My Nexiuz Sound FX

Here are a few of the sound effects I chose for the Nexiuz Project:








My minihealth sound is from the VideoBlocks website. I chose it because it sounds like a quick battery charge up. The sound is actually an alien sword.






My megahealth sound is from the VideoBlocks website. I like this one because it also has a charging battery kind of feel but, this one has a higher pitch than the minihealth sound effect.










My power up sound was a little tough. I settled on a gusty wind sound because its as close as I could get to the original.









My power down sound is a space ufo shutting down. I love it. 

Music Selection for Nexiuz Project

The original soundtrack for the "brokenlight.ogg" in Nexiuz consisted of strong strings, guitar, an airy synth and a hip hop beat. It works well for the game because it creates a sense of urgency, high energy and is cohesive with the high-tech, space feel of the game.

I got my music from VideoBlocks. My choice has hard hitting bass, strings and a gradually rising techno-like beat. I think it works for the game because it sounds mysterious, has high tech "beep boop" sounds in the background and a gradually building beat.

LINK TO MY SELECTION FOR BROKENLIGHT 

Kingdom Hearts Cutscene Analysis

 

One of my favorite video games is Kingdom Hearts. Here is a cutscene from KH1. In this part of the story, Sora approaches Riku to save his friend, Kyrie. Once Riku announces that he is actually being possessed by the evil Ansem, the fight is on.

This cutscene includes a large variety of voice overs. Sora, Donald, Goofy and Riku all have lines in this scene and their are about 2-3 voice dubs for riku to sell the idea of his possession by Ansem. Some of the sound effects include chains, foot steps and effects for swords and shields. The footsteps all sound really fake but, the cartoony vibe is apparent through the sound.

BIOWARE Game Development

Bioware is a game development corporation founded by Greg Zeschuk, Ray Muzyka, and Augustine Yip started the company in Canada in 1995. Their first commercial game, Shattered Steel, was released in 1996 and co-developed with Pyrotek Game Studios. Shattered Steel noticed by Interplay Productions, a game publisher, for its realistic graphics which paved the way for Bioware to sign a multi-game agreement with IP.

Founders of Bioware

Some if their most famous games include Baldur's Gate, MDK2, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars : Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. In 2008, Bioware was acquired by EA Games to act as its own division. This acquistition allows Bioware access to EA's audio team members but, they seem to mostly use their own team of sound designers. In Mass Effect 2, for example, Bioware used their own audio team of 8 to design the sound, dialog, music and effects but, used a combination of Bioware's and EA Games' sound designers for the Star Wars games.

Here is a list of Bioware's Previous Games:

Jade Empire

Star Wars™: Knights Of The Old Republic™

Neverwinter Nights

Baldur’s Gate II

Baldur’s Gate

MDK2

Shattered Steel

Mass Effect Galaxy

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Dragon Age: Inquisition 

Dragon Age II 

Dragon Age: Origins 

Mass Effect 3 

Mass Effect 2 

Mass Effect 

Star Wars: The Old Republic 

OGRE Game Engine

The OGRE game engine is a scene oriented, flexible, 3D engine designed to make it easier for developers to produce games and demos using 3D hardware. OGRE stands for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine.  Steve Streeting created OGRE using the C/C++ language and made is accessible through various platforms: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

OGRE's features range from lighting, shadows, texturing, shaders, meshes, scene management, animation, physics and scripting. Developers can affect fonts, game environment,  maps, the save/load system and so much more. Users of OGRE are draw to the engine's ability for graphic performance and its open source rendering library.

OGRE is free to download but after further research, it seems that developers that use OGRE all have different ways to utilize sound with the game engine because, it does not feature it on audio-ware. A user must use an add-on or a different program to include sound.

Machinarium Analysis

 

Machinarium Analysis

Machinarium is a puzzle/adventure games where the player must solve a series of brain teasers such as, finding all the pieces of the main character, an extendable robot, and building him. The start screen of Machinarium has an eerie soundtrack. There are also some mechanical sounds filling out the ambience.

Metal clangs , water drops, steam engines, fireworks and various machine sounds make up most of the sound in this point-and click adventure.

 One of the coolest parts of the game is the Hint Book Mini-Game. The player now becomes a Key that fires lasers at spiders. Only when the player beats the mini-game will they gain access to the hints inside. (Which are still a little vague.)

Created by Amanita Design Studios, Machinarium focuses on the adventure of a robot who has been exiled to the scrap heap.

Players must use "logic, collect important items and solve environmental puzzles to get the robot back to the city of Machinarium so he can rescue his robot girlfriend, save the head of the city and defeat the bad guys from the Black Cap Brotherhood."

 http://amanita-design.net/games/machinarium.html 

Guitar Hero III Analysis

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Analysis

Guitar Hero III utilizes motion capture to recreate each band member's movements onstage and to show how they interact when playing different songs. The recorded movements and facial expressions are then digitized and placed into the game.

The sound team for the Guitar Hero games spends hours in the studio recording various instruments and lots of different songs. Each instrument of each song in the game has to be recorded individually before being placed into the game. Sometimes the actual musician plays it but for the most part its the sound engineers of Guitar Hero.

The number of buttons assigned to musical phrases and riffs are what lend to the various levels of difficulty. The player can choose to be on of the Rock Legends or they can battle against them. GH3 is the first of the Guitar Hero installments to feature player vs Rock Star battles and online play.

Harmonix Team of Engineers

The music tracks, on-stage motions, stage lighting and effect synchronization were created by the Harmonix team of developers who were all musicians and had previous experience in note tracking. The note tracks were developed by placing notes in time with the song; for sections that had difficult parts to track within the game's engine, they opted to use sequences of notes that would seem to the match the music but still be playable. Hammer-ons and pull-offs ("HOPOs") for the previous games were automatically placed by the software. This allowed the engine to manually place HOPOs to make it easier to create certain effects in songs, such as sustained string bends. A separate team came up with the concepts for the various stages and arenas in the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero_III:_Legends_of_Rock