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[In a GameSetWatch-exclusive set of blog posts for the week of GDC 2010, Magical Wasteland blogger and Game Developer magazine columnist Matthew Burns continues his journey through the show. Previously: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.]

My energy is starting to flag; my feet are complaining and my voice is growing hoarse. I have ingested so much about video games in the past few days that I feel overfull and ready to burst, wishing incoherently that I want to read a book or play the piano or just do something, anything, but think about video games.

It is not to be, though: today the expo floor opens, even more game developers fly in to San Francisco, and the giant inexorable train of video games barrels along towards its fabulous secret destiny.

I move towards the Unity booth and instantly collide with yet more former co-workers. We reference hellish older times before catching up– one is a gameplay programmer now– many steps up from the PS2 memory card save/load state issues with which he was saddled last I worked with him– and another is the principal in an iPhone game startup. He shows us an early build of his first game before excusing himself on account of his hangover.

At the edge of the north hall floor I speak to a man from TechExcel about his production management software products (DevSpec and DevPlan and DevTrack) with their technical requirements and task trackers and bug lists.

I mention that a lot of game developers take umbrage at this kind of software– not personally, but at the attitude this sort of product often comes with– and that bringing it in can be a political battle because the databases and workflows and boxy user interfaces smack of top-down institutional sclerosis. “I don’t think we’re doing our job right if we’re trying to make it sexy,” he says. “Part of the point is to not be sexy.”

Close by, the exposition floor’s career pavilion is mobbed by recent and soon to be graduates, who are queueing up to talk to representatives of well-known companies like Insomniac or Blizzard, while the booths of less well known studios, right next door, are awkwardly barren. It is again impressed upon me what a buyer’s market it is and I start to worry that video game degrees will be the next film school degrees, acquired in search of a dream, deferred somehow into a retail job at Starbucks or Barnes and Noble.

Konami has a desk there too, and in the interest of continuing the theme of what I’d written yesterday about the Japanese game industry I examine their open positions in Tokyo. A notice is included that fluent Japanese is required. I ask the person behind the desk, How many applicants do you get? “A lot. Many hundreds,” she says. And how many of those can actually speak Japanese fluently? She laughs. “Pretty much none of them.”

So is it worth it to fly out to GDC in search of the one person in all of the industry who can do the job, speak Japanese, and is willing to accept the pay and position that Konami is offering? Yes, she says– it’s important to get the ideas of foreigners in order to make games that appeal internationally, before confiding that many of the people most suitable for these roles are Japanese who have gone to college in the US and who are looking to return home.

In the early evening I meet up with Brenton Woodrow, Chris McCarthy and Kyle Murphy, the other developers of Planck, the game I’m working on, and we converse for almost four hours. We talk about our plans and the future, throwing ideas at each other, our enthusiasm infectious and self-affirming.

My tiredness fades, my voice recovers, and I am yelling over the music– yelling about how our game is going to be awesome, yelling about the nuances of FPS mission design, yelling stories about dodgy code. Much like game playing, there is something about game development that naturally begs for discussion; there is a tremendous hunger for knowledge, feedback, and argument.

The night continues in another stuffy hotel bar, where I meet some television producers and watch a girl smearing her lipstick on a hapless game school student’s face. The late, late evening takes place in a hotel suite and is difficult to remember. I collapse on a couch and wake up on the floor.

JoyJoy is a beautiful-looking twin-stick shooter coming to Xbox Live Indie Games in the next couple of months. Apparently this is the first game in a series of releases by Radiangames. There's an interview with Luke Schneider, the one-man band behind it all, over on Gamasutra. Continue reading

[In his latest 'Sound Current' column for GameSetWatch, Jeriaska sits down with the musicians from titles and album series including Gravity Crash, Shatter, NightSky and I Am Robot And Proud to discuss the creative process behind their unique independent soundtrack work.]

According to many observers, downloadable platforms -- notably console downloadable titles, from more conventional genres through more experimental titles -- are currently showcasing some of the most exciting sound design concepts in games.

CoLD SToRAGE (aka Tim Wright) has been an innovator of videogame music since the appearance of his soundtracks for Lemmings and WipEout. In recent months he has been busy publishing the original album Project Moonbounce and the score to Just Add Water's Playstation Network title Gravity Crash.

In this roundtable discussion on composing for downloadable games, he is joined by Module (Jeramiah Ross), whose soundtrack to Shatter by Sidhe is in the running for an IGF audio award at this year's Game Developers Conference. As with CoLD SToRAGE, the New Zealand-based artist's music can be heard on Bandcamp.

