http://theepidemicgame.blogspot.com/

Humble Indie Bundle 2!

There's only 4 days left to get in on the 2nd Humble Indie Bundle. 5 games, and you can pay whatever you want, and the money goes to charity. The games are Machinarium, Osmos, Braid, Cortex Command, and Revenge of the Titans.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

You can also buy it as a gift for anybody else. They have absolutely no DRM so you can download them as many times as you want and install them as many times as you want on as many computers as you want, and they work on PC, Mac, and Linux.

Spread the word! Just make sure to pay more than 50 cents or so, so you pay more than their payment processing fee and they don't lose money. The average payment is about $7, and the highest payment so far is $2,000 from Notch, the guy who makes Minecraft.

Machinarium, One Chance, and Every Day the Same Dream

Just throwing this link out here:

http://machinarium.net/demo/

Amanita Design lets you play the first 3 screens of Machinarium for free in your browser. It's good stuff. Great point-and-click puzzle adventure.



And here's One Chance by Awkward Silence Games. You can only play it ONCE. Ever. You have one chance to save the world. Game only takes a few minutes, and you have some interesting choices to make. Do you spend the last week of Earth with your wife and daughter? Or do you spend all the time in your lab trying to develop a cure?

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/555181



One Chance is a totally shameless ripoff of Every Day the Same Dream by MolleIndustria, at least in terms of design, music, controls, and the whole map really, but... it's still pretty cool.

The Classroom

I thought about this game recently and remembered how fun it was. I rules are simple and the game was so successful the developer made two more sequels. This is the first game.

-Maja

Sound Design

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPWdnDdhdQM

The game Left 4 Dead 2 has excellent sound design. Multiple sounds can be heard at the same time like a horde rushing in, guns firing and fire burning. The sound contributes a lot to the game play as certain enemies can be heard, altering the player of what is stalking them. It also helps intensifies the action as certain events happen like a tank appearing or when you have to defend yourself. In the video it shows how all these sounds work well together.

Music Assignment - Vernon

Square Enix makes use its music to create a sense of unity among all its individual Final Fantasy series games. Here is a sample.

My choice for a good use of sound design in a game:Gradius 3

Software for Making Chiptunes

Here's a thread at OCRemix where they discuss several programs that emulate the sound chips for the NES, SNES, Master System, and Genesis:

http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=13715


Here's a guide that will teach you how to convert a .MIDI song into a chiptune with Garage Band and a chiptunes plugin:

http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-create-a-chiptune-in-garageband/


If anybody wants some free chiptunes, the 8 Bit Collective is a nice free database. Anybody can freely upload or download any of the chiptunes here, as long as they give credit to the composer:

http://8bc.org/

Sound/Alan Wake - Lily Hardy

Alan Wake Gameplay   Play at 3:50

I chose a clip from Alan wake.The game is about a man who begins to experience his own frightening novel. I think the makers did a great job using subtle sounds and music to convey the feel of a horror/thriller novel.

Maja's Pick for Sound

Bioshock 2 Intro Gameplay

The creators of Bioshock 2 implemented sound to create a cinematic experience. One signature sound, the Big Sister's scream, is used to anticipate the player for a rather difficult fight.

My choice for a good use of sound design in a game: Megaman 2

Here is the link for the video


Megaman 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, and a big part can be attributed for its good use of sound in terms of atmospheric music as well as the sound effects. The music in itself is composed very well to correspond accordingly to the level that is selected. It captivates the player into the game and you don't really notice that it is looping over and over. But overall the soundtrack is amazing in my opinion. As far as the sound effects goes, the simple sounds of jumping, shooting, taking damage, going through the door, etc. reflect the game's environment of being in a futuristic world where robots are the soldiers in a battle between good and evil. Although very outdated being a game from the 80s, the sound effects fit the game perfectly.

-Alvin Torres

Game Sounds- Shadow of the Colossus

Watch it here.

Good examples at- 0:38-0:50, 1:00, 4:00, 4:30, 7:55, 8:20-9:00

A submission for favorite synchronous sound...

The narrator/antagonist/guide GLADOS in Valve's game Portal:

Artur's pick for Best Sound Design: Dead Space for 360, PS3, PC

Below is the link to gameplay footage of Dead Space. Players who choose to play a video game in the survival/horror genre usually want one thing; To feel fear! This clip demonstrates how sound and music (or lack thereof in some cases) set a eerie atmosphere for the game which in turn makes the experience startlingly realistic. The main character's footsteps in the seemingly empty spaces, the sound of the door swinging open. See for yourself!

Dead Space Gameplay Footage (Recommended to watch in HD!)

LIMBO

Here is the trailer for LIMBO, a game that was developed by the Danish indie developer Playdead Studios and released on XBLA in July. The game has some of my favorite atmospheric sound design. It contains no traditional score, as it doesn't have discrete songs. Instead, the game has atmospheric sound effects to evoke emotions. At some points the sound can really scare you.

