Big Time Monkey chosen for Best Fan-Adventure of 2011
Big Time Monkey has been chosen for the best Fan-Adventure in the year 2011 by the German site adventure-treff.de. We are very proud of it and we want to thank all people who voted for our game. Thanks a lot, guys!
In: games · Tagged with: adventure-treff.de, Big Time Monkey
Head Orientation Tracking Prototype
That’s what I had in mind when I previously wrote about head tracking with an Android device.
This contraption is a smaller part of the whole system (which consists mainly of software). The communication between host machine and the phone is already working. The main application running on the host is receiving sensor data from the phone’s accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. The refinement of the sensor data is happening on the phone itself. That’s what I’m actually working on at the moment. The information is still quite inacurate and I’m trying to improve it with a complementary filter.
When it’s done and working, I’ll write some details about it.
In: programming · Tagged with: android, head tracking, headphones, Master Thesis, phone, prototype, Sensor Fusion
A New Toy
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.
In: general · Tagged with: android, christmas, Master Thesis, phone, Sensor Fusion
Master Thesis
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.
In: games, general, programming · Tagged with: binaural synthesis, Blindside, Master Thesis, Sound Based Games
Big Time Monkey Retrospective
My fellow developers and I we had a great time developing Big Time Monkey. Two months have passed since the release and we got quite good responses from the people who played our game. Now it is time to look back on the whole project and to realize what lessons we have learned. I’m writing this not only to make a final stroke but also to record those experiences for future projects.
Also, if you want to read the short version of my gibberish, scroll down until you see “Concluson” written in big letters . As the title suggests, it concludes the previously written text in a handy set of bullet points.
So, sit down, have a tea and let me answer following questions:
- What went wrong?
- What went well?
In: art, games, programming
Big Time Monkey Appears in Print Media
As Asamak already pointed out in the comments of the previous post:
Big Time Monkey is being mentioned in the current issue 9/2011 of German games magazine COMPUTERBILD SPIELE. It also appears on the Silver-DVD attached to the magazine among 100 other freeware titles.
It’s also very pleasing that Gordo is printed highly visible on page 95. We all who participated in the creation of the game are glad to hear so much positive feedback on the game. Finding our own game in one of Europe’s biggest games magazines makes our work feel particularly appreciated.
In: games · Tagged with: Big Time Monkey, Computerbild Spiele, games
Big Time Monkey Released… Finally
It’s finally done. We’ve put a lot work into this and the last fixes and polishing were really painfull. But what hurt the most was the delayed release date. Sorry for that! The game was praktically finished by the end of February but we still had to clean up a lot of stuff.
I also talked about the creation process of Big Time Monkey on the 9th GamesDay at the HdM Stuttgart (“talk” like in “presentation” ). You can see the talk as a video stream here (unfortunately only in German): Games Day – Big Time Monkey
But the most important thing is: You can download the game right now, here.
Go and have fun
In: art, games, programming · Tagged with: adventure, Big Time Monkey, Visionaire
Big Time Monkey Release Delayed
Well, that was predictable. End of February has passed and the download section on bigtimemonkey.de is still empty. All I can say now is that we are working hard on completing the final version of the game as soon as possible. Reasons for the delay are some problems which occured while moving our file server directory and some personal reasons in the core team (e.g. moving into a new appartment / starting an internship).
In: games · Tagged with: Big Time Monkey
Sound Based Games
Soundscapes and accessibility has been much on my mind lately and I wanted to drop here some words about it. Graphics are emphasized so much in computer games nowadays, that many other aspects of games are neglected. Sound for example. What would be if developers had concentrated in sound instead of graphics? How would a game for blind people be designed?
Actually, there are such games. And they are not only interesting for sight impaired people. Games based only on sound have the potential to become an own genre. It’s reasonable to give attention to sound based games since progress in sound rendering of game environments can have significant influence on mainstream titles. You can find a selection of sound based games here: www.audiogames.net
There is a particularly impressive Article about a young blind man, Terry Garrett, who completed Oddworld: Abe’s Exodus (noticed through RockPaperShotgun). He succeeded because most events in the game are accompanied by distinctive sound effects. Terry was able to make himself a picture of the game environment by listening to the acoustic clues. You can read the whole Article about Terry at Oddworld Inhabitants.
In: games, music · Tagged with: Abe's Exodus, Sound Based Games, Terry Garrett
Big Time Monkey Presented at MediaNight
Last Thursday the MediaNight took place at the HdM Stuttgart. There we presented a first playable demo version of Big Time Monkey and we got quite good feedback. The project has also been approved and it got very good marks. We want to finish the game by the end of February.
Additionally the mini page of Big Time Monkey is online. This is where you will be able to dowload the game end of February: www.bigtimemonkey.de
We want to thank all those directly involved in the development of Big Time Monkey:
Ingmar Jännsch (music)
Torsten Helber (voice actor: Gordo)
Dolores Winkler (voice actress: Dr. Dröge, barkeeper Ulla)
Alexa von Busse (voice actress: till girl Yvonne, girl Vanessa, wife Beate, computer LISE)
Benjamin Janssen (voice actor: crook Nagel, barber Blumstingel, hippie Berger, intern Chris)
Ronny Krause (voice actor: Market Manager)
Kathrin Meier (voice actress)
In: art, games, programming · Tagged with: Big Time Monkey, games, HdM, MediaNight
