Ian Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 10:29AM 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.
Audio Recording, Game Jams, Music, Soundtrack | in Music, Postmortems, Workshops | Comments Off Share Article → Ian Posted on Monday, May 14, 2012 at 9:55PM 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.
Audio Recording, Composition, GGJ2012, Game Jams | in Music, Postmortems | Comments Off Share Article → Sam Posted on Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 12:00PM The Global Game Jam theme for 2012 was this image of the ouroborus:
Since I was helping to coordinate the Cleveland site for the Jam, I didn't want to saddle another group with a member who was potentially unavailable while they were doing administrative tasks during the weekend. As a result I ran with a team of one.
The theme image immediately conjured in my mind the idea of autophagy- a sort of ceremonial consuming of the self. During the Cleveland site's cross-group brainstorming we also saw a lot of motifs related to bleakness, futile repetition, Sisyphean tasks, and so on. I had also tinkered with some procedurally generated looping track structures in 2011 and wanted to revisit and formalize them.