Nexuiz Demo

Nexuiz Music tracks

I decided to compose a piece of music to flow with the game. I used Logic and Native Instruments Komplete 8 to compose the title music and level music. Below is the title or menu music uploaded to google drive.

My goal was to create something that seemed dark and sinister and give you a feeling of upcoming combat. In creating it I thought adding the orchestra strings would also give it a rich harmonic feel as well.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByQIVLdBiw6GdGxGTGl5R3VndXc/edit?usp=sharing

Sound Bits from Final Project

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0ByQIVLdBiw6GUWV1TzVrR2IyQlE/edit?usp=sharing


Information on all files are listed below. Note: Files have been converted to wav due to google drive not reading ogg files. However files for final project will be in file format as listed below.

Mortal Kombat 9 Cutscenes

Mortal Kombat 9 Story Mode: All Cutscenes 

Mortal Kombat 9 is a 2.5D fighting game with 3D graphics and the ninth main installment in the Mortal Kombat series. It was developed by NetherRealm Studios (formerly known as Midway Studios) and published exclusively under the Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment label in 2011. The game was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 systems on April 19 in North America and on April 21 in Europe. A 2012 PlayStation Vita port was released on May 1 in North America and on May 4 in Europe.

What are Cutscenes?

A cutscene or event scene (sometimes in-game cinematic or in-game movie) is a sequence in a video game over which the player has no or only limited control, breaking up the gameplay and used to advance the plot, strengthen the main character's development, introduce enemy characters, and provide background information, atmosphere, dialogue, and clues. Cutscenes often feature on the fly rendering, using the gameplay graphics to create scripted events. Cutscenes can also be animated, live action, or pre-rendered computer graphics streamed from a video file. Pre-made videos used in video games (either during cutscenes or during the gameplay itself) are referred to as "full motion videos" or "FMVs".

Sound Analysis

In Mortal Kombat 9 the Voice actors where used to portray the characters in the game. This done to give a real movie dialog feel to the cutscenes. Here is a list of the actors involved http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1386939/ 
The footsteps, fire and action shot or fight scenes are very cinematic and puts you in the scene itself. Dan Forden, lead sound designer, said the intent was to create a "cinematic game audio experience". According to Dave Pindara, one of lead artists for Mortal Kombat, environments were developed to create active objects and effects such as "scripted cinema events", "dynamic lighting effects" and "characters and objects that animated and reacted to the fights." Sound effect design included use and enhancement of the "bone-crunching audio design" of previous titles and, while the "dynamic experience" was vital, small details such as the "rustling of fighter's clothes" and background sounds were also included. The game's developers stated that the characters have been designed with the intent to make each character unique - each having their own individual stances, victory poses and Fatalities with no shared animations. This is important in creating sounds for each characters actions and moves. 

Post 1990 Game Sound

 How has Game Sound as evolved

The FM synthesizer has been a major tool in video game sounds and composing. As cost of magnetic memory declined in the form of diskettes game music development in general, shifted to sampling in some form. After the 80' s it was used more and many games got into using music composers to create music for the games. The release of a freely-distributed Amiga program named Sound Tracker by Karsten Obarski in 1987 started the era of MOD-format which made it easy for anyone to produce music based on digitized samples. MOD-files were made with programs called "trackers" after Obarski's Sound Tracker. This MOD/tracker tradition continued with PC computers in 1990s. Examples of Amiga games using digitized instrument samples include David Whittaker's soundtrack for Shadow of the Beast, Chris Hülsbeck's soundtrack for Turrican 2 and Matt Furniss's tunes for Laser Squad. Richard Joseph also composed some theme songs featuring vocals and lyrics for games by Sensible Software most famous being Cannon Fodder (1993) with a song "War Has Never Been So Much Fun" and Sensible World of Soccer (1994) with a song "Goal Scoring Superstar Hero". These songs used long vocal samples.

