One of the projects I was working on while I took a bit of time off last year was audio for an indie game called "Firestorm" developed by Midnight Oil Studios. I wrote music and created sound effects for this. A friend of mine helped out by supplying the guitar in the track. The game has been submitted for the Independant Game Festival this year. I really hope we get chosen as finalists so we can show the game at the Game Developer's Conference in San Fran in 2010. The guys did an excellent job building the game... Keep your fingers crossed :)
Below is a video of the gameplay for level 1. Due to compression beyond my control the audio breaks up a bit in this video. If you want to hear it in a more pristine form I've included a link to the track as well in the soundcloud player :)
So yesterday Dragon Age released for PC and the consoles. I just finished working on that title, helping out with the work of porting the audio over to the consoles from the PC. I'm happy to see that its doing so well on Game Rankings (91% !). Congratulations to the team and everyone who worked so hard to get that out the door :) A special congrats to my friend Aubrey who sang the theme song. Great work!
If you haven't checked out the game I highly reccomend it. It's a classic RPG type game, but its done really well. The story work is captivating and the gameplay is addictively fun.
So I have a couple of fun sort of video game related music things to talk about today.
So first off, a friend of mine sent me a link to this YouTube video made by a band called AttackAttack. For the first 30 sesconds I was pretty sure I was watching a typical death metal band, but as the music progressed in stranger ways by the minute I was confused. So I was informed by a friend of mine who owned a recording studio in Austin for awhile that this kind of music is called "Screamo" and one of its characteristics is the way it bounces between singing, yelling and musical styles. I asked in particular about the absurd style change at around 2:45 in the track where the whole thing all of a sudden sounds like a dance club track. His answer was interesting. He said "well most of these kids grew up not being exposed to one or two musical genre's like you and I did as kids... they've been exposed to everything. Video games are also a huge influence that's why you hear bizarre breaks in that track that are reminiscent of old school video games." I'm not 100% sure I buy this theory, however the music is pretty entertaining. Check out the video.
Here are the top 6 absurd things to look for:
1. I'll state the obvious first. The hilarious crouching stance, officially known as the "Crabwalk". The bass player does this especially well.
2. The synchronized head banging that isn't always on beat... love it!
3. The over done auto-tune effect on the singing vocals...
4. Note the ridiculous guitar move at 00:57
5. Absurd style change number one at 1:44, apparently the keyboardist decided the song needed some ballad piano at this point.
6. Doubly good absurd style change at 2:45. Now the keyboardist feels like clubbin! WTF? This was the section my friend said was probably inspired by video games.
Heh... I kid, but I must admit this is interesting stuff and new sounding. I probably wouldn't buy the album though.
The second video game related music snippet I have today is that Christopher Tin's new album "Calling All Dawns" was released today. If you played Civilization 4 you will recognize his work. His song "Baba Yetu" was the theme song. The music is very ethnic and choral heavy and extremely well produced. His work is not for everyone though, if you aren't a fan of choral type vocals this may grate on you quickly.
However, I highly suggest jumping over to his site and checking it out. You can also purchase the album there as well.
