The following four project descriptions are taken from projects I made or participated in on the Medialogy master programme at Aalborg University in Copenhagen.
(10th Semester/ Master Thesis)
With a vantage point in the term Game Polish, I have proposed a simple method for designing games independently from any specific production methodologies.
The study was made in the spring of 2009 through correspondences with members of the International IGDA Game Design SIG and other forums dedicated to game design.
The main cornerstones of the study is Polish, Appeal, and Measures – all elaborated in the report.
The conclusion of the thesis proposes a simple methodology of designing games that is independent of software production methodologies.
(9th Semester/Internship)
Games should be fun and games should be plenty. If game developers should make plenty of fun games they need efficient tools to design them. Game designers today use existing games as references when discussing game design. Pattern languages may provide a common reference frame and Game Design Patterns may help game developers design more efficiently.
This case study was made to determine what it would take to implement Game Design Patterns in a small casual game company. Among the findings was a positive attitude towards the methods, however if a company is to benefit from them there has to be taken measures towards educating staff and redesigning production models.
Whether Game Design Patterns are in fact useful remains uncertain. This study offer suggestions to what is necessary to succeed in implementation of Game Design Patterns.
In the early days of computer games the sound was created using simple synthesis techniques, but as the development of better processors and larger storage media, the development lead towards the use of wave-table synthesis, which has become the most used technique in current computer games. Since the introduction of the wave-table synthesis the development in audio creation and playback in games has stagnated.
One of the latest fields within sound synthesis is physically modelled, which holds great potential, within games and interactive environments, because of its more dynamic nature. An area in which very sparse research has been done is measuring the impact of physically modelled sound in computer game environments. This has lead to the following problem statement to be formulated: To which degree does physically modelled sound enhance physical immersion in first person computer games?
This project has analysed theories proposed by several authors within the fields: immersion, narrative and gameplay in computer games, audio in computer games. These fields and their different theories have formed an ontology for the project, upon which an application has been build. The application consists of a Half Life 2 modification, which makes use of the Nintendo Wii controllers, together with a modal sound synthesis.
To test the hypotheses derived from the problem statement, 24 test subjects were in a between subjects test, introduced to the aforementioned application, in two different scenarios: (1) one scenario testing 12 subjects, with the build in sounds from Half Life 2 and (2) another scenario with a modal synthesised sound of a crowbar, a weapon in the game, also testing 12 subjects.
The results of the test were processed by using a Student T-test with an alpha value of 0.05. In the question of how realistic the sound of the crowbar was perceived, there was no significant difference between the two scenarios. The test subjects definition of whether the crowbar sound was repetitive or dynamic showed a significant difference, in the terms of the physically modelled sound was more dynamic compared to the regular sound. In the questions of whether the subjects were able to judge the speed of the crowbar and if it was matching their hitting gestures, the T-test showed no significant difference.
It can be concluded that in the narrowest sense, wavetable synthesis can be replaced with modal synthesis, when creating a crowbar sound. In broader sense, what this project has shown is that in at least one case, physically modelled sound is as good as sampled sound. This has a lot of potential because it is more dynamic. In the broadest sense, physically modelled sound and sampled sound, when used in a first person computer games, yields the same level of physical immersion. There appears to be no technical or perceptual reason why physically modelled sound cannot, or should not, be used in computer games; therefore we suggest that further research should be conducted within this field.
As human beings, we are dependent on our ability to hear sound in three dimensions since it provides us with many clues about how we are to navigate and behave in our surroundings. The fact that we from birth have been equipped with two ears placed on each side of our head makes us able to perceive the azimuth of a given sound, in fact we are able to localise a sound source within 2 degrees of azimuth; the design of the pinna or outer ear and our torso provides us with the ability to perceive the elevation of a given sound.
During the past decade there has been an increase in interest within 3D sound or spatial audio, both within entertainment, industry, and research; within this period several methods and systems has been developed to reproduce spatial audio. One of the methods is called head-related transfer functions (HRTF), which uses several audio cues in order to provide the listener with a broad spatial soundscape.
Several neuropsychological research projects in human ability to localise spatial audio sources have been conducted, these projects have mostly been conducted on a very low cognitive level. Experimental psychology has been criticised for conducting research using beeps and flashes. The aim for this project is to investigate visual and auditory cues that trigger higher cognitive processes. Serving this purpose, an augmented reality environment has been created with a 15” LCD screen and a spatial audio rendering software model.
The working hypotheses question whether semantic cues may slow down localisation of sound sources incongruent with visual cues. The auditory and visual incongruence is within temporal, semantic, and locus domains.
Test subjects where to perform speeded localisation tasks in four similar conditions where the audible and visual content either coincide spatially and temporally or differ spatially and temporally. The four conditions where presented twice, however the difference was that the content was either concrete (everyday objects) or abstract.
Six 2×2 within-subject factorial ANOVAs have been designed to analyse the data collected from the tests, where the subjects where presented with the eight different conditions.
Reflecting upon the results we can say that the higher cognitive processes, when viewing concrete ob jects with incongruent temporal cues confuses the user in deciding the localisation; whereas the equivalent condition, using abstract objects, leads the subject to focus on the actual location of the audio source.
Sounds from a concrete visual representation, located coherently is easier to locate than sounds from abstract visual representations because of cognitive congruence.