Posts

Triumphant Return by mindXpander

Image
Today I received word that mindXpander , a Swedish spacesynth duo, released an album on 28 January 2012 titled " Triumphant Return ." If you don't know of the spacesynth genre, not to worry. Neither did I until recently. I have, in fact, loved the genre for decades without actually knowing what it was called. I would, probably wrongfully, describe it as a modern take of the best oldschool "mod" music from the golden Amiga era of the 90s. The duo started making music using Pro Tracker on the Atari, so maybe I'm not entirely under water with my comparison. I find it to be a treasure that melodic elements have been kept intact in the music of mindXpander, even 20 years on! The album contains 7 lengthy tracks (durations range from 05:30 to 07:32) with a nice variety of tunes. Production quality is excellent and the instruments used are crisp and sound very unlike default presets and patches. I have some insider information from David of mindXpander that quite a ...

Imphenzia Music

Image
Not long ago I released a new and unconventional Imphenzia track named "Time Travel" - check out the video of the track: This track rocketed to the #1 chart at soundclick.com and it also received great feedback on facebook. It is, however, a very different style compared to most other Imphenzia tracks released in the past. The track, the feedback, and some recent expansion pack purchases for Nexus got me inspired to create more music. Merry Christmas everyone =)

Scripts for Watermarking and Encoding Audio

Image
I've decided to publish the scripts that I use to watermark and encode music audio files into MP3 and OGG files with meta tags. I hope this will help someone out there who needs to frequently watermark and/or encode audio files into WAV, MP3 and OGG files at different bit rates. Maybe the simplest way to start off is to demonstrate how the scripts work with this video: (Watch in HD at YouTube for better readability) Click HERE TO DOWNLOAD the zip file containing the scripts. Create_watermark.vbs Explained This is a VBScript that will loop through a directory full of WAV audio files and mix them with watermark audio files. The script uses the free application Sound eXchange (SoX) to achieve this. The script is also designed to take the duration of the audio file to be watermarked and apply a watermark with a suitable frequency. Shorter audio files will be watermarked frequently and longer audio files will have less frequent watermarks to make it less annoying. You can customize th...

Exclusive Music and Work

So far this week I have spent most of my hours awake either in traffic on my way to or back from work, or in work. The few hours I've had to spare at home I've put on composing exclusive music for the three game developers that have contacted me. I've also uploaded some more stuff to  the Unity Asset Store and played some Modern Warfare 2. Today I reactivated my Eve Online account (free for 5 days) and the game is truly looking awesome but I simply won't have time to play it unfortunately.

Weekend

Image
First week of "normal" work following my paternity leave is now in the past and I am enjoying a very welcome weekend. Motocross practice at Uringe Today I spent a few hours at Uringe, a great sand track south of Stockholm, where I tried to improve my motocross skills. It went fairly well with only one minor crash but plenty of fun. Bike collected some sand as you can see in the picture below - quite easy to clean with the pressure washer though.... Making Exlusive Music for Three Games I've also recently had requests to create exclusive music for three different games. Two games for the mobile platform (Android + iPhone) and one game is aimed at computers and consoles. Quite exciting because the music needed is of very different genres and it's a lot of fun to let the creativity take over and see where it leads. Astrofighter.Net As for Astrofighter.Net I've managed to make slight progress here as well. I've imported the low poly ship versions into Unity and I...

The ships of Astrofighter.Net

Image
Today was my first day back in my "normal" job as an IT Security Consultant and I'm coming back from a 7 month long paternity leave. It is with mixed emotions that I return because I've really enjoyed spending the time with my family and it has also enabled me to focus a lot on Imphenzia Music/Soundtrack/Games. But then again, you have to earn a living... Anyway, I've finished creating the 8 types of spaceships to be featured in the game ranging from a light scout to a heavily armored and well equiped beast. The 7 weapon types I'm considering for the game is Blaster, Cannon (Gatling Gun), Plasma Gun, Rail Gun, Laser, Missile Launcher, and Mortar. Here is a preview video:

More prototype ships and weapons

Image
Today I modeled the 8th spaceship and all the weapons. I created a low poly and a high poly version of each weapon so I can render "Normal" maps (bump maps) making the weapons appear to have a lot more polygons than they really do. I'll be doing the same for the spaceships as well. Of course, the ships won't look like this in the game. These are just colored wireframe renders of all the prototype ships in low detail. Top down view as they will be seen in the game (click for high res picture) Here is a perspective view of the spaceships as well: Finally, here is a detailed look at the weapons I created today: Texturemapping these objects will take a lot longer than it took to model them. Each ship only took about 15-20 minutes each and the weapons took about the same amount of time. I can imagine it will take me a few hours to make the texture maps for each object though, ugh. 2:31am - I'm off.