Archive for August 27, 2009

| August 27, 2009
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Zombie Game Announcement

We have decided to release the first meaningful teaser for Binary Space’s upcoming game! While we are still giving away very little at this point, we can divulge that the game will be about those rather popular brain hungry zombies. I can hear you groan all the way from Australia, “another zombie game?”. How dare you! …I mean, yes another zombie game! However being a huge zombie movie and game fan I can tell you it will be completely unlike any zombie game before it.

I must have wanted to do a zombie game ever since I first saw Dawn of the Dead who knows how many years ago. Then when the new version of that movie came out, shortly followed by 28 days later and others, I developed a bit of an interest in all things zombie and survivalist. I’ve wasted many an hour and much of my own precious brainz playing Left 4 Dead, The Last Stand 1 and 2, and also tried out Pop Caps latest game Plants Vs Zombies, however I can’t understand all the hype surrounding it. I’ve also devoured World War Z (did you know the movie is coming out end of this year?), The Zombie Survival Guide and numerous other zombie novels. The only thing remaining is to go on one of those zombie walks…hmmm.

When compared to existing zombie games, ours will be in an untried and untested genre, with different game play, and quite different graphics. The game has just reached its first playable state, which is quite exciting, and the scariest thing about it is that the game play will present a lot of new challenges that haven’t really been tackled before. Well I can’t say much more but I’m confident we will soon be bringing you zombie madness in a way that should get you pretty excited.

Concept art from Binary Space's upcoming Flash Zombie Game

Concept art from Binary Space's upcoming Flash Zombie Game

The concept art you are looking at here was illustrated by myself (Jay) and it’s one of my first few attempts at any sort of “real art”, drawn using Photoshop CS2 and a Wacom. This particular image was copied from a photograph of a foggy street in the US, where I could envisage people leaning from windows and firing out. So I copied the street and then added in the people and zombies afterwards, keeping their forms extremely simple to hide my lack of skills in that department! I feel it works well for the subject matter though, luckily for me! It could probably use another zombie up closer so you really know what they are, but I’m on a bit of a schedule and my skills possibly aren’t developed enough to tackle a highly detailed rotting corpse close up!

Finally try not to read into the image too much, its much like the box art from old Amiga games – it certainly doesn’t represent the game play, genre or POV at all! Well, it does a little…

If you’d like to be notified when major updates are announced or when the game itself comes out, make sure you sign up to the newsletter on the right hand side of the page.

Until next time!

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal, Featured | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| August 5, 2009
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Flash Game Music using Freesound.org

For the past couple of weeks I’ve put on a musicians hat, creating music for our first game. It’s the first time I’ve really ever done anything like compose music, my prior musical experience consists of only a year or two messing around on my guitars, playing tabs from the internet.

Our game, still largely under wraps, will be fairly heavy on low, bass sound effects, so we decided to go for minimal ambient music. Luckily I would say this is probably the easiest and simplest music to compose as well, good for a beginner like myself. Also due to the bass sounds, we chose mainly treble instruments so that they stood out and didn’t mix with the rest of the sound effects. You may be able to guess the genre of game from the music!

I’ve had some help though from a friend, Rhys who is a big muzo, and we have worked together to create a few of our own pieces of music, plus a couple of joint efforts. We have used a lot of samples and instruments from FL Studio, and we have also recorded Rhys on guitar through an amp and in through an Audigy soundcard. The whole process is much easier and higher quality than what I was lead to believe online. For other samples I got onto www.freesound.org after reading about it on Emanuele Feronato’s blog, and have subsequently downloaded and used a great number of samples and audio clips for our music and game sounds. Their usage rights state that you must list each members name in your finished product, so I’ve been keeping a list for the credits. Otherwise you are free to use the sounds as you wish.

I had a long look at music software before deciding on what to get, and while I saw some free options (LMMS seems the best option), we opted for a producer edition of Fruity Loops. I had used the demo and found it very easy to use, with tons of community support, which is vital for learning new software quickly. I thought the extra expense was justified since I could also use it for sound effects, and the speed and ease of use, the huge number of tutorials and support online made it an easy choice.

I have uploaded some of the music for the game that we’ve produced so far on Binary Space’s youtube channel. Go have a look and tell me what you think of our fledgling effort. I’m personally pretty happy with it!

Stay tuned or subscribe if you’d like a first look at the game, we plan on releasing some teaser/preview videos of the game within the next month or two.

Thanks for reading,
Regards,
Jay

Category: Binary Blog |