So it’s been a while since my last post, so I thought I’d get on here and fill you in on what we’ve accomplished the past couple weeks. We took a little time off with the Thanksgiving holiday, and I was pretty much out of commision while I went through the puppy love stage with my new laptop, but now I finally got Eclipse back up and running and all my files transferred over so I’m ready to really get cranking with improved efficiency galore!

First things first: If you haven’t seen our new trailer then prepare to be amazed!

I know right?! Awesome. Ok wipe off your drool. Don’t worry we won’t hold it against you. I was salivating quite a bit when I first saw this, too. Ryan really did an awesome job here and it was pretty much better than anything I could have imagined!

So what have I been working on the past couple weeks? Didn’t you hear? No seriously, I’ve been working on sound. Neither of us were really gifted in this arena so it fell upon me to figure it all out. I’ve spent most of my time tracking down the right music and sound FX to use and have spent countless hours listening to zings, zips, and diddys. The sound FX themselves weren’t really that hard once I knew what I was looking for, but finding license free music was a different beast all-together.

Finding a song that has the right feel for our game has been difficult in and of itself, but I decided to complicate it even further by trying to implement dynamically changing music . I really wanted to have a song that would build on itself as the difficulty increased and the game sped up. Unfortunately, the only way to do this is by using the built in JET player which only uses MIDI files. This meant that any song I decided to use couldn’t be in the prevailing .MP3 format which really cut down on our selection. To make matters even worse, the documentation for the program Android provides to edit the MIDI files hasnt’ been updated since 2008 and the files needed are no longer available. It took me a really long time to hunt down everything necessary, but in the end a quoted filename google search led me to the older files someone had posted on sourceforge. All is right with the world.

So once I figured all that out, I did a lot of MIDI music searching, and in the end I found the song you heard in the trailer on indiegamemusic.com This is the song we plan on going forward with and I think it has a really upbeat sound and it’s also pretty catchy. As far as sound FX go, everything you heard in the trailer will also be used in-game and we found all those at freesound.org and edited them for our purposes using Audacity. Both of these sites were really well organized with great search features and I highly recommend them.

Well, we’re finally getting to that point where we’re rounding third and heading into the home stretch. We have 10 mini-games fully implemented and only 5 or 6 more to go. Each of these only takes me about 30-mins to code so as soon as Ryan gets done with the artwork you can bet I’ll have it in the game. We’re still finishing up finding the right sound FX and we need to do some work on the training system and write our achievements, but the check list is getting shorter and shorter every day. We’re both really excited to share this with the world and we’re hoping we can get these final things cranked out in time to release before the end of the year. I’m trying to convince Ryan to have one more blowout game coding fiesta weekend before we both get busy for the holidays. We haven’t seen eachother since the last one about 2 months ago and I know we’d get a ton of work done if we got together now. So fingers crossed that everything works out and hopefully we’ll have big news in the next couple weeks!