Army Ants on GameDev.net

Army Ants was just a GameDev.net image of the day. Nicholas Korn, one of the five developers on the team, posted some screenshots of Army Ants on the GameDev.net forums.

It seems people thought our techniques and gameplay ideas were cool.

Hey guys. Just an update to when a will have videos online of Army Ants and Warship Armada: We are getting a new image set up on a single computer in the lab soon that will have Fraps on it (Fraps doesn’t offer a site license which has been our hold up this whole time …) so I will eventually have videos of both games up soon. Also, we will be showing Army Ants at GDC for the whole week of GDC (the week before Mayercraft) in case anyone is there.

Until then, I have decided to post the music I wrote for each game. BLin, Adam, Choof and Beej may recognize most of them, as they were around during most of the writing of the songs (BLin and Adam during Warship Armada)

So here they are. They are tagged up for iTunes, but I will warn you that they aren’t balanced very well with the audio levels, so some songs may come out quiet and others may come out loud… I hope that is okay. Feel free to use them for whatever you want, commercial or not. If anyone actually tries to use these songs for commercial use, well … good luck. They aren’t that great. Feel free.

WARSHIP ARMADA

Warship Armada was a naval battle game that takes place during the 1600’s, so the songs are all very instrumental. The game was developed in the Spring of 2008.

• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – MAIN THEME: This song came out pretty cool. I was really happy with the movement that the song had. Had some variety to it. Also was happy with the way the instruments blended together. It is the music that plays during the menu sequences and when the game boots up.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – BATTLE THEME: This song is more ambient and loops with less of a melody. It was supposed to be tense and “battle like.” It is the music that plays while playing the game.
• [DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – ENDING CREDITS (MAGGIE SONG): This song is a little goofy. It’s also called the Maggie Song because it was written in about 10 minutes while on the phone with Maggie. I wrote it as a joke, but when we came down to the last minute, we realized that we wanted a song to play when the end game statistics were being shown. It’s not even really an ending credits song at all. Short and weird. Also had input from Choof and BLin and maybe Adam and Beej for the tuba farts at the end.

ARMY ANTS

Army Ants was a game that was a little less “serious” than Warship Armada. It was exaggerated and modern, highly fictional and action oriented. When writing the music, I was aiming for “epic”, to basically not only excite the player but also to poke fun at the whole thing. The game centered around turn based real time battle in a dynamic environment.

• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – ITS GAME TIME: I have never worked with e-guitar sounds before, simply because they are much more work on the digital end than other instruments. This guitar patch was created by actually filtering a basic noise through several channels and hooking up separate damping tracks and the like. So technically I was happy with the way it came out. I also liked the sound in general and thought it was pretty over-the-top “epic.” This song plays during the menu sequences and during the game itself.
• [DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – END THEME: The end theme to army ants was completely out of place, but I still love it. One of my favorite songs is John Murphy’s “Sunshine” track from the movie Sunshine (also in the beginning of the X-Men trailer) because it is so ridiculously epic. After toying with ideas, I decided to literally rearrange that song. This version is shorter, sped up and incorperates more percussion and other instruments. I wanted it to be epic. It plays during the credits of the game after a match is won.

So that’s it! I hope you all enjoy it. I would love to post more music. Eric and I wrote a song back in the UC days called Cumulorockin or something like that that I would love to throw up here.

UPDATE (by eric): Here’s some Cumulolyrical action. Everybody rock out please.

Hey everyone. I haven’t posted in a while. Love the blog, just never get around to posting. Driving through life at 80 miles and hour and keep missing my exit, if you know what I mean (don’t even think I do.)

Anyways- I just wanted to write that things are going great. The school quarter wrapped up a week ago, and then I flew out to San Francisco to AdobeMAX where things went great, and now I am back at Rochester and heading to Boston from Tuesday to Sunday for thanksgiving break.

On a few topics that deserve more elaboration, AdobeMAX went great. I gave a presentation on the New Media Showcase which was my senior project along with other juicers and talented youngin’s and the presentation was about not only the showcase but sort of a general philosophy on new media and education and the like. Again, this deserves more attention, but the talk went spectacularly. I was at a special Adobe event at Adobe headquarters before the actual MAX presenting to educators and industry leaders and the like. I was the first in a series of talks, and I got to talk for 40 minutes. I really felt like somehow the talk came together, and I really ended up impressing a lot of people. People were coming up to me and the professors all day saying what an excellent job I did and I actually was being referenced in future talks throughout the day. One guy told me that when I got up there, he didn’t expect me to say anything “important” or enlightening or anything that would get him thinking. He said that I just blew him away and that some of the stuff I was talking about really got him thinking. Anyways- it rocked. Real hard. Adobe gloating done.

On to school, school went awesome. Army Ants wrapped up great. I need to capture video on the school computers of the game so I can post it here and elsewhere. I think the game went really spectacularly.

Finally, Darkwind Media is rocking out hard. Luster is blossoming into a fine young gentleman. We will be releasing our first public demos soon, which show off some neat shaders and also take that platform and create a visualizer out of it. Real cool stuff. Be sure to “stay tuned”

That’s all. I need to post more. I need to comment more. I read everyones post and I am glad everyone is doing well. Peace my friends. Keep on Juicin’

P.S. Future posts to come: One on “What Android means for the future of mobile devices” based on my own speculation and a second on “Army Ants : A Post-Mortem”

Hey everyone!

We presented Army Ants on Wednesday. It is done! And I am incredibly proud of the results. I will be hopefully uploading a video today of our final project. It won’t be a well edited video or anything, but it should show what we worked on.

So I am dying to write a little about Army Ants but I want to make sure I do it right, so until then I will write a quick blurb about a dream I had last night.

I don’t remember quite what was going on, but I remember the outcome. I think I was chatting with someone … but what we were chatting about is irrelevant. At some part of our conversation, my dream returned an out of bounds enumeration which my brain didn’t have a condition for. This, for one reason or another, lead the subsequent dream function to enter an infinite for loop. My dream hung up for a few seconds before the debugger caught it and I woke up with a very sudden jolt. As metaphorical as that may seem, that’s actually how it played out in my head and what I remembered when I woke up.

I have been working on Army Ants literally all day every day, from wake up to bed. I get to school between 8 am and 10 am and leave around 10 pm or later and typically during that time I will be neglecting all of my classes except for Army Ants. Saturday and Sunday cannot escape the wrath of Army Ants.

I need a vacation.