Sunlight

Yesterday the Humble Indie Bundle 8 launched, including Awesomenauts ! For $1 or more, you get Steam keys to the games in the bundle, and Awesomenauts even comes with an exclusive chicken skin for Clunk: Cluck. Really happy with the line-up this time. The other games in the bundle include some of my personal favourites from the past years: Little Inferno, Capsized and Dear Esther. Especially Dear Esther absolutely blew my mind when I played it, showing me a completely different kind of 'game' experience, and a story that really intrigued me deeply.

My new game Cello Fortress is controlled by a cello. This is a really weird and unique thing, and comes with some serious challenges. So far I have discussed the game design aspect of this, but at the very core of the game lies a much more technical topic: detecting notes in real-time from a live cello. Cello Fortress really knows what notes I am playing. I developed my own algorithm for that, and although it is not perfect (it quite often shortly detects notes that are not actually played), it works surprisingly well for such a difficult technical problem. So how does it work? Let's have a look! The big challenge here is that a cello produces a very complex sound pattern. There are all kinds of overtones, scratches and noises in it, and detecting the actual note from that is incredibly difficult. I did some research before I began programming the game, and it turns out that finding notes in a live acoustic instrument is in fact an unsolved problem. There is quite a lot of researc...

The most unique aspect of Cello Fortress is how a cellist does a live performance in front of an audience, while at the same time controlling a game. This is completely different from other music games, in which the musician usually plays on a fake plastic instrument, and even if he plays a real instrument, he does nothing but imitate an existing song. In most such other music games, there is hardly any real gameplay: just points based on how well you played the song. Cello Fortress is a completely different affair: here the cellist is controlling a real game, with real choice and interaction. Depending on what his opponents do, the cellist plays different notes. The cellist can even do things like baiting the opponents with a certain attack and then switching to another. So how does that work? What does the cellist need to do to trigger the various attacks? Check this trailer to see (and hear!) how it works: Live video footage in the trailer shot by Zoomin.tv Games at the Indie Game...