February 2012
6 posts
Secret pet project reveal
bookofthedev:
Here’s the pet project I’ve been alluding to on Twitter for the last couple of weeks. WordCrasher Blitz - the ultimate version of WordCrasher, with the magical, mystical price of FREE, already submitted to the App Store and arriving in the next few days.
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HELP! Hard Drive Problems!
Problem: I have an HFS formatted drive for my audio data on OSX. I need to get that information onto an NTFS formatted drive, so I can access it from Windows 7.
Solution? I have HFS+ Explorer for Windows, but can’t quite work out if I can clone the HFS drive to an NTFS drive from within Windows.
Help?
EDIT: Ok, so the solution was to grab the program MacDrive and use it’s 5-day free...
Random or not?
I’m not sure if this is information most people taken for granted or not, but thought I’d post it anyway, hoping someone gets some use out of it!
Nowadays in audio tech, it’s very easy to randomise the pitch and volume on individual sounds or sets of samples. This is often used to avoid repetition in things like footsteps, or gunshots, things that the player might hear a LOT. It...
On the importance of being social....
Having just had this tweet directed at me by @surfyournut :
@joecavers @Audiodaan @Stomp224 Haha, you busy socialite you Joe.
I thought I’d do a cheeky little blog post on what I like about the social aspect of the games industry.
I’ve been asked a few times since getting a job “How do you get into game audio?” and there’s a bunch of stuff I list, which...
Scattered
So it’s been FAR too long since I last blogged. Things have been very busy! We are in full swing on LEGO Batman 2: DC Superheroes at Traveller’s Tales, which has been both great fun and informative. I’ve learned a whole lot since this has been my first project I’ve worked on in-game sound. I finished up last week by sweeping a microphone on a boom pole across a room...
GameAudioMix ||||||||: phew! →
gameaudiomix:
Apologies for the lack of updates of late, but, i’ve been busy finishing up post on Prototype2, and as we drift into the final few bug fixes, I am sure I’ll be gathering some cool stories and noteworthy links together.
There are a couple of interviews in the pipeline here on gameaudiomix, one…
January 2012
4 posts
And a Happy New Year
bookofthedev:
Happy New Year! 2012 just sounds so much cooler and futuristic than 2011, doesn’t it? Therefore I’m boldly predicting good things for all of us. Magical ponies for everyone. Bring it on.
Here’s my development resolutions for the coming year.
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Russ Morris: Showing Unity to a 13 year old at... →
therussmorris:
I’m incredibly lucky.* It seems that whatever I’m doing, it’s something that I love. Over the christmas holidays I went to visit the various branches of various families, most of which don’t have a clue what it is I do. Among one of these families is a 13 year old boy that is pretty much a…
kellyoxford:
December 2011
5 posts
The Word of Notch: Ludum Dare is a wonderful thing →
notch:
I’ve talked about it before, and I’ll talk about it again. Ludum Dare is an amazing thing. It’s basically a recurring (three times per year? Uh. Something like that) competition where you’re supposed to make a game from scratch in 48 hours, and it just happened again this weekend. Everyone starts…
Chuck Russom: Ariel Gross: What Isn't Sound... →
chuck-russom:
Ariel Gross has been writing some great posts on game audio over at #AltDevBlogADay. If you are interested in game audio, and you haven’t checked them out, you should do so right away. I really like his latest post; What Isn’t Sound Design? Here is an excerpt:
Sound design is…
I contributed a remix to Whitaker Trebellas... →
cainkong:
Good composer friend of mine, Whitaker Trebella just released his soundtrack to the game Cardinal Quest. In addition to his excellent score for the title, he added some remixes for some of the tracks provided by Jeff Ball, Satsuma Audio, Disasterpeace, Joe Cavers, Charlie McCarron, and Cain Kong himself! (that’s me) I’m not gonna lie, I was pretty flattered when Whitaker asked me if I...
An album for Charity! Pay What You Want! →
cainkong:
Here is an album that I contributed a track to, in collaboration with talented Video Game Musicians from around the globe. It was quite the rewarding experience to say the least. The proceeds from generated from Play It Forward will go the Childs Play Organization and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Many thanks to Ryan Davies for allowing the opportunity to be included on the...
My First Title!
Some kind soul has already uploaded most of the LEGO: HP Y5-7 cutscenes, so I thought I’d link them here. The majority of the Year 6 cutscenes were my work, so here they are!
November 2011
11 posts
A bitmap font solution for games
bookofthedev:
I may have mentioned it before, but I’m not using any kind of engine or über framework such as Cocos2D or Unity. It’s not that I have anything against these libraries (in fact they probably represent the best way into iOS game development today), but when I started out on iOS, such solutions either didn’t exist, or were too early to depend on for production code.
