developer The Creative Assembly earlier this month."Aliens: Colonial Marines,
designed as an interactive successor to the landmark films from Twentieth
Century Fox, is a dream project about which our studio is deeply committed and
passionate," said Gearbox president Randy Pitchford. The NBA Live Coins game, which is in
development for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows PC, will be displayed at
E3 next week, according to Sega. This will be the first time the game has been
playable in a public setting.
In Gamasutra's latest feature, console veteran audio director Brad Meyer
picks apart how tiny teams with limited resources can create amazing audio on
smartphone and browser platforms."The past couple of years have seen an
explosion in small, free-to-play games, primarily on the Buy NFL Coins web and mobile
platforms," Meyer writes. However, "the audio in this burgeoning new
sub-industry is not quite keeping up with the innovation" that these titles are
making in other areas.Meyer's
is with Shaba Games, an Activision console studio which the publisher
shuttered in 2009. He is now audio director at Free Range Games, a 20-person Bay
Area studio which focuses on free-to-play online titles. Team size is one of the
biggest challenges to superior audio quality in these sorts of mobile and
browser titles. "100+ size teams are being replaced with a couple dozen, or
fewer, dedicated developers," he writes. "With smaller teams, we see simpler
games, but also less
and greater generalization in tasks. As an audio developer, you must
therefore become the Swiss Army Knife of all things audio." Here, he offers some
advice for audio directors to help the teams effectively: "One of the mmogo first tips
I have for a sound designer in a small company is to learn scripting. The most
important part of a great sounding-game is creating great sound effects. The
other big piece of that puzzle is how the sounds are handled within the game
engine, and control over
