the lunar pack has just been released on steam. it includes lunnye devitsy which is all exploringy and atmospheric and wake which i did the soundtrack for in 2010… and i still consider it one of my best bits of work. get em both for dirt cheap.

in other news i have a live band gestating… should be gigging in a month or two unless something drastically bad happens.

Fun little nugget of trivia here: the song used in Really Big Sky and Big Sky Infinity for the hell cascade event (is one of mine but also) wasn’t originally composed for this purpose. Though it fits perfectly it was actually originally part of the soundtrack to a 2007 project of mine called The Cheese Factory Incident (a remake of a 2003 game of the same name for any interested) maybe one day i’ll actually make that game again but who knows.

it was for an ice level but came out a little too sinister. i’m just glad it found a home in a game which not only saw the light of day but was actually a bit of a runaway hit! huzzah for unused songs i say! i have a bunch more random bits and bobs in the bank made for projects that never happened.. so when i’m in a fix i can just reach for the nearest hard drive!

The game is out in europe today. US got it yesterday even though it’s (to my knowlege) an all british production team and such… but we get 12/12/12 so we win at number alliteration basically. go have a looksee at this pile of graphical eyeporn!

The cool thing about this release for me is that it’s for playstation 3 and playstation vita, a much larger audience than ever before for the likes of my silly music and vocal noises! yes like Really Big Sky i provided all the annoying narration parts and maybe half of all the songs you’ll hear.

Recording the voiceovers was fun… the nice chaps at ripstone dragged me across the length of the country to their fair city to stand in a vocal recording booth for the day and call them a tit in a variety of tones. that was a very strange day actually, i had little to no sleep the prvious night so i was working in a haze. you’d be surprised how often that seems to help. a certain unhinged defocussed feel which helped me not to over think things. also powerful radioactive strength coffee helps. There exists a huuuuuge amount of outtakes too. or at least i hope they kept them. i know i messed up the lines enough times. i just couldnt stop saying “flip the drill around” instead of “engage the drill”!

The lines were always utterly silly and where possible a quote or referance to something that myself or james (James Whitehead, bossbaddie boss man) are into. so lots of british comedy referances, some running gags, some futurama referances and some things that i would just say in real life. back in the Really big sky days i’d say most of the narration script was written by me but as time went on it grew from both of us. When it came to Big sky infinity james wrote a whole load of new lines to correspond to the huge amount of new features which i hadn’t seen yet and so couldnt comment on… also some terrible puns may have found their way in.

The way i found myself in this role is pretty odd really, i’m a musician. i’m not a voice actor. but we needed something to add some extra flavour to Really big sky and i had recently bought myself a half way decent microphone. we just put it in for a laugh but it worked. it was really a case of me saying what i would say if i was the annoying friend watching you play over your shoulder… over time it got more and more exadurated but still based on myself. i guess the moral of the story is don’t play a game if i’m sitting behind you because i’ll likely call you a tit when you die.

In other news i’m releasing a new bandcamp albumoid soon, it’s only 25 minutes long but i cant sit on it any longer, it’s making my bum hurt.

…a portfAUDIO if you will (and i will) i’ve been meaning to put one together for ages now. in fact i had one ready. there is now a page on this here site go look you buggers.

a little late reporting on this super-cool-ism but i’ve been at a wedding OK?! (not mine obviously)

THIS IS HAPPENING my silly englishy english voice might well be spewing out of ‘your’ sony device’s speaker in the futury future.

i havent been doing a great deal of those stuffs lately, i’m gradually working on a 2nd bandcamp album and the occasional bit of ornsack flavour stuff (and perhaps for more people too) but really and truely i’ve been slacking. hard.

the majority of said slacking has been through tribes ascend which is a game what where you shoot at people and often capture flags. i was attracted by the oldschool PC shooter feel of fast moving players with slow projectile weapons and a high skill ceiling ala quake games. i miss those days. yeah free to play and all that balls, have a go.

i should game less and muskit more.

i’m not a very good band leader. i’m just not naturally that sort of a person. i dont like singing and i dont enjoy ordering my peers around. BUT I MUST. this is really an ability i need to work on. i’m so used to just playing on my own that now the full wall of sound provided by a full band at full volume seems overwhelming. i need to keep track of the noises i’m making to make sure they’re right. this is all stuff that one needs to get the hang of and i will. i just havent nailed it yet.

anyway in actual news i have an EP on the way (to bandcamp) very soon. just need to do the vocals for one track on there. its going to be pay-what-you-want with no minimum. 5 tracks, 2 actual decent ones. (plus secret bonus stuff)

oh and that song i did for a comedic youtube video, as far as i’m aware thats still on the way although already about a month overdue. still the person(s) responsible for that have done lots of brilliant stuff in the past so i dont doubt they’ll get it done one day. oh and the track for this video… yeah its on the EP too. because why not.

ayarrnd finally. i’ve been getting into this sort of thing lately. you may or may not spot the influences of those sorts of noises sneaking their way into more of my music in future. who knows!

I haven’t posted here in a little while because not a great deal of stuff has happened. However a eurogamer expo happened and we (that is bossbaddie) were there. here’s a couple of interviews. one of which features me buzzing like a maniac on free energy drinks. (10 points to the first person to guess which one)

we’re at 5:19

we’re at 3:06

no not the musical score the score i just got in the game! likely the biggest score in this game ever in the universe ever. how did i manage? i honestly have no idea, sorry!

I expect i have an advantage over lots of other players what with having beta tested this game since fairly early days but my average score (curtsey of the death screen) is/was 265,625. so how on earth did i get 4 million?

ignore the average starbits stat that's left over from a bug we had in beta.

Well sometimes you just have that dream round, where regardless of what game you’re playing or why, everything goes your way. your charmed existence arrogantly blasting through the game’s universe. apparently this was one of those times. another helpful aspect to the situation seems to be that my dad was there for the first half talking to me about something totally unrelated, the fact that i didn’t really care what he was saying apparently allowed me to achieve that exact level of distraction, enough to not react unfavorably to anything ingame but not enough to let me lose focus.

All of this leads me to gain a new appreciation for James’ difficulty scaling code.. having seen it taken to extremes now. by the end of this session my lasers were almost totally ineffective against all but the most basic of enemies, so i had to get creative, hiding in meteors here, using my tiny orbital shield to bonk the baddies on the head there, spin attack when cornered.

One of the new enemies added in this latest version (build 230) is a spinning thing that creates a shield of fire which will engulf the whole screen, killing you if you don’t shoot it down to size. all fine, rather annoying and potentially deadly but shooting these buggers gives you plenty of points. also big score earners it would seem.

I also got lucky with the boss order here as well, the beauty of random generation is sometimes it’ll randomly be really good to you. it gave me almost entirely the boss i find easiest to defeat quickly again and again! meaning i could replenish my shields with relative ease.

Basically i’m not sure why i wrote this bloggyblog apart from to say this game is indeed good even if i was a little involved in making it.

Oh and by the way, the song i was listening to at the time was Frogs got Crabs! That’s track 7 on the OST for those who want to put it on now.

blergh, in my haste to get it out i failed to spot a typo and the fact that according to the mp3 tags there’s two track 13s and no 14! so that’s all fixed now, i’ll be replacing the zip soon along with 2 more tracks (the cascades and the latest narration track with outtakes). Also itunes doesn’t associate the album cover picture with the songs which is mildly annoying.

RBSOST1.1 is on it’s way in the very soonage.

yeah i’ll continue to update it if i find myself doing any more narration parts, just to keep it definitive and complete.