Last year Chris Schlarb's music to the Niklas "Nifflas" Nygren-designed title NightSky was a finalist for the IGF Awards. The highly anticipated WiiWare title, which invites players to maneuver a rolling ball through an assortment of evocative nocturnal landscapes, is due out later this year.

Also participating in this group chat is Shaw-Han Liem, who in 2009 performed music from his solo album series I Am Robot and Proud at the Game Developers Conference. His first game soundtrack is currently in development, featured in Jonathan Mak’s top secret follow-up to Everyday Shooter. The discussion takes a look at multiple topics related to writing music for digital media, from finding the right sound for a game, to the live performance of game arrangements and the options available for distributing soundtrack albums online.

CoLD SToRAGE recently released Project Moonbounce, a music album incorporating audio signals bounced off the lunar surface, and Gravity Crash Anthems, original and arranged music from the Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable title.

How would you describe your experience working on a game soundtrack while writing an original album?

CoLD SToRAGE (Tim Wright): Having these two projects where “never the twain shall meet” was strange at times. I kind of have this multiple personality where on the one side I’m a Jean-Michel Jarre updated for the 21st century, and on the other hand I want to shun these electronic things, hit dog bowls and smash pianos.

On Moonbounce, anything that struck me as melodical or strange could be leveraged into being the theme of a track. There’s this minimalist thing going on, and on the flipside Just Add Water wanted Gravity Crash to have ‘80s-influenced computer game music, but through rose-tinted spectacles because you add so much as a child through the imagination. It’s how you would have liked the music to sound while you were playing it at the arcade in 1986.

One element that Shatter, Gravity Crash and NightSky share in common is that in each of these games, you're navigating an inanimate object on the screen. Be it a ship, a bat, or rolling ball, the player is having to identify with a thing instead of a person. Have you found that in these instances it's necessary to endow some personality on these objects through the use of the musical score?

Module (Jeramiah Ross), Shatter composer: That was essential for Shatter, having those emotional cues placed on an inanimate object. The first draft of the score was ambient and industrial, where there would be a lot of mechanical sounds. It was all a bit too serious, and we wound up scrapping everything we had been working on for the past six months. That was a bit painful, but learning that creating game soundtracks was about creating journeys was a turning point for me.

At some point we decided the bat was a teenager with an attitude. I was thinking back on The Last Starfighter and Tron, movies where teenagers are out on a mission. That gave it a voice and a cohesive relationship between each track that brought me back to Dark Side of the Moon, an album that carries a similar chord structure and ethos throughout.

Chris Schlarb, NightSky composer: I love that you mention Dark Side of the Moon. In a funny way the concept album has been reborn in the videogame medium. Prog used to be a four-letter word, you know? Back in the day a band like Genesis or Yes would be slammed for trying to tell you a story from beginning to end, but now I think that’s a requirement of a good videogame soundtrack. There should be that cohesiveness: of instrumentation, texture, arrangement and melody to serve the concept of the game in total.

Prior to composing for NightSky, Chris Schlarb released the album Twilight and Ghost Stories on the Asthmatic Kitty label.

CoLD SToRAGE: I think another thing we benefit from in games is that unless it’s a sequel, each game is a new entity in itself. You have this game called “Plonky Plinky,” and it's set in this weird world where people are made out of jelly. You need a soundtrack that will fit that. You’re not going to be judged necessarily, unless there’s a raft of jelly-based games that comes out at the same time. Many bands are happy staying where they are, or stay inside their arena so as not to lose their audience, and in many instances that straitjacket is self-imposed.

Another thing that this group shares in common is that to some extent everyone here performs music live. Shaw-Han is frequently touring, performing tracks from the I Am Robot and Proud series. What was your impression of the crowd while playing GDC in March of last year?

Shaw-Han Liem, musician I Am Robot and Proud: It was good to finally put some faces to names I knew. I’m fairly new to the world of gaming in general and indie gaming in particular, so playing at GDC was a nice introduction.

When I saw your show in Tokyo, I remember you brought out a Tenori-On and had people in the front row creating the basis to the melody of an improvised piece.

The Tenori-On is a sequencer machine that you can pitch to a particular scale, so I would start the show by bringing that little guy out into the audience. It also has a nice visual aspect to it. People can press the buttons, see the lights and hear the audio feedback. I can take that loop I get from the audience and make an improvised tune out of it. I think with electronic music there’s a degree of mystery with people: “How is what I’m seeing connected with what I’m hearing?” Starting a show like that is a nice way of making that connection with the audience.

Do you see interactivity in videogame audio as something that could be explored more fully?

