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 ;-)

 

by Paul Posted on 3. June 2011
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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).

by Paul Posted on 1. March 2011
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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.

by Paul Posted on 22. February 2011
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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)

by Paul Posted on 31. January 2011
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Big Time Monkey Report (Part 3)

Happy New Year!

Unfortunatelly, I can just report on happenings from last year. It was shortly before Christmas when we recorded the voice actors for the characters in Big Time Monkey. A big thank-you to all voice actors who voiced the characters in our game. We are very happy with the results. Spacial thanks to Torsten who voiced our main character Gordo. He took three full days of his time for the recordings and he bravely performed every stage direction Marius gave him. The results are very impressive. Gordos voice is very likable and it definitelly has recognition value. We all had a lot of fun during the recordings.

It’s the last month of our project and there’s still much to do. We hope we don’t have to do too much overtime.

Update: Full size pictures are attached below the cut. Click on them to see the large versions.

Continue reading →

by Paul Posted on 5. January 2011
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Big Time Monkey Report (Part 2)

Big Time Monkey Artwork

We are totally pressed for time. That’s why I’m just posting a short list of key points describing the progress of our apish student project:

  • intro sequence done
  • first three rooms completely playable
  • half of all dialogues finished
  • half of all backgrounds drawn
  • all characters designed and animated
  • voice actors chosen and appointment made with recording studio

We are all looking forward to see the finished piece.

No time for talking, must go on working…

by Paul Posted on 6. December 2010
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Big Time Monkey Report (Part 1)

We made quite some progress on Big Time Monkey. The entire storyline is more or less fleshed out and Marius is working on the dialogs. We’ve also managed to find somebody doing the music for our game. His name is Ingmar and he has already many years of experience in sound design. He has shown us some music samples which were quite impressing.

There were some interviews with potential voice actors. This was a really new experience for us all. I’ve never worked with voice actors before and it’s very exciting to work in such an interdisciplinary environment. The tricky part will be to find a good voice for our main character Gordo because this is the biggest part of all voice overs. Since the player will be hearing mostly the main character’s voice throughout the game, it should be chosen properly.

There also was some positive feedback on the first playable parts of our game by other students. There isn’t much time left though. Looks like we’ll have to do some overtime.

by Paul Posted on 16. November 2010
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“Oh No! Not Another Project!”

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.

by Paul Posted on 21. October 2010
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Back from London

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.

by Paul Posted on 1. October 2010
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FLXMP: First Version Released

I didn’t want to do this that early but a proper version control was needed and what better opportunity for releasing the Flash XM Player could there be than the first SVN upload.  It’s now officially named FLXMP which stands for Flash Extended Module Player and it’s released under the MIT License which means you can do with it anything you want. I could’ve come up with a more fancy name but in the end it had to be self explanatory (beside aspects of humility which come with such a small project).

Please notice:
The current version is still far away from being complete or stable. There is much work to do and you will find many “TODO” comments while browsing the code. Even the panning features I mistakenly declared as finished in a previous post are not implemented, yet. However, if you encounter crashes bugs or other problems feel free to report them in the issue tracker.

You can download the current FLXMP version 0.1 (unstable!) from Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/flxmp/downloads/list

There is also a public SVN access to the most recent upload.

A Documentation will follow soon, too.

by Paul Posted on 30. August 2010
Posted in music, programming | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments