It seems that New Years greetings are mandatory, so I do the same. After wishing you a good christmas time on microcontent here now have fun celebrating with this fine robot. It is a robot that plays the well known famous tune ‘Crazy’ from Gnarls Barkley on the Theremin. Let’s celebrate!
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At the Independend Gaming Source I discovered this tiny tool, called SFXR. It is a soundgenerator for retro-game like soundeffects, that you are familiar with by playing hundreds of classic games. It basically has three oscillators sinewave, sawtooth, squarewave and a noise generator. With various parameters like vibrato, pitch and filter settings you can quickly customize you sound settings, play around with it and get squeaky effects within seconds. A very nice feature is, that you can use some random generators. They are random in constrains, so the results will come on in some good default fashion for most used and effective sound like “explosion”, “pickup” or “shoot”.
Ok, now. You selected a sound, but want some variation? No problem. Example: you have three kinds of shooting sounds and want them just to differ a little bit. You can edit or select one and then hit the “Mutate” three times. This will automatically generate parameters that will sound similar to the initial sound, but not the same. Generate your similar sounds, write them on disk and you are done.
The author of this tiny application ‘DrPetter’ made this tool for the website Ludumdare, where they held the fast paced gaming competition LD48. He complained about the fact, that so many entries were without sounds. That’s why he wrote this app to help the contributors get their sounds. In his own words, the SFXR is:
DrPetter
And in fact, the soundeffects are good, but a little thin and I bet that now thousands of games will come out with this remarkable sound tool. So don’t forget to fatten up your sounds with some special techniques and recipes, so that your sound makes a difference. And don’t tell anybody about them.
Read an interview with Tomas Pettersson on his SFXR.
Meanwhile YouTube is becoming my favorite research tool of choice. After doing an inquiry on Marble Madness again, I fell into Marble Machines. There is lots of interesting stuff going on there. Just have a look for example at this remarkable Marble Machines:
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There are freaks outside, I know. But this project is very interesting. It’s a complete rebuild of the original 1984 Marble Madness with let’s say original graphics and original sound. The funky detail here is, that it’s rebuild with a 3D-engine and that you can switch between different isometric and perspective views and also turn the game to the “balls perspective”. Very clever. Playing an arcade classic in a new and interesting fashion.
In game screenshot from Rolling Madness 3D
PS: I searched the download-link for ages. It is located on the top-right corner of the Rolling Madness 3D website.
I regularly have lots of interesting findings on the internet, that I post frequently on Microcontent, del.icio.us (also look into the footer, they are inbound also on this page) and soup. Somehow scanning that much sources can be unclear. For that reason will here present some recommended findings.
First there is an interesting article on the Art and Science of Leveldesign. It’s a little older, but making levels is somehow the core-part of every game design and in that sense worth to think twice about that.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to define the role of the team member known as the ‘Level Designer’. Level design is as much an art as it is a science; it requires artistic skills and know-how as well as an extensive technical knowledge.”
Right in this context I have an interesting link to a Boulder Dash archive site. The good thing is, that it also features an interview with Peter Liepa, the inventor of Boulder Dash. This definitely was one of the best readings I had in the last two months.
“But I started playing with basic elements of dirt, rocks, and jewels and within a couple of days had built the basic ‘physics engine’ of what was to become Boulder Dash. I realized that using a random number generator you could generate random caves, and that by controlling the density of rocks and jewels you could get some interesting game play. The game play was not only interesting from a puzzle standpoint, but it also appealed to various emotional drives – not only obvious psychotic ones like greed (collecting jewels), destructiveness (dislodging rocks and killing fireflies) – but more neurotic ones like cleaning all the dirt out of a cave.”
Finally there is a podcast interview with Jack Tramiel. That’s the one who founded Commodore and after the big hit of the C64 he went over to Atari and made it successful. This short podcast was made because of the 25th anniversary of the C64. Just compare with a TV feature from 1985 with Jack Tramiel. See video below.
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This is a video from an incredible old videogame on the Atari2600. It explains how you can go through the videogame and you will soon see that the gameplay has some clever tricks that are above the “shooting at enemies”-level. The enemy objects are carefully designed to drive the gameplay and I find this yet convincing.
This is just a quick reminder for the 10th Text Mode Demo Compo. The deadline will be coming soon at the 12.12.2007. If you don’t know about the Text Mode Demo Compo, read this Interview with Jari Komppa. So or so get the invitation video and look forward the submissions. TMDC website.
