Hey Everyone,

My team are working on a pretty interesting game where we're trying to take more traditional ways of music composition, and involving that early on in game development. The whole process is more reminiscent of movie direction and blocking than it is more traditional game development (of what I've witnessed).

What we're trying to achieve is a score that is both reactive to changes in the game (repeating loops, transitions based on area, etc...), and maintains larger themes and structure of scores that follow narrative.

The demo we're building has been scene blocked, e.g. Opening scene: Dialogue between ship and Mel (protagonist), the scene opens to a black background. A voice is heard "What is this? What has Gran'ma been hiding all this time?" A ship HUD blinks alive. Mel's face appears framed in a blue com-link type screen. She speak's again. How do you turn this thing on? A second screen opens, but an obscured, static image displays. "This is the reBERth...". The bay doors open, a blinding white light floods..."

We set the scene, the feeling, and we provide (what our composer tells us) scene blocking notes that is more common with movie scoring. Our composer scores based on his knowledge of the scene, and we begin to block out the level. What we end up with is a whiteboxed interactive scene that compliments the scoring. Since the scoring is a "sketch," we're able to make changes as the level starts to gel. This allows us budge room with gameplay pacing, and narrative placement in-game.

So far it's working out pretty well. We used a rough version of this process to build our first demo, but this new process is being tested as we speak.

I would love to hear peoples thoughts on this; hear questions; and more specifically, hear if anyone has done something similar.

Here is video of our first go. Please note that it lacks the narrative structure, but shows a little of what we're trying to achieve. We should have some of the new scoring up for people to hear shortly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RphAgeiswKo&feature=youtu.be

Hey all you Asset Store devs,

Just an FYI, the asset store search no longer uses keyword terms in their search system. They now use a search that is based on terms used in the description. I figured it was worth giving everyone a heads up, especially if anyone notices a down tick in their ongoing sales.

Their old system use to use a submission field that allowed the dev to punch in a series of keywords that would help improve your the assets discoverability. The keyword field is still there in the submission form, but it is no longer in use. Now, it appears to use some kind of scrubber that finds all the used words in the asset description to improve its discoverability, and prevent people from gaming the keywords.

Their statement is ~"the change is to improve the chances of lesser known assets begin discovered in non-specific searches."

My colleague and I have been going back and forth in their asset store forums to advocate for a system that allows a form of keywords, but, none-the-less, it's impacting discoverability across the board.

Figured it would be worth posting here.

@k_polke Thanks, we're really excited about what the tech lets us do with music. Essentially, we can have it so the game action can drive sound or music to change, and the music can then feedback into the system and cause system to change. You get a really cool full circle of music interaction. That being said, we would love to field ideas. Let us know if you have any cool game mechanics you would like to see!

@Mr. Speaker Yeah, DubWars is pretty awesome. They used - I'm fairly sure of this, at least - a MIDI system to drive game events. Their limitation was on composition, whereas we're looking to expand this to have much more dynamics in the music itself. We would be able to maintain synchronization regardless. We hope it will be a solid step in iterating on what DubWars did.

P.S. ReBirth is awesome, but I didn't spend nearly enough time playing with it.

Now with actual video. Please check it out and give us some feedback.

Awesome, broken images. I give up. Direct link: http://imgur.com/a/e88Gr

Hey Everyone,

I'm here on behalf of Team ReBERth, a small indie group made up of ex-Harmonix (of Guitar Hero and Rock Band fame), ex-iNiS (Gitaroo Man, Elite Beat Agents, LIPS), and FireHose Games (Go Home Dinosaurs, Slam Bolt Scrappers), accompanied by artist Jacques Pena (@artofjacques), musician Larry Hong (@hey_lune), and engineer Evan Quinlan (@evanquinlan).

We're excited to finally take the wraps off of our game, ReBERth; a musical space shooter where rhythm drives enemy patterns, chord changes morph the level, percussion drives firing patters, and the music tells the story. We're in early alpha development, but will be working to get a beta for review by the end of the year.

We showed at Boston Festival of Indie Games as a showcase piece and got a lot of positive attention that we would like to keep moving forward. The hope is to get Unity web builds up for a limited set of users. We would really like to get a distro going of people who are interested in play testing. So, please, let us know if this is something you would like to try out here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/179hkrZeSqa65PDthQT98ys8WeFSzVj85Si_oW0ITdf4/viewform.

Awesome. By the way, you can follow us along here: @reberthgame

Hey Everyone,

I'm Justin Stanizzi, a veteran (I can call myself that at this point, right?) game developer that moved from AAA to the Indie space. Since my business partner, Eric Robinson (@ericrobinson), and myself have gone indie, we figured it's about time we reach out beyond our Boston based community.

Both of us have come from the music/rhythm game space and decided we could do a lot more if we weren't anchored down to studio publishers. We've just released our first tool to the Unity Asset Store, Koreographer, and we're building our first game, ReBERth (@reberthgame), with the tool we built.

Nice to meet everyone, and I hope that between Eric and I, we can contribute to the community!

Obligatory top game list:
Super Metroid, Zelda: LTTP, FF6, Ico, Silent Hill 2, Parappa The Rapper 2, Um Jammer Lammy, Frequency, Gitaroo Man, Rez, Every Extended Extra, Act Raiser, TMNT: Turtles in Time, Metal Gear Solid, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Super Mario 64, Fallout 3