WhileTrueFork

If you were at the recent Cleveland Game Devs "Intro to Game Jams" Meetup you may have seen my quick-and-dirty presentation on Gizmos in Unity. Gizmos are really useful for a variety of things and worth poking at. I've uploaded the project file in case you want to play around with the examples from the talk.

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2012 was a busy year. I changed day jobs, released a game, did a ton of groundwork for another... But that's boring. Here is a short list of my favorite games of 2012. For the sake of argument, let's assume I forgot to include one or two. Some of these sort of came out before 2012 but that's when I was exposed to them. They are presented in no particular order.

JS Joust is one of my favorite games of all time and I've only ever played it once (but my KickStarter kit is coming soon and I am as excited as all get out). Read about it!

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2012 was a busy year. I changed day jobs, released a game, did a ton of groundwork for another... But that's boring. Here is a short list of my favorite games of 2012. For the sake of argument, let's assume I forgot to include one or two. Some of these sort of came out before 2012 but that's when I was exposed to them. They are presented in no particular order.

This one is sort of a gimme; Blendo Game's periodic forays into the blocky world of Citizen Abel are regularly brought up in the "Art" vs "Not Art" vs "Shut up it's Art" vs "Your mom is Art and Games are at best Design" vs "Screw you man, you lost the Dream" debate that bounces enternally admist the fractured hall of mirrors of the game development world (and the indie game development world in particular). In case you managed to get through that last sentence, I typically see Citizen Abel- until recently in the form of Gravity Bone- enlisted as a foot soldier in the Games Are Art battalion. (Read more!)

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Hello Everybody!

First off, my sincere apologies for a long absence from the blog. I know it's been difficult for you, but I promise you that my laurels were not overly rested upon during my silence. I had hoped to get some kind of retrospective post out before the end of 2012 but with the holidays that got pushed way to the bottom of my list. Soon I will be branching out into reviews of games and/or soundtracks I've really enjoyed over the past months. But first, I want to kick off the new year at WhileTrueFork with a look ahead to the upcoming Global Game Jam 2013.

Leading up to the Global Game Jam I will be releasing at least two short articles on composing music in the context of a game jam. The topics and suggestions can apply to any short term game dev project and I hope to appeal to experts and novices alike. While I may include some other general points about game audio, I want to keep the focus specifically on music. Composing music for games presents a dual challenge in that it requires not only technical knowledge of sound editing in various programs, but also at least a basic understanding of music theory and principles. In today's post, I will begin with some general tips for structuring your track. If you attended the Cleveland Game Developer's Meetup on Saturday the 12th, these posts will connect to many of the points in my presentation.

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2012 was a busy year. I changed day jobs, released a game, did a ton of groundwork for another... But that's boring. Here is a short list of my favorite games of 2012. For the sake of argument, let's assume I forgot to include one or two. Some of these sort of came out before 2012 but that's when I was exposed to them. They are presented in no particular order.

Frog Fractions- Made by TwinBeard, this game is an amphibious romp through the world of rational numbers.

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Sara put together a trailer and game introduction for Oregon Whale. Watch it here!

Sara has posted some of her process notes for The Oregon Whale on her Tumblr; check them out.

Hello internets! It's been a while... We've got a few projects in active development (hence the relative radio silence- but that is hopefully about to change). One of these, a quick collaboration between we WhileTrueForkers and incomparable TwoBitArt, is set to release on the App Store today...

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This week's post will discuss the creative process for the second game soundtrack I created as a participant in the 2012 Global Game Jam through the Cleveland Game Developers organization. This project was a complete departure from my work on "A Short Tail" and was, in many ways, the most challenging of the four works I completed for the Jam. In this post-mortem I will describe the basic concept of the game, my experience as a collaborator with the development team, and the technical and artistic challenges of creating this soundtrack.

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As promised, here is the second of five post-mortem posts related to the 2012 Global Game Jam.  If you did not read the first entry in this series, I highly recommend that you do so to get some basic information about the 2012 GGJ and a rundown of the games and topics in this series.  The next four posts will delve into the music composition process for each game I worked on over the GGJ weekend.  The posts will be released in the general chronological order of project completion, though there was some overlap as I worked to complete each composition.  When describing musical elements, I will attempt to be as clear as possible without getting overly technical.  I will also try to provide links to further information when using some potentially unfamiliar musical vocabulary rather than attempting to clarify definitions in the body of the article.

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