I recently contacted a friend of mine here at school to get together and work on some games. He told me he'd definitely be interested, and not only that but he knew of a girl in the music department (student) that would probably love to get involved. Turns out, he was right. I must say, I'm really excited about the notion of sitting down with someone that isn't a programmer but still wants to be involved in the process by contributing their art form to the overall "product". This will definitely be my first experience of that sort.
I think what intrigues me most is the fact that sound is often ignored/overlooked in games, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone. The only game music that comes to mind that wasn't immediately replaced by my mp3 collection is Doom / Quake III Arena. Granted, I don't play a large variety of games, but the music in the ones I have played annoyed the hell out of me. It may seem weird to see a game developer (aspiring nonetheless) that doesn't play a large variety of games. Well, I guess you'd be right, it is. However, I've played games like Zelda and Sonic since I was just a tiny lad. Not to mention the fact that I learned my multiplication tables of 7 from Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES (great music, by the way) and Joe Montana's Football for the Sega Game Gear. More recently though, for the past 5 years I've been a competitive gamer on the Madden tournament circuit. I tend to stick to one group of things that I like in all aspects of life, not just games. I'm sort of backwards in the sense though that my love of programming has inspired me to play as many different games as possible. Most people are the opposite. They love games, they love computers, let's program games! I digress...
The part that really excites me about this is that I love music. I always have my music playing, and I honestly can't function without it. I'm huge into playing guitar as well. I'm really interested to see if/how she will propose a game idea based on something she wants to do with music. I think that would be so cool if she had an idea for something she wanted to do with music that would be instrumental (no pun intended) to the game itself, aside from just serving as a supplement. Of course, she may not have that idea, but now I have it, and anyone reading this does as well, and I'm sure someone else has already made a game like that, so go nuts!
I'll keep you posted and let you know how the first meeting goes on Thursday and hopefully I'll have a constant supply of updates related to the game we make.
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3 comments:
Just thought I should clarify... of course I'm aware of "Guitar Hero" but that's not exactly what I had in mind when I talked about the gameplay revolving around the music. I've been trying to think of a way to explain it, but it eludes me. Guitar Hero is more of a skills challenge based on music, but I'm thinking of something more intricate and abstract relating to how the music envelopes the gameplay.
When I think of music as a part of the game I think of the Zelda's for N64 where playing certain songs at particular places allowed you to do a variety of different things. Then there are also a couple of RPG's that incorporate music as a means to add buffs to other characters, heal, and sometimes even attack enemies.
Yeah, good example. The first Zelda game for N64 was truly a work of art. In my opinion it outplayed the first Mario game for that system. I didn't get much into the Zelda games after that because I migrated to the PS2, but they looked relatively decent. The original Zelda for NES is still king in my book.
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