Music Island Trailer and Release Date!

I'm very proud to announce that "Music Island", Thunderfish Entertainment's first game will be officially released on the Xbox Live Indie Games market this coming Monday, March 19th!!

Music Island was a four-man development team:  Producer, Programmer, Designer/Artist, Sound Guy.  Guess which one I was!  :)  

Started back in July of last year, I pitched the concept of a game similar to Chime, the generative-music-meets-Tetris game, and a music sequencer.  Since I'm no game designer though, our designer took the concept and made it more fun for the general public.  And voila, now we've got a tropical island themed, slighty generative-melody, music-rhythm game!

I wrote the five background songs for the game (and the menu music), created all the sound effects, and decided which direction to take the overall sound.  From that overarching sound design side, I was debating between magical/mystical vs rhythmic/tropical.  With the island theme, I liked the tropical side better, especially after making some draft sound effects and throwing them up against the visuals.  

Composition is not my strongest skill, but I do enjoy it time to time.  I wrote all the songs in Pro Tools SE, using the standard provided virtual instruments.  Marimbas, Xylophones, Kalimbas, Vibes, Bass guitar, Taiko drums, and general Latin percussion make up a majority of the instrumentation, with the occasional trumpet section or flute as well.  My background as a drummer certainly influenced a LOT of my composition with these pieces!  I certainly get a kick out of a good rhythm :)

This will also be the first published game containing my "voice acting".  When you hear all those grunts and injury sounds, those are me.  Voice acting is something I'm interested in, but compared to real voice actors, I've got nothin!  Very much like my composition skills, I can do it, but I'm not pro...yet :P

From my sound guy side, I'm excited to have my first game be music heavy!  And from a co-founder side of Thunderfish, I'm just pleased in general that our very first game is being launched!  It's been one drawn out submission process, what with the game being first submitted back in November of last year.

It comes out this Monday, March 19th, on XBLIG for 240 MS Points ($3)!  If you have an Xbox, please check it out!  The team and I would much appreciate it!  :)

- Ploof

So Winter Break's a Wrap!

Well that's all she wrote.  With UCI starting classes up again tomorrow, my 2011 Winter Break is officially done.  But with most certainty, I can say that it was the most productive and busy one I've had...ever.  I'd say I'll get back to you with a dedicated post per activity I did, but seeing my own track record, I'll just do decent descriptions right here right now in chronological order.

Motherlode

As the Fall quarter of school wrapped up, my Intro to Sound Design professor mentioned to the class that there was a Master's student looking for help on production sound for a short film.  Intrigued, I contacted the student, and got to be the boom pole operator for the shoot!  It was a great experience, being able to work with the whole crew, from director to ADs to grips to PAs, we had the whole hierarchy thing going on!  The project is another Master student's final thesis, "Motherlode", and will be shown in an art gallery I believe sometime later this year.  It was a lot of fun being the boom op, and I only had one instance of "CUT!!  ...boom was in the shot..." Oops... :)

Thunderfish Entertainment + Microsoft WP7 App Development

Remember that game company I co-founded last June?  Well we're making quite some progress :)  Thunderfish Entertainment is now about 20 people strong, has 3 games wrapping development, 2 more starting pre-production, and 82 submitted apps to the Window Phone 7 marketplace!  And it's those 82 apps that ate up a large portion of my first half of break.  After getting home from a nice trip to Vegas, I was alerted that the company had been given a special opportunity to go into Microsoft and learn how to build WP7 apps.  Naturally we took up the opportunity, and gathered all of our members, even searching for new prospective ones!  We spent 5 days total at the Microsoft Technology Center in Irvine, spending 10am-4pm creating purposely simple apps.  Our only criteria to meet, while working under a Microsoft employee's wing was to create 50 apps before 2012 hit.  And while we had a hard time getting started, we got better with each visit, and ultimately submitted 82!  So if you own a Windows Phone, go ahead and check them out.  Just remember that they are purposefully simple :)  In fact, we created Bonefish Studios as our mobile division to sum up all of our WP7 games.  Just remember that TFE isn't focused on mobile dev right now, and is much more focused on Xbox Live Indie Games!  That's where all of our real efforts go :)  Which you can read more about below under "Game Trailers".

