game music

IGDA Scotland July Audio Meetup

In July I had the pleasure of chairing a game audio panel at the IGDA Scotland meet up. The panel featured Will Morton of Solid Audioworks and Matthew Smith of Square Peg Games, both formerly of Rockstar North, and Orfeas Boteas of Krotos, makers of Dehumanizer.

We covered a few different topics, such as how they got into game audio, advice for fledgling sound designers and composers applying for positions, and how the transition from AAA games to indie and freelance has been. Or in Orfeas’ case, how scaling up from a Masters project to renowed sound software production company has went!

Obviously the proof is in the pudding, and we discussed a lot more in a fair amout of detail, so do give it a whirl!

AWEdio Jam!

So I’m happy to say that I’m helping out with Edinburgh Game Symposium’s AWEdio Jam! It’s being organised by Luci Holland of EGS with some help from Sam Hughes of The Sound Architect and myself along with IGDA Scotland :). We’ve got a few other things in the pipeline that we’ve yet to announce, so do keep an eye out! The current schedule is on the EGS website here.

awedio-logo-pink-1

You can also join the Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1198225880221374/

Here’s the blurb:

Are you a composer? Are you a sound designer? A voice actor? An instrumentalist? Are you working in or are you interested in working in game or film audio in some way? Or are you a games designer looking to collaborate with musicians/soundies?! Ever wondered if you could do a game jam with audio??!

Then come and get creative at our AWEdio JAM on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd October in Edinburgh – a weekend hands-on hub for creatives interested in sound, music, media, and design!
Sign up either as teams or individuals, and collaborate to make amazing sonic artworks over the weekend (inspired by a secret theme to be announced on the first day!), share and learn new skills, network, and hear from professionals in the game and sound world. We’re thrilled to be joined by Will Morton of Solid Audioworks on the Friday night, and hope to announce another speaker soon!

What’s more – early bird prices are available until Fri 30th September. We’re looking forward to an amazing creative weekend!

More info on how to book on our website – and any questions, please just give us a shout.
http://www.edingame.org/awedio-jam/

-INFO-
Fri 21st, Sat 22nd, Sun 23rd October | Roxy Assembly, Edinburgh

With a talk from Will Morton of Solid Audioworks

Take part in a weekend hands-on creative jam for composers, musicians, sound designers, voice actors, and other audio professionals!

-TICKETS-
EARLY BIRD (available until Fri Sept 30th): £20 per person
Full price: £30 per person
Friday only (for social and talk – limited tickets!): £5 per person

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE (please make sure to also read the ‘Registration Info’ section on our website): http://awedio-jam-tickets.eventbrite.co.uk/

Early bird pricing available till Friday 30th September!
Registration closes midnight, 20th October.

Mobius – Out Now!

Ahoy!

I’m super happy to announce that I’ve contributed to the Materia Collective‘s latest tribute album: Mobius – Sonic The Hedgehog Remixed!

mobius cover

Buy from Loudr
Buy on iTunes
Stream from Spotify

The album is over 3 hours of remixed Sonic themes taken from across the series (and even the TV shows too!) featuring 80 different artists, and covers more genres than you can shake your Robuttnik at (sorry/notsorry).

Here are some more previews too:

So yeah, totally check it out! And hang around until the end for my weird little remix too!

A quick update

I haven’t updated this in a while for a number of reasons and holy crap it’s been 9 months since the last one sooooo a quick recap:

August 2015 – Edinburgh Games Symposium: Protoplay Edition

The 3rd annual Edinburgh Games Symposium was hosted as part of the Dare To Be Digital festival. I was on a panel on game audio with Joanna Orland, Ryan Ike and Chipzel discussing a load of audio related things. Then Steph and I gave a talk on Monstrum, with her covering the VR implementation and me covering the audio work. These were film and I’ll chase them up and cover them in more detail later!

The Mantra Collective also did a cover of Bad Happenings from the Monstrum OST and it’s super cool. You can check it out here:

 

November 2015 – Got elected to the IGDA Scotland board

The IGDA Scotland board elections happened in November and I managed to get elected some how, so yay! Got lots of stuff in the pipeline and we’ve just hosted three play parties for this year’s Global Game Jam  with thanks to a number of local partners. We have plans for the rest of the year too, so keep an eye out!

November 2015 – Award nominations!

Monstrum also got shortlisted for a few awards in November. Firstly it was shortlisted for Best Debut Game at the TIGA Awards, then later in the month for Best Game at BAFTA Scotland (shout out to Blazing Griffin who got the win). Not bad!

January 2016 – I got a Neo Geo Pocket

And it’s the coolest wee thing. I mention it as I kinda wanna talk about limitations in games at some point. It also is home to the 1st non-Sega hardware Sonic and it’s amazing remixes of the Mega Drive games’ soundtracks. Case in point:

Also been playing a lot of SNK games on the Sega Saturn as well for that additional crossover bonus.

