I’ve struggled a long time with this. Almost everyone of my close friends (including my brother) got in possession of one of those fancy new smartphones. Half of them have an iPhone. Very early, it was quite obvious that this wasn’t just a fad. It was the future. The capabilities of those things are quickly converging towards what the clumsy boxes we used to put beneath our desks did. Nevertheless, I avoided this next generation of devices like I avoid facebook (no, you won’t finde me there). I don’t like how people show off with them. It was just another status symbol at  first. And I do not care much about status sybols.

However, as a developer I eventually had to confront those things. Sure, you could make cool games with them. Java programming became also more and more interesting for me, due to it’s shorter development cycles. For a long time I was convinced that programming with C/C++ was the real deal. Later, I realized that the end justifies the means in this regard. And then, I started with my Master Thesis and realized that head tracking will become an integral part of my work (more on this in a later post). An employee at the University refered to a talk on Sensor Fusion on Android Devices as a possible approach for this problem.

Long story short: This plus chrismas and I got myself my own Android powerded device.

I started to work on my final thesis for my master’s degree. The thesis is about “Binaural Synthesis in Interactive Media”. I discovered that the title is not self explanatory, so here come some explanatory words :

Binaural hearing is the ability of humans and animals to use both ears in order to determine from which direction a sound they are hearing originated from. Without binaural hearing your expensive Dolby 5.1 sound system would be useless to you because you couldn’t tell the difference between 5.1 sound and mono sound. Also, binaural hearing makes the cocktail party effect possible.

Binaural synthesis is the process of synthetically generating a two channel singnal (i.e. a stereo signal, one channel per ear) out of a mono signal which can be perceived by a human in a spatial manner — creating a “binaurally hearable” signal as one might say. So, you do not need 5 channels to make 3D-sound possible. Everyone has just two ears, ergo: two channels should suffice — when using headphones, of course.

The choice of this topic for my master thesis originated from an earlier interest for sound based games. I was fascinated by the idea of creating a game whith no graphics at all. But in my opinion today’s sound technology is still missing some capabilities which are necessary for a proper sound-only-experience. Well, let’s see what we can do about it . Of course there already have been many scientific investigations and approaches to this problem. I’m by far not the first one to work on this topic.

By the way: recently I found this via RockPaperShotgun. There are two developers who are working on a sound based adventure game called Blindside. It’s comforting to know that the subject is still up to date and that you’re not the only one who’s working on it.

Yep, I commited myself to another game project. Doesn’t this guy have enough stuff to work on, you might think. Indeed I do. And yes, I shoud finish some of my work-in-progress-projects first. But unlike all other of my projects this one has a fixed deadline in January 2011. So either it’s done till then or it’s a failure. And I’ll get marks for it at university, so there’s actually something at stake.

What’s it about? It’s a point-&-click-adventure again. It’s a little game about a monkey saving the world from the evil plans of his former mistress. The working title is “Big Time Monkey”.

It wasn’t me who initiated it. There where two other students at my university who wound up with a lot of creative ideas and I chose to join them. So there are three of us (maybe a fourth coming making some music): Marius, creating the story, the concepts and puzzles; Melina, doing character design and animations; and me responsible for project management, background art and the technical part.

It’s fun working together and I hope we will get all this work done in this short time.

Just returned from my one week trip in London. My girlfriend and I enjoyed the city, the galeries and museums, architecture (old and modern as well) and the British kindness. It’s a very busy and beautiful city. The highlight was a play in the Vaudville Theatre: The Prisoner of Second Avenue starring Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl. They did a fabulous performance.

Now back to regular life. Monday semester stars again.

A short summary of what’s done and what’s still to do:

2D-Plattformer (no official name, yet; working title: Vessel):

• Done:
  • majority of gameplay mechanics (weapons, triggerable objects, etc.)
  • simple ai architecture
  • level bitmap interpreter (creates tile based levels from bitmaps, including ai-information and entities)
  • level transitions
  • basic enemies with animations (content)
  • basic mod player (see below)
• To Do:
  • bosses (this will be the biggest part, also including some sort of ai)
  • save game system
  • menus
  • music and sounds (content)
  • additional enemy types
  • additional level tilemaps (content)
  • decoration sprites (content)
  • name and logo (content)
  • level design (content)

XM Player (no official name either):

• Done:
  • mod player core is working and playback is possible
  • panning and envelope features for instruments are working
  • set tempo, portamento up, portamento down and tone portamento effects are working
  • basic volume commands are working
• To Do:
  • automatic vibrato for instruments
  • volume effect commands
  • most effect commands are missing (quite the biggest part)
  • file loader (currently, mod files need do be embedded via AS3 in order to be played)

Now, back to work…

• Nov 2009: Lost my Job in Munic
• Jan 2010: Moved back to Stuttgart
• Feb 2010: Got a short job opportunity as a freelance IT teacher
• Mar 2010: Got an university place at the Stuttgart Media University (HdM)

So apparently I’m a student again. I’m making my Master in Computer Science and Media in Stuttgart and I’m really enjoying it. And maybe there will be more time spent on game making

Recent developments will follow soon.

Another source of inspiration I’ve spottet a while ago is a comic by Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics — The Invisible Art. It’s a fairly famous piece of work and it’s not an ordinary comic at all. It is a comic about comics.

Scott McCloud explains inner workings and phenomena of the comic art form and proves his explanations by applying them at the same time. During his explanations he delves into the topics of psychology, art history and effects used by comics, for example immersion, iconography and closure.

A very interesting and inspiring read which I already recommended some of my friends. Most of the concepts presented in this book are also applicable outside of the domain of comics.

After two weeks of not-blogging I report back from vacation. Paris was great and we have seen many things. This was the last year in which I get free access to so many museums (you get free admission to most museums in Paris as EU citizen under the age of 26) so I enjoyed every bit.

Food was very expensive compared to the prizes in Germany. We’ll come back when we became rich

I’ve almost forgotten what day is today. After my unpleasantly early breakfast at 5 AM – I drive 200km to work each monday morning – I prepared my togs for the next week and got ready to leave as my lovely girlfriend (who showed her solidarity by getting up with me) came down the stairs with the words: “It’s just a small one, but I can’t let you leave without.”

Not until she put the towel over my shoulder I understood what this was all about. I remembered the Towel Day, celebrated each May 25 as a tribute by fans of Douglas Adams. And smilingly I remembered how much I enjoyed Adams’ books. So, why deny this amusing homage? Apart from that, such a useful and life saving item as a towel could come in handy in many circumstances – and it did! It was a damn hot day!

Thank you, my love!