As I get acquainted with the latest spatial audio mapping and motion path tools like SpatGRIS, Playtime, and Grapes – all amazing plugins with their own unique best features – I still miss a few things about Spatial Studio — the Unity-like hierarchy of objects, property and behavior inheritance, the uncluttered canvas, to be sure, but also I miss the standalone app aspect of it.

It doesn’t depend on a DAW to operate, and I’m realizing now how transformative the experience of working in it was — it made me design in a less linear way, composing in procedural clusters, grains and swarms of sounds instead of tracks. I started to see the DAW as a hinderance, or a scratchpad to sketch up elements and tiny events first, before going to Studio where the ‘real’ work was done. I went back through some folders and grabbed another Spatial scene capture and listened to it. It’s so nice how good it sounds without connecting to the actual speaker array I was mapping to when I made this, even though I think it just uses Apple’s built-in HRTF algorithm for stereo monitoring and playback. Thought I’d share.

CriWare Audio API Adventures!

We were in need of something that audio-generated buttons for each sound cue in the AtomCraft middleware session, sorts them into different categories to keep everything organized, and handles the more complex playback behaviors. Writing a pre-delivery tester helped us ensure beat-synced cues and events that wait for a beat division before firing would work, so we know what to expect once we get it in a game’s build.

This is a demo video where I’ve loaded it up, and am playing some dorky chiptunes-ish cues I made. This mainly demonstrates how good CriWare is at waiting for a phrase or beat to be complete before transitioning to different sections of music. I’ve built a separate SFX player below the music player as well, and most one-offs get sorted to this simpler player. Those have various sequential and random sound trigger functions set up in AtomCraft and loaded here.

I designed a little ‘Meditation Garden at Night’ scene in Spatial Studio, complete with a set of musical pitch-shifted crickets. You can tune your slowed down crickets so they harmonize — in this case I chose to set my samples in a major scale, weighted randomness skewed a bit toward that 7th interval. Besides all the fun sequencing and random playback you can program in Studio, the floating sound objects’ trajectories as they move around the speaker map are just so pretty to look at.

Thanks to Empty Clip Studios, RGG Studio, and Sega, I got to re-imagine Hidenori Shoji‘s super-energetic and awesome music as if it were created with the Sega chip!

Streets of Kamurocho is a pretty fun mashup of the amazing Yakuza series and the much-loved classic Streets of Rage II. It’s basically your favorite Yakuza characters teleported into Streets of Rage. This game was initially released in October to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Sega. Will there be more? I sure hope so, as it inspired me to go back and play more beloved classics on Sega Megadrive.

I got to recreate the classic Streets of Rage II intro and title screen music as well. It’s always educational to decipher the original tracks and discover the clever tricks and innovations that give a game its sound.

I am fortunate enough to have worn all possible audio hats for this elaborate TCG-RPG style game by Magic Fuel Games. I designed the sound effects and ambiences, recorded and performed the character VO, wrote the music, and handled all the audio integration in Unity for this game.

It’s a charming game with a lot of depth. Play long enough and you’ll encounter my favorite character, Timekeeper, a huge fluffy cat with time warping abilities. I did some pitch and formant shifting on my voice for the fierce feline Time Lord meows.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fort-stars/id1380108008?mt=8

…for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, out now on Steam.

Positional music changes here, as I jump to different locations on the board.

Siege Hammer is a uniquely-designed strategic VR tower defense game where players take the role of the young hero, Blip, and are granted a magical hammer to defend the realm from evil invaders. The fuzzy blue npcs (‘Wisps’) are a source of power. Focusing gaze on a Wisp will entice it to fly to the hammer weapon and charge it with energy. Part of the fun is looking around the scene and up into the sky to find them and bring them to you.

Wisps have the most complex sound design in the game, emitting a variety of constant  vocalization/propelling loops while in flight.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/536230/Siege_Hammer/

Earth Primer is a fantastic learning experience: Imagine if your Earth Science book was interactive, and you could sculpt with magma, lava, rain and wind, and move tectonic plates with your fingertips! I was lucky enough to get to play a small role designing UI sounds in Chaim Gingold’s lovely interactive book.

Credit to Cliff Caruthers for all the beautiful music, inner-Earth and weather ambiences in this.

Now available on the Mac App Store, as well as iPad. More info about the project here: http://www.earthprimer.com

 

 

This game was made by a small and talented team for AT&T’s presentation booth at the Chinese New Year Festival’s Flower Market Fair this weekend (Jan 30 and 31st) in SF Chinatown.  It’s multiplayer on several android devices at the booth, and players’ scores are updated live on a central display screen.  This is a quick screen grab of what the player sees on the devices, but you’ll have to visit us in person at the fair to see and hear all the animations and sounds that get fired off on the central screen as the players rack up their gold coins.  Details: Chinese New Year Festival

 

Go, little burdies, go! Burds, the addictive puzzle game created by Justin Cooper and Troy Sandal at Tiny Marble, is currently featured in the “Best New Games” category in the App Store. I couldn’t be more delighted. It’s a charming game that was a pleasure to work on. Every SFX in this game is very musical: There are tons of tiered musical rewards, and I had a lot of fun voicing the singing burds. I used some pitch and formant shifters to make the burd voices cute and small, and layered the results to get a chorus of them. The basic tweets and chirps for when you connect 2 or more are crafted with a little FM synth magic. This game’s art was an inspiration — I fell in love immediately and the characters’ warbly little singing voices came to me quickly. Check it out here: Burds iOS