Tag: Design

Ruya – Version 1.7

Posted on | by Brad Smith

Ruya – Version 1.7

Hello to you wonderful people! If you were unaware we recently did a BIG UPDATE to Ruya for you all.

Here’s what’s new:

◆ Controller support!
◆ UI overhaul with new animation system.
◆ Frame rate no longer drops when opening and closing options screen.
◆ Reduced overall sprite count.

Updated Platforms:

◆ iOS AppStore
◆ Mac AppStore
◆ Google Play
◆ Itch.io
◆ Steam

We’re really proud of it as there’s now full controller, keyboard and mouse support. This opens up a wave of potential in terms of accessibility! Before the game was mouse only but now players are able to interact with Ruya in multiple ways opening the door to the types of people that can use the game with ease as they see fit. Accessibility is something we’ve been thinking about a lot lately thanks to our buddy Joe who’s a big advocate for it on our Twitter feeds. Hopefully we’ll be picking up some wisdom about input remapping in Unity overtime and maybe you’ll start to see some that being embedded into our games in the future.

Free to swing any suggestions our way for future updates you might want to see in Ruya to our Twitter DMs or ping us an e-mail. In the meantime we’ll currently focusing on Alula and some other secret stuff, so keep and eye out for that.

Give a follow to our coder Tom on Twitter for all of his hard work and making this update possible. You can read about some technical details on UI optimisation and controller support in Unity3d that went into Ruya 1.7 on Tom’s blog post here!

– Miracle Tea 

Creating Binaural Ambiences for Alula

Posted on | by Enrico Ercole

Creating Binaural Ambiences for Alula

Without a binaural microphone and for free!

Here at Miracle Tea we pride ourselves of a high level of dedication to creating meaningful experiences for our players and one of the elements that helps us convey this to them is immersion.

When I started working on Alula I was looking for ways to push the level of immersion we achieved in Ruya to a new level. I knew about binaural audio but only came across it in a VR context until I remembered this video I watched a few years ago.

This was most likely recorded with a binaural microphone, with the actors moving around it in real time and using the scissors and hair clipper close to the microphones. I remember I was mesmerised about how “real” it sounded so that’s when my quest to replicate that level of immersion started.

I looked at ambisonic microphones first of all but I had to change my plans when I found out how pricey they can get and on a second thought getting one wouldn’t have necessarily be all that useful as I would have been limited to recording real ambiences and sounds which wouldn’t have always matched the ethereal soundscapes I had in mind for Alula.

It’s when a friend introduced me to the SoudField plugin by Rode. I realised how a binaural recording could be easily decoded into stereo and keep it’s 360° feel intact.

With further research I came across the IEM plug-in suite which allowed me to actually simulate a binaural recording combining an indefinite amount of mono and stereo files of my choice and place them into the 360° space.

That was it! Exactly what I needed and for free!

Binaural and Ambisonic audio in a nutshell

Before diving into how I created my first binaural ambience for Alula let’s briefly define binaural audio and how it differs from ambisonic audio.

Ambisonic is a recording in playback format that presents itself as a full 360 degrees sound source, but while ambisonic audio has the capability to track the head movement of the listener (as when you’re playing a game on a VR headset) binaural audio is “head-locked”, therefore a sound coming from your left, for example, will keep coming from your left even if you turn your body 180°.

Ambisonics is the combination of binaural audio with the real-time decoding of your head rotation.

Step-by-step Process

To create my very own binaural ambience I used my DAW of choice Reaper and the IEM plug-in suite or binaural audio.

  • Add the Stereo Encoder plugin to a track.
  • Change the track channels input number to 36 for 5th order ambisonic.
  • Add a mono or stereo audio file to the track.
  • Create a parent track (36 channels) and add the FDNReverb and Energy Visualiser plugins.
  • Keep the reverb deactivated for now.
  • Add the Binaural Decoder plugin to the master track (36 channels).
  • Adjust the width, azimuth and elevation on the stereo encoder plugin of the child track
  • Repeat for as many child tracks you want to add 
  • Render the master mix as a stereo track keeping the binaural decoder active on the master track.

If you rather follow a video tutorial on how to use the IEM plugins check it out below…

And there you have it!

My first go at binaural audio resulted in this kind of creepy recording of my voice and footsteps walking around you and going on a ladder to speak above your head.

I then tried this on an ambience for the intro cinematic of Alula.

I’m looking forward to implement this technique on more elements of the game’s soundscape so if you have any suggestions for sounds you’d like to hear or you know of some ways to improve the 360° effect please hit me up on Twitter. or follow me on Soundcloud to keep updated on my work. I’ll be more than happy to take on your suggestions or criticism 🙂

Much Love,

Enrico

A Sketching Process

Posted on | by Brad Smith

A Sketching Process

When I sketch, I try to sketch a lot. I start with a line, a circle, something rude or whatever. I try not to think about it too much. I push away any doubt or care or worry or opinions. I don’t want my sketches to look good. I want my sketches to say something. To make someone see something they’ve never seen before. Above all else, I want to make someone feel a strong emotion. The emotional response is in the end all that matters.

When I sketch, I’m searching for something. It’s manic and desperate and immediate and ugly and raw. I strive for flow. Only in flow I’m likely to grasp the thing I’m looking for. The more I sketch, the more I throw away, the sooner I get rid of the white page, the more likely I am to find it. I don’t know what I’m looking for but I’ll know it when I see it.

I put an emphasis on turning up. To just sit down and do the work. Not to wait on anything or anyone or kid yourself with excuses or cop out with other duties. No matter how important they may seem. I let it spew out of me. I don’t let my emotions get in the way of turning up. I try to be honest with my emotions. My emotions are often my fuel.

