Had a bunch of fun last week for Fuse Jam making a ridiculous helicopter flying game where you re-unite estranged couples and save love! Me & the lovely folks I worked with were all super busy so I’m pretty proud that we managed to make something that’s pretty much finished!
You can play it over on itch here.
I’ve been working away on a few things recently, including finishing up some work on a great new podcast series for BCfm and working on a new short film with the lovely folks at CINE Ultra.
However, game wise I’m pretty quiet right now, with a few projects pending confirmation, I took the opportunity to work on some personal stuff and dug into the Celeste FMOD project to do an audio redesign of this awesome game.
I redesigned every single sound in here from scratch including all the footsteps, landings, slides, grabs etc as well as the more abstract and fun stuff. It was a great opportunity to learn a little more about FMOD too and I really feel like I’ve got a good handle on the basics now!
When I have some more time I plan to do a narrated walkthrough and maybe a more detailed blog post, but for now, check out the video below (stick around to the end to see me die repeatedly).
Went for a gentle ambient(ish) thing this morning, again playing around with the granular delay settings in Izotope DDelay quite a lot.
Definitely inspired by Besaid Island theme from FFX today.
Forgot to post again yesterday! So, two very contrasting styles for todays and yesterdays pieces. Starting with yesterdays, Harold Budd/Ryuichi Sakamoto inspired gentle solo piano stuff:
and todays, which is some weird, wonky 8-bit (ish) techno.
Went for something closer to my usual style today, I’ve been playing quite a lot of Faster Than Light recently, so I was imagining some kind of space based game while I was writing. As it happens, I’ve also been doing a bit of playing around with Unity, using Ray Wenderlich’s online course. So, after I’d written some music, I decided to make a looping version (and a couple of quick sfx) and implement them in the demo of “Space Debris”. Here’s a screen capture of what I made:
The sound design is still pretty rough and ready, and I have only implemented single sounds for now, but I’ll share a more polished version here once I’ve finished it up. The full piece of music is on my soundcloud page here:
Today I went for something very much outside of my comfort zone and usual composition style. Ridiculous orchestral battle music! It was really fun to write something in this style as I’ve never tried it before, I also learned how to change time signatures in Reaper which is cool, and surprisingly easy.
Very much inspired by the fighting theme from FF7:
Here’s todays piece:
Had a little break from blogging for a while but, given the current situation I currently have a lot of time on my hands so I’ve decided to do the Video Game Music Academy “21 Days of Video Game Music” challenge!
I’ll be writing a new piece of music every day for the next 21 days, some of these will just be quick sketches or ideas and some will be a bit more fleshed out or (hopefully) finished. I’ll also write a short blog post here about each one and if I use any novel or interesting (at least to me!) techniques I’ll talk about them here. I’ll be sharing them on twitter too, and you can follow the hashtag #21DaysofVGM to see what other folks taking part in the challenge are doing.
Here’s todays piece:
A quick post today to say that my first three sound effects libraries are available now on A Sound Effect.
They were recorded as part of my final piece of MA research and I’m pretty proud of them!
They’re all 50% off right now and available here.
That’s all for today, happy halloween!
Last week I went to my first game jam and had a great time! Fuse Jam in Bristol. We made a little game where you float around on a boat and you can raise and lower the water level by collecting pluses or minuses dotted around the world.
You can play or download the game that we made here: https://tidalloch.itch.io/tidal-loch
I made the music that plays in the background when you start and quite a lot of the sound effects too, I collaborated on the audio with Starshine Audio.
It’s the first time I’ve ever done any kind of audio work for games and luckily folks were kind enough to help me with implementation in Unity and explaining some of the basics of how that works.
In terms of audio stuff I created the music by making multiple variations of a simple piano loop, made using Kontakt, Tritik’s Krush (which is free and awesome) and Izotopes DDLY that looped seamlessly, and then telling unity to play them in a random order.
The idea was to create the impression of the music being generative, without the serious work involved in doing that properly! I was pretty happy with the result.
In terms of sound design I kept things pretty simple due to time constraints and because my goal for the jam was more to meet people and learn a bit of unity/implementation stuff than imprve my design chops.
I used Collected Transients flusher library quite a lot though, especially for the water drain/fill sounds. Thanks to some of the folks at the jam I’ve now discovered Bitsy so the next mission is to make a little game using that and then learn how to make audio work within it!
It’s been a while since i’ve written anything here as I’ve been wrapped up in studying for my MA and working at my new job at Doghouse Post but this week I decided I should get back on writing this blog and making some recordings.
With that in mind, and inspired by Akash Thakkar and Rene Coronado, I decided to make a stethoscope mic. I’ve only recently come across these as a concept, and Akash’s GDC talk about the sound of Hyper Light Drifter (which you can find here) made me decide to give it a go myself!
The build was based off of Akash’s design and both he and Rene were (as far as I know) inspired by Diego Stocco so thanks Diego for inspiring me by proxy! My version is substantially lower budget than all of these guys, but I was able to make it in under an hour, for under a tenner and mostly out of stuff I already had lying around.
The ingredients were as follows:
1 x Stethoscope – From Ebay – £3.99 inc. postage.
1 x Lav Mic – I already had this from my previous DIY parabolic mic build, I decided to reuse it for this as the parabolic mic was a bit fragile and just all round not that good.
1 x 3cm section of garden hose – From my garden hose! Thankfully my housemates didn’t seem to mind me cutting up the hose.
1 x Shitloads of gaffer tape
That’s it. The build was super easy and the end result looks a bit like this (I’ve since added more gaffer around the hosepipe section, please excuse the state of my sofa!)
I haven’t had much chance to make recordings yet this week as I’ve been pretty busy with work, but hopefully I’ll get the chance to make some and share them here in the next few weeks. I did, however, take a quick test recording of my own heartbeat.
As you can hear, the noise floor is pretty high, but I expected this from a mic that cost less than £10 to build. It’s running through my Zoom H1 which has quite a high noise floor anyway, but i’m still pretty happy with the result and will be running around like some kind of weird sound doctor for the next few weeks, i’ll share the results here when I make some more recordings.
