing sound and information from the weekend.
AG JAM (AUDIO GAME JAM)
The premise of the jam was to make a game focusing on audio/music. Use sounds in creative ways as a game mechanic, ambience, etc. The point of this jam is to embrace the often neglected aspect of game development, to learn to create sounds and have new interesting experiences.
Our team made Hack-M8, a robot that needs to hack a system using sine waves. You trace up and down on screen with your mouse to follow the the notes getting higher and lower respectively.
The game featured sound effects, music and dialogue and due to it being all audio based, all sounds were created to effectively tell the player what is happening. For the robotic dialogue I also created a Pure Data patch which modulated the narration to make it seem less human. Pictures and audio from the patch can be previewed on the right.
Credit to the rest of the team Brian Beacom - Programmer; Louise Jackson - Level Designer and Emelie Edholm - Narrative Creator.
For more information on Hack-M8 you can get all the details here or listen to the track on my SoundCloud.
LEAP MOTION GAME JAM
I created a few small sound effects and music for our entry to the game jam. Using Leap Motion you can use your hands to remove and replace the objects from your spaceship before the timer runs out.
To the right is a short video demonstration of the game working. For more information you can visit the team page here.