#procedural audio

A few weeks ago, I exhibited enen with AARON GROMMESH, our Marketing Manager, at TOKYO SANDBOX. It was a smaller, simpler event than last year. The staff were friendly, and things ran very smoothly. Organizer Kevin Lim was very considerate, asking if everything was alright and even taking a little time from his busy schedule to try our game.

If I had one complaint, it's that I'm not a huge fan of the performance aspects - goofy, costumed mascots with microphones / DJs with masks blaring chiptune remixes of classic games, etc. My two reasons:

1) It's loud and ensures that every exhibitor with a game whose sound they consider essential to the experience has to bring headphones with very good noise-cancelling. We had two devices at our booth. Aaron's headphones have good noise-cancelling, but not perfect - you can still hear very loud sounds. (I'm not sure if there are perfect noise-cancelling headphones. If there are, I'm sure they're expensive) My headphones, which we used for the second device, are very good quality, but don't have noise-cancelling. They worked fine whenever there wasn't a stage performance- but I'll have to invest in some noise-cancelling headphones next time we exhibit.

2) It sort of seems like a desperate attempt to make indie-games seem cool and pop-cultury. This seems to me to actually stifle the culture of indie-games by keeping them in a box. Written on the box are the words: 'games are for nerds, but nerds know how to party too, bro' The box is coated in nostalgia. As someone who sees games as a an art form, I'd like to see them grow beyond this box. I'm fine with interviews - anything that's informative and encourages discourse - but I find the rest gimmicky.

These are my personal pet-peeves though. Regarding 1), I'm certainly in the minority when you consider that the majority of exhibitors didn't have headphones available for players at all. Of those who did have headphones, they were often of poor quality, or the exhibitors didn't actively offer them to players (one booth, featuring a hip-hop game, had headphones, but recommended I just use the external speakers, even though there was way too much environmental noise). This says something of the value the developers / exhibitors themselves give to sound.

I'm probably also in the minority regarding 2). A lot of people probably liked the performances and having a fun, party-like atmosphere at the event. This sort of thing is surely the standard at larger events and might be the Sandbox-organizers' way of trying to legitimize or popularize this somewhat smaller show. Or maybe it's just fun and I'm a party-pooper.

enen's reception

We had enen trailers streaming on two monitors and two setups- an iPad and an iPod Touch with our headphones. A fair number of visitors walked past without trying the game – I joked that it's because our game doesn't have any cute/sexy anime girls in it, but there's probably some truth in that. Just take a walk around Akihabara and you’ll understand.

Of the people who tried, most of them liked it. Some people said it was 'a strange game' (不思議なゲーム), which might have been meant pejoratively, but most were positive, saying things like 'I've never played a game like this before.'

A majority of the players commented on how unique and engaging the sound design was. They loved just playing around with the sound and were able to hear the ways it reacted to their touch. This really meant a lot to me- I sometimes wonder if I'm not wasting my time making avant-garde interactive sound design in a gaming culture that seems to prefer nostalgia and clichés. This event gave me hope that maybe my dream of communicating with people through games isn't a delusion. If given the chance to experience this kind of unusual, dynamic sound design, people can and will embrace it.

The big challenge for enen's success will of course be marketing - getting people to know about the game in the first place. We learned some important things at this event - difficulties for first-time players, room for aesthetic polish, etc. We're still prepping for the international release and hoping to invest more time/money into gameshows / advertising.

And of course, not everyone liked the sound- one person said she wished it were ‘more musical.’ But you can’t - and shouldn’t - please everyone.

Listen to Wikipedia

Do not just look at these GIFs. You’ve got to hear this to get the full experience: Listen to Wikipedia

The way it works is to watch the edits being made on Wikipedia and playing notes in response, as it happens live. Stick it up in the background and listen to the data.

I really like this kind of thing, for a multitude of reasons: it uses an unusual input as an effective way to create structure; it gives me a completely new way to understand the data; and it creates listenable music that’s totally generated but still has a very human connection.

Listen to Wikipedia was built by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, and you can peruse the source code on Github.

Escape Point: dynamic vs. static vs. no music

Escape Point is a simple proof-of-concept game I made in order to experiment with different approaches to game music. It was designed in Unity. This video shows three different music configurations: dynamic music, static music, and no music.