The event itself is an interesting concept; a group of people enthusiastic about games making games under the time constraint of a 9 to 5 day. The chilly, open planned room over looks a busy street of interesting characters which provides a refreshing occasional distraction from the computer monitor. There was a moment where a presumably homeless gentleman tried to enter through the locked door to inspect what was going on inside. However after being obstructed by the lock, began to dance and mumble words towards the table in which I was sat.
There was about 15-20 people involved in the game jam, which consisted of a variety of skilled individuals ranging from college students to professional game developers. In terms of "audio guys" there was myself and another guy, however we worked apart and on completely different projects. A chat with the other aspiring sound designer proved very insightful with regards to job application techniques, as we are both recent graduates looking for work. There was another individual working on a game that utilised audio as a key component of his game. A brief discussion of his game led to an issue being raised regarding audio spatial positioning. He mentioned how he had done a quick test of attempting to locate a sound positioned within the stereo field and found that when the sound was positioned in between Left and Centre and similarly Right and Centre the accuracy was diminished greatly. This topic was discussed briefly in my research leading towards my MSc final project, which contributed to the reading and prototyping of auditory dimensions.
The group of college students, who had been sent by their game development course teacher were an interesting addition to the event. They were zipping around the room engaging with people and overlooking what was happening on the screen. I spoke to several of these students and explained the concept of audio-only games and the approach I was taking to making such a game.
As soon as people (both professional game devs and students) looked at my screen it became clear that max/msp is truly an unknown game making programming tool. I once wrote about the pros and cons of using max/msp as a game developing tool and the response was that it is overlooked by the majority of developers. This raises questions regarding the practicality of using max/msp to make games, but I still stand firm on the belief that there are considerable benefits to building an indie audio-only game with the software. Nonetheless the enthusiasm shown towards max/msp and the concept of audio-only games at the Manchester Game Jam was greatly appreciated.
There were several themes suggested to make the games in conjunction with prior to the event. These were FIRE, COWS, MUTATION, SUBMARINES and TRADING. Quite a fun bunch of themes ey!? After seeing submarines as a theme and recently working on a submarine audio-only game, I thought I would take another stab at it, but with subtle differences in gameplay and much improved performance of certain technical aspects. However, seeing mutation on the screen now, I seriously wish I had picked that theme, as one of my favourite aspects of audio is the ability to mess with it, in both drastic and beautiful ways. A lot of my work is heavily inspired by my time at Huddersfield University under the supervision of a collection of tutors and composers who are leading contributors to the computer music scene.
As previously stated, I built a spin-off of an audio-only game previously prototyped several months ago. One of the key differences was the non-repetitive sound design, which was much richer in audio content and diversity than previous versions. This is mainly due to having no creative boundaries and making a game for the fun of making a game. However, one issue that arose during the development hindered the entire games' credibility. This was due to an unexpected amount of audio glitching and slow and disrupted audio playback. Now for a video game, audio issues would be annoying and distracting from the gameplay but the game would still be capable of playing. But for a game that relies entirely on audio quality it was disastrous. (I will be spending some time troubleshooting the issues to find out what was going wrong.)
Unfortunately I was unable to stay till the end, which resulted in not being able to see some of the work being displayed. Some vines and photos of the final games are available on the manchester game jam twitter - @MCRgamejam
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