When your character walks into water, and the water level reaches your ears, the sound changes accordingly to sound like you're underwater. When struggling to stay on a boat, you might dip into the water repeatedly, making for some very effective use of sound, especially if you're wearing headphones while you play it.

Borderlands - An example of good sound in gaming

Why does Borderlands have great sound? The sound control as seen in the introduction when the driver is talking over the loud music ranges in stereo volume. Quality of sound is very detailed on emphasis because we are able to hear the obvious splatter when the monster got hit by the truck. The music sets the mood for game play, being very humorous and laid back in the introduction while serious when the players get dropped off and is left alone for the adventure.

The sound effects such as the guns shooting and enemies lurking heard from the direction corresponds to the stereo audio, giving the experience a surround sound effect. Although this clip doesn't show it clearly, other game play clips on youtube will demonstrate it.

Sleep is Death

http://www.sleepisdeath.net/

A Virtual Tour of the Video Game History Museum

If anybody wants to see more late 70's and early 80's handheld game devices (and robots, stuffed animals, game art, and advertisements), here's a little "virtual tour" of the Video Game History Museum. They filled a whole room with classic games, systems, and memorabilia at this year's Classic Game Expo, and they let me photograph the whole room.

http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/81204/cge-2010-a-virtual-tour-of-the-video-game-history-museum/

The Tetris Effect

Wiki Entry on the Subject

Wired Magazine article on Tetris Effect as "Pharmatronic"

Wired article "This is your brain on Tetris"

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/tetris_pr.html

"Video [game] mayhem enlivens decision making"

You can find the full text here, but the gist of this article is that playing video games - specifically first-person shooters - makes you smarter:

Action-game players get tutored in detecting a range of visual and acoustic evidence that supports increasingly speedy decisions with no loss of precision, the scientists report in the Sept. 14 Current Biology. Researchers call this skill probabilistic inference. “What’s surprising in our study is that action games improved probabilistic inference not just for the act of gaming, but for unrelated and rather dull tasks,” Bavelier says.

The University of Rochester Brain and Vision Lab's research on the subject can be found here. Their elaboration on the effects: 

The skills found to be enhanced by action video game training, so far, include low-level vision (enhanced contrast sensitivity function), various aspects of attention (ability to monitor several objects at once, to search through a cluttered scene, to detect an event of interest in fast-forwarding video), more complex task constructs (multi-tasking, task-switching) and, finally, a general speeding of perceptual processing.

This work illustrates how skilled performance in a variety of processing domains can be enhanced by a single training regimen. Practical implications of this finding, such as vocational training (e.g., for laparoscopic surgeons) or clinical rehabilitation are being investigated.

Gamers shun stores for downloads

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11397504

There's a groupon today for wall art from Larger Than Life Prints - $35 for $84 worth of art - including these:

You can also create your own. Pretty cool.

Design Process for Half-Life

I came across this Gamasutra article while looking for ideas about how to flesh out the first draft of our design doc. It outlines Valve's process and decision-making logic in creating Half-Life, and has a few quotable gems, like this one, which I think speaks a bit to the iterative tuning excersize we did in class on Friday:  

Letting players see other characters make mistakes that they’ll need to avoid is an effective way to explain your puzzles and add tension and entertainment value.

And this one, about play-testing:

To do this, we added basic instrumentation to the game, automatically recording the player’s position, health, weapons, time, and any major activities such as saving the game, dying, being hurt, solving a puzzle, fighting a monster, and so on. We then took the results from a number of sessions and graphed them together to find any areas where there were problems. These included areas where the player spent too long without any encounters (boring), too long with too much health (too easy), too long with too little health (too hard), all of which gave us a good idea as to where they were likely to die and which positions would be best for adding goodies.

Fee content on the GDC vault

There's a lot of video, audio and slides from past Game Developers Conferences which you can access for free here, including this video from our textbook author talking about MMOGs (in a top hat) as well as the slides from the in-class video about The Sims character design. The latter hold up better-than-expected despite the absence of a narrator.

PlayStation HQ San Francisco Meetup - TODAY

Friday, September 17 · 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Playstation HQ Info

Portal 2 - Full Co-op Trailer

Portal Sequel

I loved the original:

Best of Indie Games 2010 (From Australia)

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/30328/Best_Of_Indie_Games_Greetings_From_Down_Under.php

SF Weekly story this week on Zynga 'Farm Villains'

http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/

Museum of Soviet Era Arcade Machines

Strange arcade machines from the 1980s Soviet era Russia

Textbook online via the library

Fundamentals of Game Design is available as an online-only ebook at the SFPL.

Playing it safe: The A.V. Club’s fall/holiday 2010 games preview

This article has a ton of cool trailers for upcoming releases. Like this one, for the gameplay of Ghost Trick on the DS: