Coming Soon: BT's Video Game Theme Song

Electronic musician extraordinaire BT has really been forging ahead with this newfangled Internet thing. From being quite involved on his Twitter account to releasing 12-second preview clips of his upcoming album, dude knows how to keep his fans pumped up. He also made some cool announcements at a Ustream interview he conducted this evening.

Coming soon, the Beatport music store (which has BT's new single available DRM-free) will be offering up a version of said single hacked up and ready for remixing in a contest. The winner will see their remix available for sale on Beatport. Pretty cool.

Of particular interest to me was BT's response to questions about his work with video games. BT has had his music appear in games, the most noteworthy of which (to me) is the playable version of Kimosabe on Harmonix's PS2 title Amplitude. He let slip that he has composed the theme song to an upcoming (but unnamed!) video game, describing it as "big, orchestral" and "dubstep" and more. He followed up by saying:

...being a gamer myself, I've found that a lot of people that support my music and what I do are gamers too, and so I'd like to write a lot more music for video games.

Good to hear, Mr. BT! Please bring-it-up bring-it-up bring-it-up, and thanks for engaging your fans like this!

YouTube Vids of Older Stuff

Took me long enough, but I've finally gotten around to uploading some video of Melody's Musette and Rabbit-Proof Fencing, two projects that comprised the majority of my work back at ETC-Adelaide.

Melody's Musette is a game whose core concept is synchronicity, tying the music and gameplay events together. Rabbit-Proof Fencing is a humorous look at introduced species in Australia. Puns abound.

Both of these games were made with Panda3D.

I've embedded them below, or you can simply head to my YouTube channel to check them out.

Melody's Musette Stage Two Gameplay


Melody's Musette Stage Three Gameplay


Rabbit-Proof Fencing, Full Game

I Really Am Still Blogging

You know something's up when your last post starts with "I'm going to try to be terser and more frequent in my postings." And said last post is almost three months old.

Well, I have something to show for such a delay. Three things, actually:

Firstly, a link to a game I made here at ETC. It's not as good as I would have liked it to be, but seeing as how it's my first finished game and was made in two weeks in a language I didn't know before starting, I'm quite pleased with the result. This (and subsequent games I post about) were made in a class called Building Virtual Worlds, where you're given a game design prompt, and two weeks to implement it.

I also have a video of my most recent BVW assignment. Why no link to the game? Well, for one, I haven't packaged it up yet. But also, it uses an alternative input device (read: not a mouse or keyboard) so you'd have a hard time playing it anyway. The video will be at the bottom of the post. I made it myself. =)

Finally, some news: I'm pitching a project for next semester here at ETC-Adelaide. If it gets greenlighted (and it's looking like it might), then I get to design a game over the spring Down Under! Schweet.

That's all for now. I seriously will try to post more often, or at least regularly. Hard to keep up when you're this busy!

NYC Games Salon

I was going to sum up the NYC Games Salon that I went to on 9 January, but: 1) I got into the Carnegie Mellon ETC in Adelaide, Australia which has thrown my schedule off-kilter with doctor's appointments, visa applications and the like, and 2) seeing as Gamasutra has already blogged it better than I would have been able to, I'll just refer you to that and point out two things that really, really bothered me:

The DWI Simulator's development started in Torque, until they decided it wasn't as good as they wanted, so they switched to a web-based Java app. What? As you programmers know, Java runs on OS X and Linux, and even Windows. As does Torque. The big difference? Java can run within a web browser, without installation. Torque, while required to run natively in a "full app" context, has significantly more graphical/input chops. It's better for full-fledged games, and could make the simulation that much more immersive, by not having to deal with the headaches of a browser paradigm.

As was evidenced when the Java-version of the game failed to run properly in his web browser. Now, he didn't say what, exactly, they didn't like about their Torque version, but I'd wager it has more to do with developer familiarity than any sort of defeciency in Torque. There's nothing wrong with being upfront about such unfamiliarity, but there is something wrong with asserting (without evidence!) that the pathetic Java3D toolkit could somehow make a better simulation experience than Torque.

And I realize that there was no actual Inspector Carbone game, it was still being designed, but I really don't like these non-material metrics for gameplay, we'll call them "Glue Points."

See, Inspector Carbone used a system of "Eco-Points" to represent several metrics: financial capability of residents, willingness to live greener, capacity for ecological responsibility education, et cetera. These nebulous points grew with time, but fell with upgrades. There's a flaw in the mechanics when a metric representing education falls after installing CFL bulbs.

I think that's just a symptom of the simulation being too simple. SimCity simulates urban development quite well, but it breaks simulation parameters up sufficiently to resemble real-life parameters. Taxes, energy, water, population, zoning. It all adds up to a realistic simulation, than if something like "City Life Points" had been used to "glue" several distinct aspects together.

Anyway, it was a great event and I wish I could go to another. Here's hoping one comes to Australia. :)

Guest Lecture Slides

On November 28th and 30th, I gave guest lectures at UALR and UCA on video games as interactive narrative.

I've reproduced the slides here in Flash. (The Flash version doesn't have the movies intact, sorry.)

Simply click on the presentation to advance the slides.