Papa Sangre

Here’s how our Game Design Document begins … with a couple of redactions made for various reasons, some of them good. Margaret Robertson forced us to write this. We’ll come back and expand on a few of these prior to releasing the game, trying not to give away anything it would be more fun to discover first-hand …

1: You are You — this is a first-person game where you, the player, are the person. There is an immersive visceral kick of feeling immediately that it’s you in there. This is not the real world (surreal), but it also isn’t abstract.

2: This is Horror — there are things in the space trying to kill you.

3: Finger Man Walking — walk with your fingers. Every step you take is meaningful and full of feedback; it locates you. It carries an outcome in relation to the threat. You need to understand the stakes on every single step.

4: Sound and Music — the world has sound and music in its fabric. It is the first game created with dynamic binaural sound.

5: Sightless World — it’s a game in pitch darkness, where immersive sound transports you in your imagination wherever you are.  There is no visual representation of space whatsoever. Instead there are safety nets such as *** REDACTED *** to help you. Playing the game teaches you audio cognition in the early stages.

6: *** REDACTED FOR SUSPENSE ***

7: *** REDACTED SPOILAR!!!1!! ! ***

8: *** REDACTED BECAUSE WE CAN ***

9: *** REDACTED TO SAVE KITTENS ***

10: Playing this enriches peoples’ lives — through positive subversion, confidence building and / or co-operation.

The April issue of the UK edition of Wired magazine has a story on Papa Sangre, sitting pretty on page 55.

It features an interview and pic with Paul Bennun, wearing a very fetching set of yellow and pink headphones, freezing his arse off near London Bridge one February morning, 2010.

It’s a good article and the newspaper industry needs your support, so go and buy the excellent Wired immediately.

Hello! Welcome to the Papa Sangre development blog, where we’re going to geek out about how we’re developing Papa Sangre’s gameplay, audio, tech, artwork, PR and the rest.

We’d love to hear from you!

The most interest we’ve had in the game is about the audio — probably unsurprisingly. So let’s have a quick look at that for our first post.

Well, here’s a couple of members of our team building the first teaser for Papa Sangre, which you can hear here … the rather fabulously good-looking Benjamin Cave, project producer, and the fantastically talented Dr. Nicholas Ryan (sound designer and composer).

There are two main types of audio in the game, both of them binaural.

One comes from a software engine that can simultaneously position a number of sounds behind your head — or anywhere else — and move them about in real time relative to where you move in the game (which, we may have mentioned elsewhere on the site, is BLOODY HARD TO DO, at least on a handheld device).

We haven’t got a name for our engine (maybe suggest one — we’ll use it forever and give you a credit!).

The other type of sound involves a few novel techniques using the extraordinary dummy head Neumann lent us (thank you Neumann). The head has the same shape, density and features as a human head, with two exceptional microphones in the ear canals. These shots show Ben and Nick moving around some of our studio speakers (playing mono audio) relative to the dummy head, which records what it hears. This creates flat two-channel files (left and right), which are beautifully binaural when you listen back on headphones.

This is not the first iPhone game to feature binaural audio: you can find a few games on the App Store that use a dummy head or something similar to record two-channel binaural files. The beautiful Zen Bound springs to mind. To the iPhone CPU this is as demanding as playing a stereo file (mainly because it is just a two-channel audio file!). The difference here is that we’re also generating binaural audio in real time.

It means the player can move about freely inside the game, and the game procedurally uses an HRTF to work out how sound sources should change relative to the player’s movements in real time.

This was, by the way, BLOODY HARD.