The Ride – Let’s Get Some Audio

The Ride is a personal experience game about how it feels to ride. And being a personal experience game – what better audio than the sounds that my own motorbike actually makes?

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Tonight I met up with the three audio students that agreed to work on the ride with me.

Ash – Chris – Johan

We discussed a few ideas of what positions the mic’s could be in to record the best audio with the least amount of wind, loaded me up with different mics and set me off to ride. The best mic ended up being the last one we tried which was taped to the inside of my jacket – completely protected from wind.

I never thought I’d be riding a motorbike while strapped up with mics – especially to record audio for a game I’m making. This blog is just – here’s a thing we did. It was something out of the ordinary, and it was a really worthwhile. The experience alone and getting to work some people who are in a different discipline, but share the same enthusiasm and passion for what we do. Unfortunately the project was so short for me, the audio guys said this would be a project they would love to have a few months on.

Edit: Chris did a vlog on some of the audio stuff we did for the ride.

Game dev makes me feel like spongebob:

Until next time –

FeenikxFire

Nic

 

The Start Of A New Chapter: Studio 2

Studio 1 was all about learning new skills and learning from making mistakes. Along with mechanically focused game design. Studio 2 is about thinking of other aspects of video games like: Feel, Visuals, Audio, Story, Emotions, etc, and how they interact with mechanics to say interesting and meaningful things. The things we create in studio 2 aren’t going to be mechanically focused, but more emotionally focused, more about meaningful design. Trying to give the player an exact experience or feeling, other than “Whacking s**t is cool”.

Meaningful Design

My understanding of meaningful design is that everything we design must have intent. If it’s in the game, it has to mean something, or add something to already existing content in the game, otherwise, why is it there?

Much like this black square. It serves no purpose and doesn’t add anything extra to this blog. Unless somehow you can draw more meaning from it than I can.

Rami Ismail wrote a very striking blog on a different approach to traditionally taught MDA (which we’ve been taught since day 1) to IMD – Intent, Mechanics, Declaration. The first sentence of his blog goes a little like this:

Retrieved from: Rami’s Blog

All previous games that I’ve made or collaborated on really only had the intent of mechanics and game play for “Yeah this is a game and I can do stuff”. Considering Studio 2 is about how to say something with a deeper meaning this is exactly something that I want to learn. Meaningful game play isn’t just about how systems interact but the decisions that players have to make which creates a dynamic game play loop. Right now I’m familiar with how to create mechanics but not so much on the meaningful game play. I’m hoping throughout studio 2 will allow me to focus solely on creating an experience or emotion, along with being able to experiment with tools and gain new skills that allow me to do so competently. Through learning how to create emotional and expressive design it will enable me to create more thematically consistent experiences.

Until next time –

FeenikxFire