Shaw-Han: Why? What have you heard? (laughs) Yeah, that’s definitely an aspect I’m interested in. I think the fact that the person listening to your music has a bunch of buttons in their hands is the unique aspect to videogame music. There’s definitely a lot of interesting things you could explore to take advantage of that unique relationship with your audience. What I can say about the game is that the visual weirdness is reflected in a musical weirdness. The question is whether that music will make sense outside of the context of the game itself.

Shaw-Han Liem has created a collection of music albums, titled "I Am Robot and Proud," which include The Catch, Grace Days, The Electricity in Your House Wants to Sing, and Uphill City.

Chris: I understand that perfectly because the way the music is used on the NightSky soundtrack, it is made up of short, ambient movements randomly selected throughout the game.

For a long time I couldn’t listen to the music outside the context of the beta version of the game because I didn’t think it made sense. The game helps to give it context. But then I ended up being asked to perform music from the game in a live setting at a music festival. For a lot of the stuff that I wrote for NightSky, and kind of my compositional style in general, I don’t use electronics. There were a few worlds where it was a stylistic requirement, but with live instruments you can happen upon these nice accidents rhythmically or melodically.

Even though the game has not been released and no one has heard it, people loved the live show. I performed it with upright bass, mandolin, vibraphone, drums and guitar. I got probably one of the most enthusiastic reactions of any live performance I’ve ever given.

CoLD SToRAGE: When people ask me if I’m a musician, I say “No, I’m a composer.” However, I did promise myself that on my fortieth birthday I would hire a venue and play live for the first time in a long time. In that case I would have to play something from WipEout, and I might also do a tongue-in-cheek reprise of one of the Lemmings tunes.

Module: You would be surprised what people relate to. Living on the road and touring gave me an appreciation of that. A lot of the live environment in a sense is like an overgrown kindergarten. Once you get an idea of what works and what doesn’t, that starts translating back into the studio recordings and compositions.

Performing game soundtracks live is particularly cool. It’s something I’d love to do more with Shatter—getting together a live band with a laser and visual show. I think that’s something that can really add to the promotion of a game and take it to another level. It's really a great time with multimedia in the digital age.

Bandcamp has become very popular among game composers as a means for making soundtracks available online. How have you found the service as as host for Gravity Crash Anthems and the Shatter soundtrack?

CoLD SToRAGE: For me it was more of an accident than a deliberate act. At the point where we were bringing Gravity Crash out, the managing director of Just Add Water sent me an email pointing me over to Jeramiah’s work on Shatter. I found the service had a really well laid out website and that it was free. The other thing is, it’s free “for now.” What the tipping point is for Bandcamp, I don’t know.

Jeramiah "Module" Ross has made his music for Sidhe's GripShift and Shatter available to stream on Bandcamp.

Module: Before we released Shatter, I was signed to a record label that wanted me to spend thousands of dollars putting out physical CDs. I decided to pull out of operating that way, because the music industry at that time was not working for me. Things were drastically changing. That was when I stumbled on Bandcampy. It makes it easy for people that are interested in your music to come along, listen to it and buy it. Bandcamp was the perfect platform for the Shatter soundtrack.

CoLD SToRAGE: They’re very proactive—if you contact them with queries or problems, they come back and they talk to you one-to-one. The other thing is it’s lossless as well. I haven’t a complaint so far, and I cannot yet see Darth Vader in the background, but I should be knocking on massive chunks of wood.

For a number of downloadable titles running on a tight budget, it appears that releasing the soundtrack can often be crucial to promoting the game.

Module: Having the stream on Bandcamp is pretty important. If people really want a album, they’re going to download it anyway, via torrent or file sharing. This makes it so you can say, “You can listen to it here for free, and if you want to support us, you can pay to own it.” You never really get a feel for an album with thirty-second clips—especially with game soundtracks, because they are reliant on there being a journey.

I think this is a good approach to digital music in general to give people a really good feel for it in advance. 9 times out of 10, if people love something they will pay for it. Otherwise, they’ll skim through it and move on to the next thing.

Do you have an idea of how you would like the soundtrack to NightSky to be made available?

I have been thinking about it since I completed the soundtrack. We’re still waiting for the game to come out to coordinate the soundtrack release with it. I like that on Bandcamp you can stream and purchase in the same place. I don’t know if any of you have had to fill out Excel spreadsheets for certain services, but it is the antithesis of what you want to have to deal with as an artist. There are enough obstacles to the creative process already.

[To learn more about Module, I Am Robot and Proud, CoLD SToRAGE and Chris Schlarb, visit their websites.]

