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!

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.

The standard rocket parts include all the things you’d expect: liquid fuel tanks and rocket engines, strap-on solid boosters, stage separators, tail fins, support struts, and of course the command module, with add-on parachute, which houses your Kerbal astronauts. Like their real-life counterparts, solid boosters have a lot of thrust but they burn out quickly and can’t be shut down once started, while liquid engines are less powerful but burn longer, and can be shut down or throttled mid-flight.

The Vehicle Assembly Building, where you design your rockets

Simple rockets are quite easy to put together, but more complex rockets require a lot more thought, since you can (and really have to) customise the staging sequence for your rocket, determining when each engine lights and when each stage separator fires. Larger rockets also need control systems, like RCS thrusters and the ASAS flight control computer, to keep them from veering off course.

Once you’ve built your rocket, it’s time to launch it, and if you’ve built it properly, it might even get off the ground! Again, with simple rockets, it’s not hard to get something off the ground and flying upward in a straight line, but as your rockets get larger and more complex, the challenge of building a working rocket increases dramatically.

This one may not be going in the right direction...

Failure can be frustrating, but it’s also hilarious. Rockets can veer off-course wildly, encounter control oscillations so bad that they tear themselves apart, suffer from disastrous separation mishaps, or just sit on the pad due to a shortfall of thrust until they topple over or explode. You might feel bad about dooming so many Kerbal astronauts, but watching a failure play out entirely beyond your control in KSP is just as entertaining as it is in games like Lemmings or World of Goo.

With two liquid-fuelled stages and six strap-on solid boosters, this rocket has plenty of power to reach orbit

One of the great things about KSP is the way it demonstrates the principles of real spaceflight. People may wonder why NASA spends billions sending astronauts in to space while companies like Virgin can do it for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but KSP makes the differences very clear. A small rocket will get your Kerbal astronauts straight up to the boundary of space, around 35,000m up, and a slightly larger one will get them out beyond the atmosphere, at about 70,000m.

Getting Your Kerbals in to orbit, though, requires a lot more power — you need to get them up there, and then get them travelling straight across at about 2300m/s, which means getting an entire rocket stage up to orbital height with a lot of fuel left. Perhaps the coolest thing, though, is that getting back down doesn’t require much power at all: you only need a tiny amount of reverse thrust (50m/s is usually plenty) to slow down enough to dip in to the atmosphere, and from there, the atmosphere will slow you all the way down without needing any extra fuel.

Flying in a high orbit above Kerbin, with Mun in the distance

Earlier versions of KSP required maths skills, or just dumb luck, to get in to orbit: the only way you knew for sure that you’d made it was by waiting until you’d completed an orbit. Current versions include an orbital map, which plots out your current orbit (or your current course back in to the planet) based on your speed and heading.

The orbital map plots your current orbit -- or your current course back to terra firma

When I started playing KSP, it took me a lot of work just to get in to orbit, but in KSP 0.12 there’s now a much grander target: a moon, called Mun. Getting to Mun requires even more power — you need to get to orbit and then accelerate to about 3000m/s in the right direction — and then slowing in to Munar orbit requires even more thrust. Spaceflight is all about weight, and every bit of extra fuel you need at the end of your flight means a lot more fuel (and often more engines, which adds more weight and requires even more fuel) at launch.

The ultimate challenge is a Mun landing. There’s no landing gear as such, but you can cobble one together with tail fins, though the challenge, as always, comes down to weight: you need fuel to get to Mun, slow to a halt above the surface, make a controlled hover over the surface until you find a suitable landing spot, and then very carefully drop down to the surface. Once you’re there, you still need enough fuel in your spacecraft to take off again, break away from Mun’s gravity, and then head back to Kerbin.

My massive moonshot rocket, sitting on the pad before launch

Touchdown! This is all that's left of my giant rocket after reaching the Munar surface

For now, KSP is available only for Windows and Mac OS X; it uses the Unity game engine, which runs on just about every platform other than Linux. The Unity developers apparently plan to add Linux support, but for now, the Windows version runs quite well under Wine. The current version is free, but the developers are going to start charging soon, so now is as good a time as any to check it out!

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.

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.

With the 8800GT back in place, I was also able to pick up a second monitor, which I’d wanted for a while — I couldn’t tell you exactly what I got, but it’s a 22″ ASUS, it has a HDMI port alongside the DVI and VGA ports (handy for running consoles through it), and it was cheap!

Most recently, I picked up a new mouse. Dragging my old Logitech MX500 all the way across my now 3360-pixel-wide desktop felt annoyingly sluggish, so I headed to CPL yet again to grab a new mouse — perhaps a Razer DeathAdder. What I ended up with, though, was the Razer Mamba, which is totally awesome. Its laser-based sensor is fast and accurate, and even though it’s wireless, it’s always smooth and responsive. It’s rechargeable, and comes with a dock to charge it from, but if all else fails you can plug it in and use it as a wired mouse, which is very cool. There are hardware buttons to adjust its sensitivity on-the-fly, and its side buttons magically defaulted to controlling the back and forward buttons in Firefox; I think that’s related to the fact that it appears to the OS as both a mouse and a keyboard.

As a sweetener, the box is freaking sweet (apologies for the phone camera photo):

This is the actual box that the Mamba comes in. Insanity!

I know it’s not the latest and greatest game, but I just fired up Penumbra: Overture, which I picked up in the first Humble Indie Bundle, and it worked beautifully. I did run on the on-board video, albeit very slowly, but at 1080p on my new monitor through the 8800GT, it looks great and runs beautifully. I might just have to pick up Amnesia after all!

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.

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.

Some of the usual Halo complains apply — while there’s a solid enough story here, Reach does a lousy job of telling it — and you could argue that without the Flood there’s not a great variety of enemies on offer. I’ll be happy to never again see the Flood, though, especially after Halo 3′s penultimate chapter, and I never felt the campaign lacked variety during my two complete play-throughs. That’s perhaps a testament to Reach’s level design, which is varied and interesting throughout; there are no areas that feel like they was thrown in during a crunch to pad out the experience.

I haven’t spent a tonne of time online, but the time I have spent has been fun — the revamped matchmaking system is brilliant, and the variety of game modes on offer, including the Horde-style Firefight, is huge. What I’m most looking forward to, though, is a four-player co-op campaign run on Legendary difficulty.

“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.