Analogue Overview

Analogue is the concept of producing physical sound, through th methods of impriting (cutting even) sound onto disks. Analogues is considered to be a warmer and real sound that performs a better overall quality than a digital alternative.

The most important feature of Analogue is that it is real. Unlike digitial, it's sounds produce waves, rather than digitally created via special software, and for that matter, created using real instrucments (although digital can perform the same concept).

There are two main formats of Analogue sound, one format is Vinyl. Which is the old way of imprinting groves onto a alluminium disk, coated in special black liquid. It is replayed by a pin running through the groves and replaying the sound. Another format is Magenetic tapes, which magentically imprint sound onto it, one downfall however is you scratch the suface of this disk, the area skips that particular area.

Personally, I am in favour of Digital, due to the basis that it is quick, of a high enough quality for my standard, and compresses down well to work in video games or projects without overdrawing it.

Amplifier is a form of Analogue format.

Game Trailer - Mindmap

In this lesson we gathered in teams to plan and discuss the ideas for our project. We mades notes and ideas on a piece of A3 about what is possible for our project and how we plan to handle it. We covered a few concepts, such as font, graphics and things that we would include into the trailer, this as well as making sure we covered the idea we had.

We have selected to go for a past tense sort of scenario (think bioshock), we have taken aspects from many other games, such as the animus idea, going into the past when Salts Building was a school, and having the player do puzzles from room to room, and learning more about the history of saltaire, while trying to fight against the evil Titus Salt.

The idea is to provide a very popular puzzle based environment, take inspirtation from popular games like bejeweled, with this mind we have also worked with an adventure scene, with a bit of story to add some flare to the design of the game trailer.

The characters we have decided to use, is ourselves as well as some characters from the past. Our characters are avatars, guides that help the player along his path to finding a solution to destroying Titus Salt. And restoring freedom and peace to Saltaire, we have decided to give a unique elements and voice act our characters ourselves, such as ..

Rob the Wizard
Stuart the Goat
Curtis the Boss
Micheal the Goldfish

Overall the group particpated well, I believe we still need to discuss this more and work on the mindmap to get a foundation laid out, and the lack of one of our vital team members, set us back further than the other groups. We would like to continue this is time allows with the particpation of Joe Brown, next week.

Sound in Games

In todays lesson we discussed the elements of Sound in Computer Games. We covered how sound is used to create ambience and set the feel for the game, we also discussed elements of sounds and how they are created either sythetically or with the use of real life objects, such as the job of a foley artist.

Sound is recorded for many elements, and referred to as samples, these samples are mixed and modified in a computer program and used in different areas of environments, such as floorboards squeaking and doors opening, bullets firing.

It helps in environments as well, such as when you are playing through an FPS, the sound of shooting helps to define the location of the enemy, or if you are being fired upon, the element of hearing the sound after the flash, aids the user in ambience and elements.

Music Psychology

In todays session we was listening to music from different tracks and genres to help get a better understanding of how music helps us feel. There was mixed emotions that poured from each track, but each was defined by it's principle, the first song, "Killing in the name of..." was a rather upbeat, high tempo song, that used alot of heavy sounds and symbolises in my opinion with anger, frustration and taking this out on the world, rebelling against an authoritve figure and rules.

I'll relate to another song, that I like. I am an avid Fan of metal music, Disturned, Avenged Sevenfold, Sevendust, Devil Driver, the music I listen to, provides  a rather heavy and deep tone, but one song, i'll cover for this is Seize the Day by Avenged Sevenfold. This song is rather deep, and sad, like a repentful notion, like regret is felt throughout the entire song, the height of the pitch and tempo in parts of the song provide more timbre in the texture and ambience of the music, and creates a more felt sound giving of more emotion in the voice of the artist.