This means...
New Sound Library →
chuck-russom:
Today I released Drones, my latest sound library. It’s been almost 4 months to the day since I released my last library. That is the longest break between libraries since I started Chuck Russom FX back in April 2010. Damn, I’m slacking….
Hidden areas, spikes (and more wall jumps)
bookofthedev:
Time for a new video to show the progress on Food Run. I’ve recently added hidden areas and spikes to the level design arsenal. The video also shows wall jumps in action for the first time - last time out it was just static screenshots.
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GANG IESD RMWG →
gameaudiomix:
As one of the co-chairs of the GANG IESD pro branch, along with Kenny Young, Scott Selfon & Alexander Brandon, I want to shed a little more light on some of the projects under development there. One of these projects, initiated & spearheaded by Alex Brandon, is the Runtime Mixing Working Group. For those of you who aren’t already active GANG members, here are the goals that...
GameAudioMix ||||||||: Exclusive Interview with... →
gameaudiomix:
I’m very happy to present this interview with score mixer Rich Aitken, who took time out to discuss a variety of mix related topics.
Firstly, could you give us a Brief introduction to what you do…
I’m Rich Aitken and I am the Production director at Nimrod Productions Ltd. (a music and…
The long tail
bookofthedev:
Last week I received a letter through the post forwarded from my parents’ house. I haven’t lived there for seventeen years, and the envelope was hand-written, so I was quite intrigued to see who still had my address from all that time ago.
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October 2011
10 posts
It's competition time
bookofthedev:
As part of the company name changeover to Pixels on Toast, I’m trying to bring as many of the fans of the old Kevin Ng Games Facebook page over to the new Facebook page. This is going to be a hard job, and in fact, I’m not sure if it’s even possible. To help me achieve this, I’m running a competition.
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Catch Up
I’m LONG overdue another blog post (I am terrible at doing this with any regularity, apologies for that!), so here it finally is! So, job-life. We finished up development on LEGO: Harry Potter Years 5-7 a few weeks ago, and with it, finished crunching. All in all, we were happy with how the game sounds and everything we got into it, and I even managed to fit a bit of time into the schedule...
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FMOD Studio Featured on Develop's Website →
gameaudiomix:
A nice feature briefly discussing the new approach and philosophy behind the upcoming version of FMOD Studio. Central to the new design are interactive mixing features that look, feel and act more like a familiar Digital Audio Workstation. I am certainly looking forward to getting my hands on this technology and seeing how it feels. Hopefully we will have a more in depth interview...
Calibrating Your Room →
gameaudiomix:
The above link contains a really useful guide to calibration from the Blue Sky website. Included are files and instructions on calibrating a 5.1 system… note: Almost all of the rooms sound editors use are small rooms, so 79 SPL should be used instead of 85.
6 tags
Dead iPhone?
My iPhone has sporadically, over the last few months, been disconnecting randomly from 3G and Wifi connections. It’s been happening enough that I’ve questioned it, but not quite enough for me to be sure it’s definitely broken. Today however, I’ve had almost no 3G connection in a place I normally have totally usable 3G, and the phone connects to the Wifi at home, but...
Emotion Triggered by Audio
There’s an album I’ve been listening to lately that I listened to a lot last year at Christmas. I think that this combined with it getting darker in the evenings (even as little as that’s been happening lately) has been giving me a kind of emotional deja vu (is that the right description?) for that warm, wintery feeling you get when you’re curled up somewhere warm and safe...
September 2011
7 posts
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Life update! Game Audio ahoy!
Finally getting round to a blog post! So, as some of you might’ve heard, I was recently hired as a Junior Audio Engineer at Traveller’s Tales. For anyone who doesn’t know, they’re a UK-based developer with a fairly long history in the industry. In recent years, their hard work has lead to the creation of the highly successful LEGO series of games, including titles based on...
August 2011
12 posts
So busy....
I’m so long overdue for a blog post and update, it’s coming, I just need some free time to sit down and write it!
It’s coming soon, I promise……
In the mean time, here’s a cool (fanmade) video of the game I’m currently working on:
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Prototype for Automatic Ringtone Personalising...
auralscope:
Coming Soon…
My Prototype for Automatic Ringtone Personalising Suite for a Smart Phone
Will be writing a detailed blog post soon, once I get a video capture of functionality of the prototype on Mac (I am currently on Windows).
Auto Equalizer patch
Auto Light Sensor patch
Auto Output Volume patch
jamestelfordmusic asked: Cheers Joe!
audibilization-deactivated20110 asked: Hi mister, How long have you been pursuing sound design as a career?