Sound Based Game

Sound based games have been primarily musical up until now, and include visual ques (i.e. guitar hero, dance dance revolution etc.) I propose a more abstract game, a first person view adventure with a character that is going blind. As the game progresses the player will have to depend more and more on their sense of hearing and less on the visual cues.

Mechanically the game will function through classical conditioning. Throughout the early parts of the game the layer will have normal vision, and the player will play the game as though it were a basic game. However every footstep and every action will have a very characteristic sound. As the game progresses the visual effects will still coordinate with the game but will get more surreal and abstract; The audio effects, by contrast, stay consistent for each action.

The really progressive part of the game comes after the visual cues are lost. The game will sill have visual effects that correspond with game play, but they will be more cryptic than direct relationships. The challenge comes when new elements are introduced after the player loses sight. The player will have to make assumptions based on the game play up until that point and react accordingly. The player has never seen certain enemies before going blind and thus will not know how they actually appear. In many senses this game will stimulate the imagination in a way similar to reading.

Game Project Soundscape

My soundscape is going to be built around the Gooze game I have discussed with you earlier. For my Honors addition to this project I will be creating gesture drawing sounds in the tradition of Akira Yamaoka.

I plan to make my unaltered sounds primarily with water, pasta, and jello. I want to record various boiling, squishing, stirring, swirling and splattering sounds to be used for motions of the Gooze. These sounds should work well for smacking against surfaces, sliding across the ground, forcing through small holes in walls and other similar basic abilities. For the more advanced abilities such as bouncing, traveling through hot water pipes, storing electricity and generating heat, these sounds will need to be heavy altered and synthesized with other sounds to make a full effect. For instance combining pasta squishing with the twang of a rubber band being plucked would be a good starting place for the bouncing sound, boiling water mixed with rapid pasta stirring could work for the heat generation sound, and an organic sounding crackling or popping (perhaps knuckles cracking?) could be used to supplement electrical effects.

As for the gesture drawing with sound, I plan for many of these sounds to be heavily altered products of several sounds combined. A sound to represent anger or happiness, or pain or pleasure. There are over used conventions of screams birds chirping, grunts and moans, but all of these are examples of instances of the emotion, not a full representation of the emotion. If I am unable to generate sounds which fulfill my goal of nonverbal, non musical, non visual emotions, I have devised a contingency plan. If emotions prove to difficult to fully conceptualize I will make sound effects for the colors in the white light spectrum i.e. a cyan sounds, or magenta sounds.