Testing the first playable game in class

This is the first playable testing this we finished this Thursday.

Meeting with George, the Audio PhD student

This Tuesday we met a PhD student from Audio dept. Roger introduced us, George. He was excited about our game and gave us a lot of opinion. With his professionalism, I believe we can make this game better.

One more reason why we focus on the audio instead of graphics

I had just read this comment in Unity3D forum and I agreed with it:

The State of Game Audio

The traditional sample-based approach to game audio is old and dated.

Over the course of the last two decades, game graphics have evolved from bitmap sprites to near photo-realistic imagery running at a solid 60 frames per second. We have shaders, massively parallel calculations running on dedicated hardware, and much more. With today's and tomorrow's hardware you can literally trace a ray of light as it bounces from surface to surface (and even through them!) towards the camera, creating crystal clear pictures.

Some of these developments are slowly starting to transfer to game audio, but not nearly enough! Games across the entire spectrum, from AAA to Indie, still resort to using ancient sample-based approaches for audio. Middleware packages such as WWise or FMOD offer real-time effects processing, which is a step forward, but they don't offer you the possibility to model your own synthesis model and generate sound on-the-fly. Furthermore, these packages seem to be mostly aimed at AAA first-person-shooter titles, making it difficult to do something radically different with them.

This inhibits development of game audio as a more integral part of game design. The result is that audio in games is still mostly an afterthought. In my opinion, game audio is at least 10 years behind on game graphics.

Colour of sound

I really think that it would be great if we can change the colour of the environment/avatar based on the music. There are already some article and argument about the colour of sound. These are some article that I found:

http://www.colorcube.com/articles/music/music.htm

http://www.musicandcolour.net/

At this point, I am not going to spend more time on researching the colour of sound or breaking down the music as I wanted to. Nevertheless, I will absolutely do that when they pick our thesis game.

For now, let's put this idea into our future feature.

A peek on last week brain storming

This is the short note from the brain storming last Tuesday.

We slightly changed the game a bit. First we are not going to use vinyl or string anymore. Instead we are going to use half-pipe. Second the music playback will be altered based on the character movement, which I believe make this game different than other music game.