Winter in Blue Mountain

Once again I had the opportunity to work with Ravn Studio. The game was released on 11-11-11, but of course I didn’t update the blog immediately. This time I had a reason though. I was a victim of the TimThumb hack. Google shut me down first, and soon after, my webhost. I’m usually fast when it comes to updates, but this time I didn’t make it in time. That’s why the site was unavailable for a few weeks. I’ve only now rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. It took me long enough but now it’s better and stronger.

Back to Winter in Blue Mountain. I delivered sound effects to Ravn Studio which they then implemented. Yesterday they were kind enough to send me the game, together with Captain Sabertooth and the Trials by Fire. They even sent me two bonus games. What a great gift for the holiday. Time to get a 3DS!

Selling Sound Effects

It was only a matter of time until it would come to this. As I built my own library from nothing to several gigabytes it was time for something new. To start selling some of my recorded sound effects.

I thought about different ways to approach this and to begin with I wanted to be able to sell them at my own site. Then I realised that I haven’t got a clue how to set something like that up. That’s why I’m going sell my audio as stock. I’m well aware of the fact that stock sites have a history of bad reputation and quality. But times change and stock sites do too. Naturally there’s still some junk out there, but I was surprised to hear lots of high quality stuff.

I started silently a few weeks ago to see how it works and to learn how to set it up. Today I have 9 individual sound effects for sale + one sound pack of 14 variations of two similar themes. I will update this page with deatailed information about each sound effect. I’m also thinking about setting up a mailinglist for new sound effects.

To start with I tried out different sites. I chose to sell exclusively at Audiojungle and other sfx non-exclusively on Audiomicro and Pond5. In the end I dropped Pond5 and Audiomicro. Not because they’re bad services, but because I feel more at home at Audiojungle. The Envato Marketplace also gives me the opportunity to add other assets like photos at Photodune for instance.

Below you’ll find the sound effects available at the moment. This is just a start though, I’m aiming to add more in the future.

Enjoy!

Sprinkle

Here’s the trailer for Sprinkle. A fun little game from Mediocre, which is being released for iOS on August 25th. I was asked to do the audio for the trailer. There was already sound effects for the gameplay but that was it. I edited the music and put it in place, then created sounds for the fire truck, falling iPad and everything else.

I love working with video games but sometimes the limitations of audio is frustrating. Every now and then I get a chance to do a trailer and I’m always happy to do so. I hope you enjoy the result as much as I did creating it.

Captain Sabertooth

Norwegian game developer Ravn Studio released Captain Sabertooth and the Trials by Fire a few weeks ago. I communicated with producer Annika Fogelgren primarily by e-mail, but sometimes via Skype and phone. It’s so easy nowadays to work together even though you’re in different locations.

I provided all sound effects for the productions including ambiences and a couple of original stingers. This is my first production that is not only available digitaly. You can find the game in stores now.

The game has been well recieved by journalists. Here’s one of the many reviews out there (in norwegian):

http://spill.geeky.no/global/reviews/218/
”The music and sound is awesome…”

”The sound and the music puts you in a perfect mood…”

Ionocraft Racing

I love racing. That’s why I was extra excited when I found out that the the new game from Fabrication Games was going to be Ionocraft Racing. Since it was developed in Unity, I could play with the engine pitch without bugging the programmers (hello Måns Olson) too much. For me that’s one of the best parts of game development, to play with dynamics in real time. I love creating assets but being a part of implementation is always a bonus.

Solitaire Nation

Sometimes I work so much that I forget to post my new projects. Anyway, over at Solitaire Nation there are three different versions of solitaire that I worked on. They already had some sound effects so I started by doing some polishing. There were also some timing issues with the updated games that I had to work on. Other than that just the basic creation of suitable assets plus mixing and mastering.

Available for Windows Phone 7, Mac and iPad so far. IPhone, Andriod and Windows is in the making.

Piclings

This was a game I sincerely enjoyed working on. The music was already made for it and pretty quick I had an idea of what I wanted to do. The sound effects are a mixture of sounds from Native Instrument’s FM8 and library stuff. I’m very pleased with the ”uh oh” sound I made. Unfortunately there was no time to create variations of it but so far there’s been no complaints about it being too repetitive ;)

Anthem for the video game industry

My friend Albert Schapiro showed me this great video about the video game industry. That inspired me to write this song. I’ve been listening a lot to Pogo lately, especially his amazing Joburg Jam. I’m used to writing songs and then sing them myself. Now I’m curious how you can manipulate audio to make music. I tried to use auto-tune at first but didn’t get the result I wanted. Instead I bought The Mouth from Native Instruments and experimented with that.

Here’s the result. I hope you enjoy it, and think twice before you start working in the video game industry ;)

You can download the song in the player on the right side.