James (the developer of Taphobos) invited me along to a game jam in Nottingham a few weeks ago, and I was glad to join him. It was a weekend jam called ‘ART / GAMES / HACK’ which intended to bring together digital artists and game developers to create interesting  games and interactive experiences. Myself and James knew we worked well together with FMOD and Unity, and I thought it’d be good to build my relationship with him over the weekend.

We made a cool little game based on the classic arcade fighting games of yesteryear. I made some cool retro sounds, and made a retro 8-bit style soundtrack for the game.

A few weeks ago I attended Rezzed, a game convention in London. I went with a few friends of mine from Game Audio North, and we explored all of the many games that were showing at the event. Taphobos was shown at Rezzed last year, and sadly I wasn’t able to be there with any of the games i’m working on at the moment (one day though). Prior to the event however, I realised that I knew a large number of people – both that i’d met in person previously, or knew from twitter, that were attending Rezzed. I decided to pull together a little impromptu game audio meetup, and suggest the game audio people around went for a pint together. Incredibly, after I pushed it quite a bit on social media, we managed to get a turn out of 20 people – which I was pretty impressed with. I caught up with some old friends, and met some new ones, including the composer I worked with on my last game, Hashtag Dungeon.

In early April I attended the game audio north meetup, my fourth so far. At this stage it’s mostly old faces, and a few new people to chat too as well. It was held in York, and around 15 people showed up – the usual mix of masters’ students, freelancers, PHD students and those working in AAA. I found a number of people were interested in Taphobos (and the latest game i’ve just announced i’ll be working on) and I picked up a few tips in regards to my FMOD technique.

Myself and James, the developer, met 2/3 times during easter to begin putting the first sounds into Taphobos. The process was relatively simple as we anticipated, and a number of sounds went into the game. I won’t go into detail about how we implemented the sounds, as this is something I will look at in more detail in my FMOD write-ups.

We implemented all of the ambience, including some complex parameter based generative ambience, which I am very proud of. As I said, i’ll explain in detail when I blog about the FMOD session.

James and myself worked well together, and although there were a number of issues that we have to figure out, he was very pleased with the results. We spoke briefly about the actual sounds I was creating, and he expressed a interest in realism – although he loved what i’d done thus far. We struggled a little in our communication in regards to the fact we didn’t have a common vocabulary to discuss sound (the age old talking about sound conundrum) but he said he was happy to leave the details up to my expertise.

Some short recordings, made while I was at home, with a Zoom and a Rode NT-4 stereo X/Y mic. The night ambience will almost certainly make it into Taphobos in some form. The noise from the H4n’s pre-amps was manageable in this case, and I think the recordings are very usable.

This is the rain:

And this is the night ambience:

(LO1)