News
A song is the whole theme of thatgamejam #02
thatgamecompany's two-week jam asks entrants to turn a piece of music into play, with $10,000 across five prizes and no rhythm games required.
Sound design
Dead Space
Scoring Fear: Ryan Holladay and Jason Graves on the Sound of Dread
Two horror composers on building dread from almost nothing: a muted brass collage, music that waits on the player and a small metal oil rig that screams.
Podcast
The Sound of Dread, From Weapons to Dead Space [Podcast]
I ask Ryan Holladay and Jason Graves how dread gets built before the scare, and why a game score has to wait on a player in a way a film score never does.
News
Noah Thompson Announces Free Spectral Map Demo
The claymation shooter arrives on Steam on October 19
ecology
The Places We're Losing Are Becoming Jakob Steensen's Worlds
Danish artist Jacob Kudsk Steensen turns volcanic vents, collapsed glaciers, and extinct birdsong into virtual worlds that blur science, grief, and living dream.
Sound design
Sound Design Is the Most Ignored Art Form in Games. One Researcher Is Changing That.
A new study asks why there are so few sound-first games—and what you'd hear if you finally stopped shooting and started listening.
gravity
Why The Dream Logic of Love Eternal Doesn't Need to Explain Itself
Toby Alden traces a line from to ambient DJing to Love Eternal, a gravity-flipping platformer where dream logic and intuition guide every level.
interactive art
Fernando Ramallo: On the boundary of sound and interaction
Fernando Ramallo crafts experimental interactive experiences that blur the boundaries between music, visual art, and play, challenging conventional ideas about game design and artistic tools.
sonic experimentation
Joo Won Park: To listen is to interact
Composer Joo Won Park transforms ordinary objects into extraordinary instruments, challenging listeners to discover the hidden musicality in their everyday surroundings.
Feature
The neglected history of videogames for the blind
The game starts with a black screen. A woman’s voice, speaking in Japanese: “Real Sound. Kaze no Regret. This software brought to you by WARP Inc.” A string quartet, swelling and romantic, begins to play—press the start button, and the music stops suddenly with the sound of a bell. A light hiss of s
News
The threat music and animal sounds of Rain World
The goofy term “slugcat” has been tossed around to describe the creature you’ll control in Videocult’s upcoming game Rain World for a couple of years now. Due to its unique ecosystem set on an industrial planet that’s ravaged by bone-crushing downpours for most of the year (the game takes place duri
News
Return Of The Obra Dinn’s historical fiction gets even eerier in new demo
Lucas Pope, of Papers Please (2013) fame, has been working on his new project, Return of the Obra Dinn, for nearly two years now. Back in October 2014, he released the first build of the game, which ran for 10 minutes in length and showed off its stylistic 1-bit rendering. Updates on the game’s prog