If you could do me a favor too, as the Community Manager person for TFE, please like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter @ThunderfishEnt!  :)  Building a fanbase is what we're looking to do now, and we'd be happy to have you in it!

Night Before Christmas

I'll just save the time, and reference you to the post I managed to write up on this project!  First one I had posted in months!

Christmas Ashes

Same goes for this project!  Here's it's own post!

Loss

Ah "Loss", my first experience with film sound post-production :)  At the beginning of last year, I met with an aspiring director/fellow student here at UCI.  He was looking for a guy to do the sound for his short film project!  I immediately offered my services, excited to work on a film project.  Before this project, I'd made lots of videos in the past, but more with me in the producer/editor's chair.  Simple neighborhood skate videos, stop motion ones, the occasional scripted video, documentaries for school classes, those kinds of things.  But this time, I get to do what I want to do as a career: film sound.  Dialogue editing, foley work, sound effects, mixing, collaborating with composers, all that good stuff :)

This truly is something that deserves its own post when completed, but for now I'll say that I've been doing a lot of footstep recording/editing, dialogue-aligning, and trying to make things scary with this horror/drama short :)  Because this is still a work in progress, if you want to stay up to date with how it's going, feel free to follow me on Twitter @BryanPloof!  In fact, for anything I'm up to I'd recommend following me there because I sure do tweet a lot more than I blog!

Game Trailers

As mentioned earlier, Thunderfish Entertainment has 3 games nearing submission to XBLIG:  Music Island, Space Debris, and Tarik's Tomb.  And in order to promote the games once they get approved, I made the trailers for two of them!  I'll link you to the trailers, but just be aware that even though they say "Out Now!", well...they're not yet haha :)  Let this just be a sneak peak because you keep up to date with what I personally am doing :P

Trailers: Music Island  Space Debris

Finally Own a 360

As Thunderfish Entertainment (TFE), is an XBLIG focused company right now, it was a little difficult to help my fellow co-workers when it came to debugging since I didn't own an Xbox 360.  However, problem solved now!  Now the proud owner of a 360 and a Kinect.  Really looking forward to experimenting with the Kinect in terms of little sound projects too!!

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Phew!  Long-winded I know, but that's what I've been up to this break!  :D  If this is all possible in just a month, I'm really pumped to see what can happen in all of 2012!  Happy New Year everybody!  And let's have a great one!

- BP

IGDA OC Meeting Recap & Thunderfish Full Steam Ahead!

Great IGDA Orange County chapter meeting last night!

A group of a hundred or so met up at Obsidian Entertainment's offices in Irvine, and listened to a panel of four game company CEO's discuss their opinions and experiences in creating their own game companies!  The panel consisted of the heads of Obsidian, Fire Forge, Shiny, and Blind Squirrel Games.

And it was quite the perfect timing for this topic!  This is because for the past month or two, Justin Britch (www.justinbritch.com) and I having been in the preliminary phases of setting up our own game company, Thunderfish Entertainment!  And amidst all of our planning and confusion over legal jargon, it was a great opportunity to listen to these experienced studio heads.

So, ranging from legal topics like forming an LLC or a C-corp, to general things like establishing your company with a specialized niche in order to stand out, there were great things to take note on (and record, of course :P)!

Also, now that the IDGA OC Chapter seems to be getting up on it's feet now, considering that this is one of its multiple "reboot" meetings over a few years I believe, I've decided to officially start my career involvement in the industry.  So as of today, I am officially a (student) member of the IGDA!  And of course I joined the Audio Development and Implementation SIG as well!

I learned a lot at the meeting, and am glad I went, together with my co-founder and our first two "employees", Brian Macintosh (www.brianmacintosh.com) and Jacob Anderson.  

Also, to give a quick company status: With a producer, designer, programmer, and sound designer, Thunderfish Entertainment has officially started development of its first game!  With our prior game development experiences from classes (college, what better time to experiment and learn!), and our newly collected start-up company knowledge, all systems are go!

I can't wait to get more involved and contribute to this large and continously growing community and industry!  See you all around!

- BP