There was a lot of other things that happened in the past few months too that I’ll unpack at a later date, but will hopefully have something a bit more interesting to talk about soon! Busy busy!

Game Audio and the 50% fallacy

Ahoy!

It’s been a while since my last blog, with a few good reasons:

  • Monstrum launched at the end of May! Go buy it! The soundtrack is also up for grabs too.
  • I took up a guest lecturing post at the Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio, which I may cover in a later blog, but some of the experiences from it have influenced this post.
  • My girlfriend moved in and managed to break her leg in fairly short order. But she’s also getting her cast off soon and we’ve managed to play through a fair few games together so it’s not all bad.

Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. There’s been a phrase relating game audio that’s been bugging me for a while now, even though I used to say it myself, and I think it needs to be addressed as its popularity increases. This might ruffle some feathers but:

Game audio is NOT 50% of the experience.

Continue reading “Game Audio and the 50% fallacy” →

Story in Games Pt. 2.5: A Sonic Shipyard

Originally posted on the Team Junkfish blog.

This audio blog returns to the Story in Games/world building series that I was writing regarding game audio. Last time I looked at the IEZA Framework and broke down Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s sound design using it. As with the first blog on music in games, this time I’m going to break down some of Monstrum into the four components, what the sounds are for, why are they used and how do they make the world that the player is in feel more believable.

Continue reading “Story in Games Pt. 2.5: A Sonic Shipyard” →

Monstrum – The Hunter’s Soundtrack

Originally posted on the Team Junkfish blog. So much for keeping this up to date. Hopefully will have more to talk about soon though.

In this blog I’m going to talk about some music in Monstrum again, this time: the Hunter. As with the Brute’s themes there is a fair amount of sound design stuff going on as opposed to traditional instrumentation, so I’ll go over that as well as the general ideas that I was aiming for. Here’s the Hunter’s Chase Theme:

Continue reading “Monstrum – The Hunter’s Soundtrack” →

Story in Games Pt. 2: Sound Design and New Leaves

Originally posted on the Team Junkfish blog.

We’re on to the second proper part of my little series of blogs covering the use of audio in storytelling for games. Previously on Team Junkfish I spoke about the use of music in games and how we’re going about those ideas in Monstrum. This time I’m going to talk a bit more about the use of sound effects and how they build up the world and everything in it.

Continue reading “Story in Games Pt. 2: Sound Design and New Leaves” →

Story in Games Pt. 1.5: The Music in Monstrum

So much for writing more… I should try and keep up, but it’s been busy at Team Junkfish. Once again, this is a repost of that blog and is reflective of the development progress at the time. The original post is here.

 
This is one follow up to my previous blog which discussed storytelling in games. You can give it a read here. My original plan for the second part was to speak about the use of sound effects in story telling and world building, however I thought it’d be an idea to talk about how we’re actually going about the music side of things ourselves!

 
In Monstrum we are aiming to use both diegetic and non-diegetic music for a few different purposes. The most obvious use of non-diegetic music are the monsters’ themes, so let’s start there. Simplifying some statements down a bit, these are used to provide information (i.e.: the monster is chasing you), context (which monster it actually is) and emotional content (trying to evoke a certain feeling). I’ve spoken about the “hows” of the Brute’s theme before in detail here, including of the sound design that’s used, so I’ll give you a little summary of the decision making, the “whys”, that went behind it and what I was hoping to achieve.

Continue reading “Story in Games Pt. 1.5: The Music in Monstrum” →

Story in Games Pt. 1: Speaking through Song

Originally posted on the Team Junkfish blog.

This blog is based on an event that happened as part of Abertay’s Game Lab, loosely based on the topic of “story”, and how people from different disciplines tackled it in games. I was asked to provide an audio perspective, and given that I’m usually better at explaining things in written form than verbally (shocking, I know!) I decided that I’d expand and clarify a few points I spoke about and why I think they’re important. This will be the first of what will (hopefully only) be a two part blog post, and will have a few spoilers here and there, so heads up!

What is “Story” anyway?

The word “story” itself is a bit of a nebulous term. Most people would associate it with some form of narrative, such as the Hero’s Journey, that follows one main protagonist or group of people through their various trials and quests to some sort of resolution. But is that it? Is that everything that’s being told? Does the entire game world merely exist around the player character(s), with everything only being relevant them? What about everything else: the details, the history, even the context of the place and situations that you may be in. Going from A to B through C becomes much more engaging and involving if there are different forces, details and subtexts at play instead of “because that’s where you need to go”. 

Basically, how do you “build the world“?

Continue reading “Story in Games Pt. 1: Speaking through Song” →