The development team Playdead has announced that their first game Limbo will be coming to the Xbox Live Arcade service, according to an article posted on IGN.com. Playdead CEO Dino Patti also confirmed that the IGF-nominated puzzle platformer will be launched this summer, so mark your calendars for this one.

Limbo is currently competing for the Technical Excellence and Visual Art awards in this year's IGF, and if you're attending GDC next week you'll be able to play the game at the IGF showfloor as well. Continue reading

[In the latest Road to the IGF interview with 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists, our own Leigh Alexander speaks with Hello Games' Sean Murray, Dave Ream, Grant Duncan and Ryan Doyle about capturing the joy of motorcycle toys in Joe Danger, their Seumas McNally Grand Prize-nominated contender.]

Hello Games, a UK-based independent developer founded by veterans of AAA racing titles, is bringing its first game to digital platforms -- Joe Danger, an Evel Knievel-inspired racer that aims to catch the spirit of childhood toys.

Here, Hello's Sean Murray, Dave Ream, Grant Duncan and Ryan Doyle get together to discuss the Seumas McNally Grand Prize-nominated Joe Danger, how real play with a toybox helped firm up the concept, and where they hope the project is headed next.

What is your background in making games?

Sean: I guess we’ve all worked for bigger companies like Electronic Arts, Criterion and Sumo for a couple of years. I worked on Burnout and Black, amongst others.

David: We’ve all been making games since we were kids, though. The first game I ever made was called Little Yellow Car goes Beep.

Grant: I was an artist on a bunch of Sega games, and I worked on Warhammer. First game I made was a Doom mod called Space Cows From Beyond The Milky Way. I was very young.

Ryan: My first game was called “Tech Demo v0.8”.

What development tools did you use?

Sean: Us three coders mainly spend our days in Visual Studio.

Ryan: We’ve got lots of tools and editors we’ve made ourselves, we use them quite a lot.

Grant: I’m mainly Photoshop and Maya. Sometimes they make me open xml files in Notepad, but I sob until it stops.

How long did you work on the game?

Sean: It’s been about eighteen months since it all started, probably longer than that now.

David: We’ve lost all track of time. We’ve been working on Joe Danger for so long our keyboards are covered in dust and cobwebs.

Ryan: Dave’s keyboard is covered in dust and cobwebs.

Where did the idea come from, and what influenced the style?

Sean: We kind of had too many ideas to begin with, too many directions we wanted to go in. Then Grant brought this box of toys in from his parents attic, and we started playing about these toys -- one in particular, actually.

Ryan: That dildo?

Grant: It was an old Evil Knievel stunt cycle.

David: Next question...

From what I can see, you've really recreated the joy of playing with toy motorcycles and race tracks. What considerations did you build into the design to bring this sense right up to the forefront?

Sean: We wanted something that was fun to play with. Like when we were firing that stunt cycle out of windows and down halls, it was just fun. So many games are based on avoiding failure rather than seeking reward. We wanted to make something different. Something charming, rewarding and just fun.

Grant: As a child playing with toys, they’re never frustrating.

Ryan: Apart from Optimus Prime. He never did what I told him. Always talking back.

With the level editor that allows people to put their own tracks together, can you see the potential for releasing more building blocks via digital download updates once it launches? Would you like to have users able to share tracks among themselves?

Sean: We’d love users to be able to share their levels, absolutely. It’s rock-hard to implement, but we’re working on that.

Ryan: Sean doesn’t understand how it’s done.

David: I’ve been telling everyone how to do it for ages.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

Sean: Have enough money to finish the game?

Grant: Have enough money to not have to finish the game?

David: Have enough money to never have to finish anything.

Were there any elements that you experimented with that just flat out didn't work with your vision?

David: Jelly!

Ryan: Jelly was too awesome for its own good.

Grant: Can we put Jelly back in?

Sean: No.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists or recent indie titles? Any games you particularly enjoyed?

Grant: We’re played them all really, anything that’s been released.

Ryan: They are all disappointingly good. I want to play Vessel. Rocketbirds was ace, loved the Flash version of Closure.

Sean: I loved every minute of Super Meat Boy. They say it’s coming for WiiWare, but it’s not, it’s right there on NewGrounds.

David: Miegakure looks awesome, it twists my brain. Trauma seems really interesting, and Limbo looks lovely. Have we left anyone out? VVVVVV is brilliant.

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

David: The focus on guitar is too strong. Folk has been sidelined in recent years.

Sean: We’re probably a bit removed from the main scene here in the UK, but for me indie games have never been more broad or interesting. I’m excited to meet some of the other devs at GDC.

