Introduction to Tom's research

Right, high time to put my info on this blog:

I'm Tom van Kruijsbergen, Django's team mate in creating what will hopefully become a great game, as well as fellow student at the Utrecht School of the Arts. I tend to be drawn towards the systems behind games, and how they can be used to create an experience for its players.

My "skills" lie in areas such as game prototyping, designing, tweaking, and thinking about stuff™. I enjoy testing out a game in small concepts, and watching it grow into something bigger and better over time. I strive to get my games playable as soon as possible, because I believe that this core experience is ultimately what it's all about.

My research, then, is about game sound, and music in particular. Game audio is a field that is becoming more and more interesting as of late, and particularly because I think more and more developers are starting to see its potential.

Generally, sound in a game serves to support what is happening in a game; roughly, music articulates setting and story, ambient music enriches the environment, sound effects bring small events to life, and dialogue communicates all sorts of other things (multiple models exist for this division, examples to follow. This is obviously a very rough outline).

So sound generally supports game events. The problem lies in what is actually being supported. The impact of any piece of art on you as a viewer is very great if all the source's elements work together in communicating its meaning as precisely as possible. If a painter wants a painting to make you feel happy, he will make sure he uses the right colour and lighting in his painting. If a film maker wants you to feel sad when the main character's sidekick's aunt dies, he'll use different colours, lighting and camera angles. There'll be a sad sound playing to further prove to you that this is definitely a sad scene, and so on.

In games, however, this is harder to achieve. This is because you can't know when a character will die, or if he even dies at all! You also can only vaguely estimate what is going to be happening in the next five minutes; it's up to the player to make the next five minutes happen. Because of this uncertainty, it has traditionally been hard to closely score events. Cutscenes are very often used for this purpose, because you as a designer do know what will happen in the cutscene, or games are designed with the idea that the level will lead up to defeating the dragon anyway.

But what if that outcome is more uncertain? What if you're playing a game where it's not sure whether you'll win or lose at the end? How can you make sound support a game, if what happens during that game is unknown at the start?

That, in a (pretty long) nutshell, is what my research is going to be about. I'm going to be looking more closely at that problem and particularly solutions, and then incorporate the solution into a game.