Papa Sangre

Today a missive from Nick Ryan; our Doctor of Sound (no less)…

We have been working on further audio design for the palaces. Last week a new Palace was born; designed narratively to sound dramatically distinctive, The Palace Of Glass has loads of levels all of which play with the acoustics of highly reflective surfaces. In one level there’s a major twist in functionality (but I can’t tell you what it is yet!)

The footsteps sessions are growing exponentially it seems and we have devised a way of delivering more footsteps more procedurally. This makes everyones life ten times more labour intensive *except* the player of course, who can now enjoy footsteps that are gradually adjust to changes in terrain – thus allowing us to circumnavigate the ‘peg-leg conundrum’.

I’ve just opened a  conversation with software developers ‘Flux’ hoping that they’ll let us try out the hotly awaited new plugins from Ircam Tools. Only just said hello but they seem very nice fellas and we hope that they dig Papa. One of the two plugins in question allow voices to be manipulated according to variables that change percieved age and gender – except it sounds like they’re taking a radically different approach to other tools that have done this in the past and the results are meant to be amazing. The other tool we’re hoping to get our hands on models acoustic space in new and exciting ways. More news to come on that…

I’m off on holiday next week but taking a friend with me – George or KU800 as he’s better known (god I’m a geek!) Anyway I’ll be taking George with me to some nice sounding places and recording binaural ambiences for use in the game. These will include a cornfield and a wood.

I leave you with some pics of the logic automation for the FWT’s voices  - if you dont know what an FWT is, you will.

We had a drink last week and someone took a photo on their iPhone.

If you wondered what Team Papa Sangre looks like (minus Dan the Coder and Neil the Writer) here you go.

And for special bonus edit: chief Sangre Wrangler, Ben Cave, is not in this picture either. The author of this article sends his sincere apologies.

OK — we’ve had a *lot* of requests for information as to when Papa Sangre’s going to ship. Thanks for all the interest!

Short version: “When it’s done.”

Longer version: we reckon we’ll be done by early summer — to be specific, June.

Exact day to be determined.

It’s sounding pretty darn good by the way.

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.