Ryan: I’m afraid of the indie scene. I hear they come for you in the night.

Grant: I had a friend once. That happened to him.

[Previous 'Road To The IGF' interview subjects have included Enviro-Bear 2000 developer Justin Smith, Rocketbirds: Revolution's co-creators Sian Yue Tan and Teck Lee Tan, Vessel co-creator John Krajewski, Trauma creator Krystian Majewski, Super Meat Boy co-creators Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, Sidhe's Mario Wynands, who worked on Shatter, Daniel Benmergui, creator of Today I Die, Klei Entertainment's Jamie Cheng, executive producer on Shank, Star Guard creator Loren Schmidt, and Miegakure developer Marc Ten Bosch.]

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this edition include a puzzle-based roguelike with an emphasis on managing resources, a single-button Flash action game, a pair of platformers made for the recent Global Game Jam 2010 event, a one-button remake of Civilization, and a space trading strategy game with shoot 'em up elements.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Desktop Dungeon' (Rodain Joubert, freeware)
"Desktop Dungeon is a puzzle-based roguelike with an emphasis on resource management, where the health of your adventurer is restored by walking into unexplored rooms or corridors. You can choose to engage an enemy immediately upon finding them, or save the tougher encounters for later after you've gained some battle experience with weaker inhabitants of the dungeon first."

Game Pick: 'One Button Bob' (Tom Vencel, browser)
"One Button Bob is a single-button action game in which you have to help Bob survive an obstacle course to reach the treasure he desires. The control scheme is switched around in every room, meaning that you could be running away from a boulder, climbing a set of ladders or jumping from one platform to another as you venture further into the cave."

Game Pick: 'Where We Remain' (Twofold Secret, browser)
"Where We Remain appears to be a simple 'save the girl' Zelda-style adventure at first glance. Yet look a little closer, and you'll find that there is so much more to it. Trapped on an island by a mysterious being, our hero must find his sweetheart and rescue her. But is there a way to escape the island?"

Game Pick: 'Super Space Rogues' (Ted Lauterbach, freeware)
"In Super Space Rogues you play as a trader who owes a big sum of money to an alien overlord, and must find means to repay him back or suffer the consequences. This basically involves mining asteroids for precious minerals to be traded at a friendly spaceport, or destroying pirate ships and making off with the loot that they drop."

Game Pick: 'Press Tilda' (Press Tilda Team, browser)
"Press Tilda is a Unity-based puzzle platformer in which you can bring up a console to type in commands and change the layout of a level directly. By typing in certain keywords, players can swap the position of their character with another item in a stage, send an attack order to one of the robot guards, push objects or even set them on fire."

Game Pick: 'War and Peace' (Stéphane Bura, freeware)
"War and Peace is a one-button remake of the classic strategy game Civilization, created by created by Stéphane Bura as a submission for the Gamma 4 game showcase competition. The technology tree which was the highlight of the original series has been distilled down to just two branches of research, and your task is basically to choose whether to dedicate all of your resources into developing war machines or encourage the cultivation of technology advancements."

Game Pick: 'Boxplode' (David Newton, browser)
"Boxplode is a neat little puzzle game created by David Newton, in which the player's objective is to destroy all boxes with numbers on them by causing a series of explosions to blow everything up. The chain of explosions work like a domino effect, and you have a limited number of clicks to clear all blocks in a single level to progress."

Game Pick: 'depict1' (Kyle Pulver, freeware)
"Created by Kyle Pulver (with Alec Holowka providing the ditties), depict1 is a platformer which will hurt your head lots, but probably also make you smile too. An unknown announcer barks orders at you, which you need to follow... maybe. The whole game is pretty much an incredible mind-bork."

Natural Selection 2 was voted Indie Game of the Year by the members of Mod DB. According to developer Unknown Worlds, the above video reveals “the first game footage of the skulk, marine, gorge, command station, the sentry and a marine base chock full of marine toys”.

The other games honored are Wolfire’s Overgrowth, 0 A.D. (an open-source ancient history RTS), FOnline: 2238 (a pretty amazing-looking free-to-play Fallout MMORPG), and Platinum Arts Sandbox, a free, open-source 3D game creation program. Really cool stuff. I need to pay closer attention to Mod DB, apparently!

By the way, for those of you who were curious about the results of the NS2/Overgrowth Preorder Promo that happened last month, Wolfire’s provided a postmortem. And for those of you who were curious about Wolfire’s John Graham, Wolfire’s John Graham’s beard, and more importantly, Wolfire’s John Graham’s beard’s color, check out this video. Warning: it’s hot! Continue reading