Category Archives: Games

not-quite-announcing my next project!

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Things have been decidedly quiet here after the flurry of activity across March and April, but thankfully, in the real world, things haven’t been quite so quiet. I’ve been working on a new project with a couple of really talented guys, and while I can’t say too much about it yet, I can at least reveal that it’s a game!

Unsurprisingly, I’m taking care of the audio. I was initially brought on to write some music, but as we discussed the game’s design and setting, it became clear that the soundtrack would be much more sparse and ambient than my usual video game ditties. I do have a lot of ideas for the music that will fit the mood of the game, but for now, I’m focusing on the sound effects.

Designing those sound effects has definitely been a challenge. I’ve been creating sounds from scratch on the Blofeld, and using Ardour and Audacity to process recorded sounds from my Zoom H1 recorder, and while those tools are all quite familiar, these sounds are unlike anything I’ve created before. Part of the challenge is just getting an understanding of what sounds I need to make, so I’ve been playing a few different games and even watching bits of movies to get ideas on what different things should sound like.

A new prototype of the game should be ready soon; hopefully then I can real a bit more about what the game is and who I’ve been working with!

music video: periapsis

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Here’s a little something I put together: a video of a trip to the Mün in Kerbal Space Program, edited in to a music video for the first track from my RPM 2012 album, periapsis:

I had to cut about two-thirds of the video to fit it to the track, but you get to see all the major events in a flight to the Mün:

  • takeoff
  • booster stage separation
  • Kerbin orbit insertion
  • transmünar injection (that’s the burn that sends you to the Mün)
  • Mün orbit insertion
  • orbital adjustment for landing altitude
  • orbital braking burn
  • core stage separation
  • final descent and landing

The rocket design is the smallest and simplest I’ve come up with so far that can get to the Mün and back again; you don’t see it on the video, but I did get those Kerbal astronauts back home safely.

I captured the video using ffmpeg, with KSP running under Wine on my Linux desktop, and then used Kdenlive to edit it. Kdenlive worked well for the edit (no crashes!), though I suspect there was something funny happening with the audio/video sync — I’d place an edit right on a beat, and then find upon repeat listens that it sometimes didn’t quite match up, but it was such a close-run thing that it may have all been in my head.

this is my minecraft: kerbal space program

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It seems like half the people I know have put hours in to Minecraft, but I’ve been spending my time with another indie sandbox game: Kerbal Space Program, a rocket-building spaceflight simulation. KSP gives you a bunch of rocket parts, an editor to build those parts in to complete rockets, and a mini solar system to fly your rockets around. Even though there are no explicit challenges to complete — or at least, not yet — if you’re a rocket nerd like me, it’s still an absolute blast.

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child of eden

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Few games have had as powerful a combination of sight, sound, and action as Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s music-driven shooter, so when Mizuguchi demonstrated its spiritual successor at last year’s E3, I was sold on it instantly. Child of Eden plays much like a Rez sequel, but with its Kinect controls, it feels like a very different experience.

It’s a very pretty game, of course, and with a controller that would probably be about the end of it, but the Kinect controls not only work well, but they feel great. You sweep across the screen with your right hand to target groups of enemies, and then push your hand forward to fire; there’s also a rapid-fire attack that you can target with your left hand. Firing in time with the music gives you a scoring bonus, and with many sequences calling for rapid switches between the two firing modes, you start to feel like some bad-ass Jedi conductor.

Or rather, a bad-ass Jedi conductor that’s tripping balls.

The Kinect controls do suffer from the odd mis-detection, but once you get used to how it works it’s easy to keep them to a minimum. I had the best luck holding my right hand fairly close to my body, giving myself plenty of room to push it forward to fire. I also found it important to keep my inactive hand by my side, to prevent any accidental firing-mode switches. You can play it with a controller, and I’ve no doubt I’d score better that way, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

Like Rez, Child of Eden isn’t a long game — the main game takes no more than 2-3 hours — but there’s a lot of fun to be had in replaying the levels for higher scores, or just for the experience. However, it does lacks some of the sense of mystery and wonder that came from playing Rez. Playing through Area 5 in Rez is a powerful, chilling, and uplifting experience, and while I’m glad Child of Eden doesn’t try to simply replicate that experience — you can’t go home again, as they say — it does feel like it’s missing some of Rez’s emotional highs.

Despite that, it’s still a brilliant game, and perhaps the best demonstration yet of Kinect’s ability to deliver precise, responsive controls.

waterfall rescue

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My good friend Switchbreak produced another game recently — Waterfall Rescue, a Flash game with a great single-button control mechanic that’s a lot of fun to play. He wrote the game in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 20, which is a solo competition, but he spent some time after that working on the graphics, so I whipped up a quick theme tune for it, too.

