OK this is gonna be shameless and a bit long but ill include lots of pictures.
My name is Aaron Lemke and I am a musician, game developer, and artist living in Austin, Texas. My “game studio” is called
Unello Design. I am new to the TIGSource community and joined in hopes of learning more about making games and to hopefully get some feed back on the projects I am working on.
I’ve been a fan of video games ever since I can remember. Some of my early favorites were
Myst,
SSB64, and
Ocarina of Time. But it wasn’t until more recently that I started thinking about actually creating games.
There were three games, which I played back-to-back-to-back that really inspired me to try and make games. They were
World of Goo,
Machinarium, and
Braid. Each of these games taught me something unique about the world of independent games.
With
World of Goo I learned that it’s possible to create extremely complex and entertaining gameplay with a very small team, in this case a team of two.
With
Braid I learned that it’s possible to make a game, which can enter the realm of the abstract and be as emotionally stirring as a novel or a good movie.
And with
Machinarium I learned two things. One, the power of an interactive experience where the visual style and the aural style compliment one another and work together to create a single cohesive sense of mood. And two, YOU CAN RELEASE YOUR VIDEO GAME SOUNDTRACK ON VYNIL?
?? And more importantly people will buy it if it’s good enough.
As a musician, these last two points to me were the most important, because at the time when I played these games and drew these initial conclusions I was playing at least two gigs every weekend, in and out of four different bands. (I was also making music by myself on my computer) All of this constant gigging was starting to wear on me. I began looking at our live shows with a more critical eye. Slowly a pattern started to emerge.
One of the places we played most frequently was a housing coop at UT called The 21st Street Co-op. This was a place of loose morals, bright colors and naked dancing hippies.
a video of one of the shows we played there if you’re curious.
(I’m the goofy kid playing guitar stage right. Green pants)
The emergent pattern I found during these shows was that the more debaucherous the crowd was, the better our show was. This might seem obvious, bands feed off of the energy from the crowd. But what really fascinated me was that as long as the audience was partying hard, they enjoyed the show;
independent of how poorly we may have been playing due to the influence of alcohol. And believe me we played some very sloppy shows. But the crowd never noticed. They just kept on drinking and dancing.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that the
context of our performance was more important than the performance itself. And it was with this realization that I started becoming disillusioned with the whole notion of performing with a band. I felt like it didn’t matter if I was good or not. What mattered was the frame of mind people were in when they experienced the music. I started making more and more music by myself on my computer, but it was difficult knowing that I had no idea how people would eventually experience it; on their computer, in their car, at a party? It was frustrating not knowing what frame of mind people would be in when they heard my music. So, the next logical question was, how can you control the context that surrounds the music?
Enter,
Machinarium.
Of course! Games are an excellent context for music to exist in side of. And Amanita Design knows that. Especially a slow paced contemplative game like
Machinarium or
Sword and Sworcery. It was with this realization that I decided to make my own game.
A few years and two halfway made flash games later... brings us to the present. The game I am currently working on is called
Newborn Bard . It is the first game that I really think I can complete and would be proud to share with people. It’s a sort of puzzle platformer that uses perspective to create puzzles.
Anyways I plan on posting a build sometime soon to hopefully get some feedback on the latest puzzles. I came to TIGSource to learn and be humbled and to have my games criticized.
Peace out.
Aaron
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