As sound designers, our jobs usually entail creating a vivid sonic world to accompany a narrative. But often, the nature of the worlds we are creating presents some unique challenges; there's no doubt this was the case on ABZÛ, an upcoming underwater exploration game from Giant Squid Studios. In a recent blog post, Giant Squid's sound designer Steve Green delves into their … [Read more...]
The Story in Surround – Game narrative and sound
I recently came across the Frictional Games blog and have spent the last few weeks trawling through it’s archive. It provides a wealth of informaiton on game design, and in particular discussions on the point of game narrative. One particular post, 4 Layers, a narrative design approach, written by Thomas Grip, Frictional's creative director, raised the concept of the mental … [Read more...]
Alternative Reality Sound: Acoustic Remodeling of a City
Guest contribution by Tom deMajo A special thanks to co-founder Tom deMajo of the game studio Quartic Llama. Tom is an artist and sound designer who currently resides in Dundee. Earlier this year, Quartic Llama was approached by the National Theatre of Scotland to make a game as part of a city-wide trans-media project called other, supporting the theatrical debut of “Let … [Read more...]
"Flower" – Sound and Music as Narrative
The video on the top is from a session given by sound designer Steve Johnson and composer Vincent Diamante. In the session they talked about the use of sound design and music as narrative elements in Flower, a game for PS3 developed by Thatgamecompany. Thatgamecompany's Flower was an ambitious and unconventional game that saw fruition through an equally unconventional … [Read more...]
Interactive Dialogue on "Heavy Rain"
The May's Issue of Develop Magazine contains a very interesting article about the interactive dialogue on Heavy Rain. Take a look: With the success of Heavy Rain, narrative is once again thrust to the forefront of game development. Like casual and social gaming have recently done in their own areas of the gaming spectrum, Heavy Rain has broadened the interactive experience in … [Read more...]
Rob Bridgett and the Dynamics of Narrative
Bob Bridgett has published a new fantastic article at Gamasutra, this time exploring common examples of dynamics from horror cinema and how those rules can be adapted to game design and game audio in any genre through graphic visualisation and planning techniques. 'Design' is one of the most important areas of sound design, in that the sound designer needs to sit down, over the … [Read more...]