You really should check out the game, but if you just want to check out my music, here it is: I’m feeling lazy, so I’m including this as an embedded player from my Bandcamp page instead of uploading it again and using my usual HTML5 player.

damn it feels good to be a (pc) gamer

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It’s no secret that, when it comes to gaming, I prefer consoles to PCs — it’s just easier to have a nice black box under the TV that I can shove discs in to without too much hassle, especially when your PC isn’t running Windows anyway — but there’s still the occasional PC game (sometimes with a Linux port, no less) that I would like to run. Unfortunately, my PC hasn’t really been up to scratch, despite being mostly decent (with 4GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo E8300), but thanks to a few recent upgrades it’s once again capable of playing actual games.
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sketchbook: bouncy game music

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Here’s another quick piece done quickly for a purpose: my friend Switchbreak spent the weekend developing a short Flash game for the So Many Rooms game jam, where each developer had 36 hours to produce a game that challenges the player to get from a starting door to an ending door, using whatever obstacles or gameplay mechanics they like. Switchbreak’s game is full of bouncing balls, so when he asked me to produce a quick tune for him, I made sure that it was appropriately bouncy.

This was whipped up on Sunday night mostly in Qtractor, with Hydrogen for the drums, and my Blofeld for all the other sounds. I’d normally record everything in to Ardour and mix it there, but I stayed in Qtractor for this one, and it did a fine job; I had no trouble replicating my usual trick of running the drums on to separate tracks so that I can apply individual effects to each, for instance. The result is a bit trite, but it’s fun, it loops pretty smoothly, and I think it suits the game well.


mp3 | vorbis | flac | 1:18

november games

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I’m aware that all of these games came out in October. I’m playing them now, though! I can’t be bothered with proper reviews, so here are a few quick notes on each:

Costume Quest — this is Double Fine’s latest, and it’s exactly as funny as you’d expect. It’s basically a cross between Zelda-style questing and adventuring and JRPG-style turn-based battles, and while there’s nothing much new to speak of in terms of gameplay, it’s all executed well. The art direection really steals the show, though — the Halloween setting is super-cute, and the use of costumes to gain abilities add an extra layers of charm. I do wish it was voice-acted (I assume that budget constraints prevented that), and I thought the combat dragged a little toward the end, but it’s still a great little game.

Super Meat Boy — I haven’t played a tonne of this yet, but it’s already thrown me over a barrel and beat me senseless, and yet I keep coming back for more. This is simple, old-school, tough-as-nails 2D platforming at its best. It demands precision, and often rote memorisation, but the levels are so short (tens of seconds, usually) that it doesn’t take long to learn them, the penalty for death is light (just restart the leve), and the controls are not just solid, but forgiving. Dying never feels cheap, and finishing a tough level always feels like an accomplishment.

Rock Band 3 — this really deserves its own post, but since I’m too lazy to give it one, here it is! On one level, Rock Band 3 is the Rock Band 2 you always wanted to play, with a far more flexible and intuitive UI that makes it much easier for each player to manage their instruments and preferences. On another level, it’s an entirely new experience, with the addition of a “Pro” mode for drums, guitars, and the game’s new addition: keyboards. I’ve been having a tonne of fun with the keyboard, but the cost of instruments for the other Pro modes may be a bridge too far. RB3 draws a line in the sand for older content, too — older tracks don’t have keyboard parts, or Pro Guitar parts.

halo: reach

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It’s almost uncool to admit it these days, but I’m quite a fan of the Halo games. I wasn’t always — in my earlier years I was quite the GameCube fanboy, so I hated Halo with a passion — but when I got my 360 I found the first two games on eBay and finally discovered what all the fuss was about. When Bungie announced that it was working on one last Halo game before partnering with the devil Activision, I hoped for something great, and I’m glad to say that Reach delivers; it may even be the finest of the Halo games.
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super mario galaxy 2

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If you’re like me, the experience of playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 can be summed up by the words you’ll find yourself involuntarily muttering again and again:

“Haha, what? No way! That’s awesome!”

Following up Super Mario Galaxy was always going to be a hard task; it turned 20 years of platforming tradition on its head — sometimes literally — with its mind-bending, gravity-defying spherical worlds. Rather than trying to reinvent the genre once again, Nintendo has simply taken the shell of the original game and stuffed it to bursting point with an incredible wealth of crazy, inventive, and unique ideas.

It’s hard to understate just how imaginative this game is. Just about every time you enter one of the game’s dozens of levels, it throws some new gameplay mechanic or concept at you, and as soon as you’ve mastered that, you’re thrown off to the next level and the next crazy idea. Incredibly, with just a couple of exceptions — Spring Mario, which makes a (thankfully brief) return from the original, and some motion-controlled gliding levels — all of those ideas are not just brilliant, but brilliantly executed as well.

The result is, simply put, one of the finest, most enjoyable games I’ve ever played. If you’ve ever been a fan of platformers, you need to play this game.