Popularized in the early 1990s by games like Street Fighter II (1991) on the CPS-1, which used voice samples extensively along with sampled sound effects and percussion. Neo Geo's MVS system also carried powerful sound development which often included surround sound.  In 1994, the CD-ROM equipped PlayStation supported 24 channels of 16-bit samples of up to 44.1 kHz sample rate, samples equal to CD audio in quality. It also sported a few hardware DSP effects like reverb. The Sega Saturn also with a CD drive supported 32 channels of PCM at the same resolution as the PSX. In 1996, the Nintendo 64, still using a solid state cartridge, actually supported an integrated and scalable sound system that was potentially capable of 100 channels of PCM, and an improved sample rate of 48 kHz. Games for the N64, because of the cost of the solid state memory, typically had samples of lesser quality than the other two however, and music tended to be simpler in construct.The more dominant approach for games based on CDs, however, was shifting toward streaming audio.

The increases in storage capacity and playback quality has allowed sampled sound to be used. The modern systems also frequently utilize positional audio, often with hardware acceleration, and real-time audio post-processing, which can also be tied to the 3D graphics development. Based on the internal state of the game, multiple different calculations can be made. This will allow for, for example, realistic sound dampening, echoes and doppler effect. Foley and voice overs have helped create a more real video games experience.

Today popular music in video game music and sounds have appeared in songs by various popular artists,with arcade game sounds having had a particularly strong influence on the hip hop, pop music (particularly synthpop) and electro music.

Christian Allen - American video game designer

He is most noted for his contributions to the Ghost Recon franchise and Halo: Reach.

Allen started his career as a modder in the late 90’s. He started making mods for Rainbow Six for fun and for his friends he decided to make a career change and get into the gaming industry. 

Allen grew up in Eagle River, Alaska. After high school, he joined the US Marines, where he served four years in the Military Police, mainly at MCAS El Toro. After finishing his tour in the Corps in 1999, Allen returned to Alaska, serving in the Air National Guard with the 176th Security Police, and working for the State of Alaska as a Child Support Enforcement Officer. Later, he went to work IT & Communications for the Department of Emergency Services. Allen moved from Alaska to Arizona, and attended the Art Institute of Phoenix. During this time he also joined the Army National Guard, serving with the 855th Military Police Company. 

In 2002, Allen was hired by Red Storm Entertainment/Ubisoft Entertainment as an Assistant Game Designer. Since then Allen has worked on a variety of military-themed first person shooters, in a variety of rolls, from Scripting to Weapon Design to Lead Designer to Creative Director.

In 2006, Allen completed his B.S. in Game Art and Design through the online program of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In 2007 he accepted a Design Lead position at Bungie Studios and moved to Kirkland, WA. In 2009 he began work as Lead Game Designer on an unannounced project at WB Games. 

Allen announced in March 2012 that he had started a company called Serellan LLC in order to produce a hardcore tactical shooter, successfully raising over $220,000 on Kickstarter.

 

 Learn more about Christian Allen at his blog

 

http://serellan.typepad.com/about.html

Adventure Game Studio

Adventure Game Studio is a free software development tool created by British programmer Chris Jones that is primarily used to create graphical adventure games. AGS was originally released in 1997 as an MS-DOS program entitled "Adventure Creator". It is aimed at intermediate-level game designers, and combines an Integrated development environment (IDE) for setting up most aspects of the game with a scripting language based on the C language to process the game logic. 

Capabilities

The editor and runtime engine were originally designed for Windows operating systems; though the runtime engine has been ported to Android, iOS, Linux and Mac OS X since the release of the source code. Prior to AGS 2.7, a DOS engine was also available; this has since been discontinued. It is not yet possible to run the editor to create games on operating systems other than Windows without an emulator or API wrapper such as Wine.



AGS can create games with a graphical range from 256 colours and a resolution of 320×200 (games with more "classic" looks) to truecolor games with a resolution of up to 1024×768 (games with more "modern" looks) and an alpha channel. The higher the resolution, the more demanding a game is on computer resources, resulting in the need for a faster computer. The program has the support of a sufficiently large number of multimedia formats: mod, S3M, wav, xm, midi, ogg, mp3, avi - version 2.61. Version 2.72 has support for IT and S3M.

Games

Wadjet Eye Games is an Indie game business that has created most of its commercial titles using AGS, most notably the Blackwell series of games and Gemini Rue. You can find other games that have been created by AGS here. http://www.freankexpo.net/?room=GameChart


 You can download this free game engine at http://adventure-game-studio-ags.en.softonic.com/

And work on creating your own video game ideas.

 Note: Information is complied from online sources and Wikipedia