Hello everyone! I know it's been awhile since I've made a post, but now I've got quite a few new things to put up. This last weekend, I was part of something called Global Game Jam. It's a game making competition where you get about 48 hours to make a game (whether board game or video game) and hopefully come out with something that is at least a prototype, and should be based on a theme. 2014's theme for this year was "we do not see things as they are, but as we are". For my first year, I choose to be part of "Team Blink", and worked on the game Ego-Boost, a game about fighting projections of your own ego, which get stronger the further in the game you get, since the better you do, the more powerful your ego. I worked on the audio, alongside two other audio engineers, Nolan Hansen and Luke Grady. It was a blast working with them, and we did a great job. In fact, in the 48 hour competition, we created 30 mins worth of music for the game, 7 individual tracks. Our group did well, and we were awarded the top prizes for Audio (yay!) and Game Play, and honorable mention for Theme and Overall.
I wanted to post here mostly about the music however, and the process of our teams work. We started off around 10 PM on Friday with setting up our equipment. Nolan had a guitar, bass guitar and an amp, while I was using reason and a keyboard for drums, and Luke worked with Pro-tools and garage band. We came up with 12 songs to make, and began working on some of them. The tricky part about the music, is that there are different emotions: Rage, Fear, Pride, ect. Each of these emotions could be a power used by the player, so what we wanted to do, was create a track for each one, so that it could play when they were using that particular power.
Egotistical was the first song we made, as it was going to be the default power up. Nolan used the guitar and the bass to lay down some tracks, and after he did that I put in a drum track in using the Boom plug-in for ProTools. After I added it and did some minor editing, Luke produced a wet track with effects, EQing, and compressors. This became the pattern for the weekend and how most of the music was produced.
Of course, as with any project, we got better as we got along. After awhile, I realized that the Boom plug-in was not enough, and I used reason to create custom drums loops. But even that had issues, so eventually, I started creating entirely constructed and played drum tracks through Reason. The results were much better and made our music much better.
There were also two songs of note. Despair was the song that would be played when the player's health got low and they were nearly gone. It was created by Luke last semester as a personal project, and it worked so well that he let us use it. Nolan put down some guitars for the background, and I put some cymbal rolls and looped it, but otherwise that was his work. Another song was Envy, which I made myself in about 30 mins or so. We were crunched for time, and we need a song for this emotion, so I created a totally electronic track for the piece.
As with all projects, things didn't always go as planned. We didn't get all 12 tracks we had planned. Emotions that we thought we'd have were scrapped, and other game design issues arose. However, we made it work and our team did well, getting first place in Audio. Below is a playlist of the music we created, and is available for download if you would like. Artwork is by Chris Leonhardt and Paula Rodriguez.
Also feel free to check out my SoundCloud account, which has a link to it on the right hand side of the blog. It has my other songs I've made and will be where I post all my audio work.
Also, it is likely that my team will be continuing the game, with the possibility of us forming an indie game design group. If this is the case, we will likely revisit these songs and make newer cleaner versions of them. While I am proud of these versions as well, we only had 48 hours to make them, so we couldn't put too much time on any one song. I have also discussed with another team who produced a game and wishes to continue, and have agreed to help them create music for their game too. If more comes from it, I will post my work for that game here as well.
Finally, another project I'm working on now is the Han Zimmer Wants You contest, which is to remix a track created by Hans Zimmer. I will keep you up to date on that as well. That's it for my projects for now. With school going on however, and all these other projects, I am not going to do much for the time being with my Review blog. I will post there later saying the same thing, but unless someone gives me some suggestions for it, I will not be posting there often.
Remember you can find my on Twitter, Soundcloud and Youtube by clicking on the links on the right hand side!
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