PJ Belcher Pro Audio.

Subversion has just had it’s first development blog entry surrounding the game audio!

To check out the post and some of the preliminary audio in action click the link.

This is also a good demonstration of the bespoke audio engine developed by Introversion that is being used in Subversion. For those of you familiar with the orignal engine used in DEFCON and Darwinia you will notice some of the customisations put in place to handle the multi-track music system myself and Chris are developing.

I will soon be starting a new project developing preliminary audio for Introversion’s eagerly anticipated 5th game Subversion.

Visit the development blog here.

More details to come soon.

I recently attended the Brains Eden Conference hosted by ARU, where two games I had worked on were featured in the gallery, Sacrifice and Pulse.

The Conference included seminar presentations from David Braben CEO of Frontier, James Shepherd CEO of SCEE Cambridge and was introduced by Jeremy Cooke CEO of Gameware. In addition to this were presentations from ARU ex-students Matt power and Cristian Leon, who had acquired professional jobs in the industry, and Solomon Rogers displaying some of the work created by his students from Hertfordshire.

Altogether a very insightful and interesting evening, but there was little, if no mention of audio. In it’s defense the conference was aimed towards people on Games Design courses, which does not include audio courses.

So did we do it? A fully operational game in 24 hours? Of course we did!! Well sort of……….

After several hours of debate, tears, sleep deprivation induced insanity and laughter, Team X (we never did think of another name….. team members listed in previous post) came up with “Sacrifice”.

The brief was simple “A 3 minute game with 2 massive heads.”Obviously this can be interpreted in a thousand different ways, but ours was for the heads to be that of monsters, and the 3 minutes to be the time you had as the player to lure your monster to the pit of sacrifice.

The story went such that “You have angered the Gods! Sacrifice you monster to appease them”. It was a 2 player game, with each player luring a monster to a pit in the middle of the map, first one to get their monster to the pit of sacrifice appeased the gods and didn’t have their village destroyed. Bad luck for the other player, but if neither got there within the 3 minutes then the gods destroyed both villages.

So how did the gameplay work? Well monsters are very lazy, and more importantly reluctant to put themselves into the pit, so you lure them with food, by feeding them or placing it near your monster. This in turn gives them energy and encourages them to move quicker down the path to the pit. The downside to feeding your monster is that it makes it very fat! Specifically in the head (that’s the 2 massive heads bit….) meaning it cannot fit through the various gates and obstacles along the way to the pit, unless you stop feeding it for a while and let it loose weight.

This see’s players carefully timing their feeding rate, strategically placing food, and messing up the other players game by excessively feeding their monster, or stealing all their food.

The game was later featured in the Brains Eden Conference, where although it was well received featured none of my audio. This was due to a lack of time to implement my ideas for the audio, and more noticeably a lack of speakers at the conference…..

Hopefully a later update of the game will feature my audio, but for the mean time I will be posting my creations on my Audio page, so go have a listen to my unsung innovations.

I will update soon with screen shots of the game, and a web playable version.

This Sunday I am taking part in a 24hour games jam being held at Anglia Ruskin. I’ll be producing audio for one of two teams representing ARU, alongside other teams from the University of Hertfordshire, UCS and Swansea.

At the end of the 24 hours each team’s creation will be showcased at the Brains Eden Conference. In addition to this, works from some of the students over the past year will be shown, including the game “Pods” now named “Pulse” that was the result of the last 12 hour games jam that took place over easter, on which I worked.

Team X, soon to be renamed…… includes the talents of Stephen Langston (code), Angel Angelov (graphics), Hywel Thomas, Ailwyn McGeoch (both graphics and code) and myself (audio).

I will update following the event on what happened!

I have recently started work on Floe as lead audio producer, an iPhone game currently being developed by Otterly.

Visit the website here Otterly.

Due for release this July, it offers gamers and puzzle solvers alike the opportunity to utilise the iPhone’s unique functions in a bid to help save Flo!

Update! Floe is now on sale and can be purchase from the app store here!