My old man sketches. We bond over it. He sketches as a way to document his life and stories. We laugh and joke and be rude to one another and come up with juvenile ideas. There’s a kind of child like fun to juvenile art. People roll their eyes at it. I think there’s a lot of value in it. It adds balance and counteracts all the seriousness of life. Humour is a way into the subconscious and it feels healing.

When a child sketches, it’s done without ego or pretence or judgement. To be able to sketch like a child must be a wonderful thing. Care free and void of approval. I try to put myself in that state of mind. To see sketching as play rather than work. I’m learning to see everything as play. It takes time. Everything worth pursing takes time.

Miracle Tea’s Game Design Philosophy

Posted on | by Brad Smith

Miracle Tea’s Game Design Philosophy

I’m going to talk about some of the things that we consider important when developing games. If you want to know more about our process and what’s important to us, this is the place! Our design philosophy has matured a lot with time and no doubt will continue to. Often, learning something new forces the introduction or emphasis of a new idea. Hopefully this offers you some useful insight into the thinking behind a Miracle Tea game.

Pursue deep work

We want our games to say something. To mean something to someone and feel meaningful. To be real and honest and authentic and personal. To reflect the human experience. To question how someone thinks. To be memorable. Even if it’s just one person that takes any of this away from our games, that’s all that really matters us.

Design around emotions

When designing, we prioritise the emotional response above all else. It’s arguably the most important thing. All the matters is how our players feel, once we know what emotions we want to create, we start studying and prototyping ways of achieving that. The very best game designers are those that know how to juggle all different types of emotional responses. Knowing which ones complement each other and which ones leave a bitter taste to send players on an emotional roller coaster ride.

Design by subtraction

We’re try to get to the essence of our idea throughout development. Often, that means adding components just to take them away. Anything that doesn’t compliment or support the core is usually not needed. Embracing the removal of content that doesn’t reflect the essence can sometimes be tough and discouraging. We’ve found though, that embracing this gets us closer to that thing we’re trying to communicate with much more elegance and grace. We’ll go into more detail about core pillars in design in a more fleshed out post in the future, so look out for that!

Treat players with respect

We imagine our players to be forward thinking open minded and intelligent individuals with their own thoughts. We try to not pander or come off condescending. We try not to hand hold and to let players discover things for themselves. We try to make them feel special and let them know that we made this game just for them.

Design for accessibility

We work to find creative ways to allow for our games to be played by as many different people and play styles as possible. If this means including dyslexic fonts, colour blind settings and controller remapping, we’ll strive to do it!

Embrace limitations

We’re a very small team, it’s important to remind ourselves of this fact. A part of that territory means we have to be wary of our capabilities in what it is we make. Embracing our limitations often results in creative solutions to solving problems. Though, we’re not shy about pushing something as far as we possibly can – especially in terms of design!

Be open to feedback

It’s useful to listen to people’s suggestions. Though, sometimes this can throw a curve ball of confusion into the vision of what you’re trying to say which can be paralysing. It’s most useful when it comes usability. We take on board feedback, digest, interpret and meditate on it before we ever act. Acting too quickly isn’t always productive for us. If you listened and acted on everyone’s feedback, you’d never get anything done and you’ll never have work that is interesting or that pushes evolves the video game medium forward.

Show don’t tell

We try to communicate ideas with visuals rather than overtly making things obvious or defining the gist to them. Meaning we don’t report on a character feeling shy or cute, we show this through their actions! This is the key to rousing players emotions allowing them to step into someone’s shoes and experience their feelings.

“If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.” -Alfred Hitchcock

Scaffold Teaching

In our games, we don’t like to bombard our players with many ideas or visual elements at once. Doing so can feel overwhelming and cause confusion. Confusion leads to frustration. Frustrations leads to immersion being broken. Immersion being broken leads to people walking away. We break our gameplay/visuals down into chunks and gradually introduce more components overtime. This is especially true when it comes to tutorialising.

Time is precious

Time is all we have. It’s a real treat to have people devoting their time into something you’ve made. When you consider the ethical ramifications of making games, you quickly realise how much of an impact you could potentially have. Your creation could be played by thousands if not millions of people in its lifetime. That time is precious. If the position of a button takes a fraction of a second longer to load or it’s hard to find, that will ultimately add up to hours of wasted time for humanity that could’ve been spent elsewhere.

Personal health over work

We want to make video games well into the later stages of our life. This means that we need to learn to sustain ourselves over a long period of time. We’re in this for the long haul. Whenever work is too much, we take the time we need to recover. This is very important. We’ve pushed ourselves to the point of knowing where our limits our and whenever we teeter on that, we reign it in. Our projects take as long as they need. As a result, we’re happier and healthier and still making games.

Stay grounded and let go of your ego

Having an inflated ego is a killer a deal breaker and often a real turn off. The moment I start thinking I know it all or have the answers I try to tap into the part of me that is observing myself to consider why I’m saying what I’m saying. Freud called it the superego. Usually it’s tied to wanting to one up someone in some hypothetical game or competition I’ve made up in my head. Ultimately, it’s seeking for approval or gratification. Acting on that makes me realise it’s just an extension of my insecurities and believing it stunts my growth. It feels redundant and unproductive and surface level. Being grounded through self-awareness is a trait I really admire in people.

Go outside, observe people and nature

Spending all day indoors hunched over a PC staring at a screen that’s spewing radiation into your face can sometimes feel very soul draining and inhuman. No matter how much we love making and playing video games, we try to stay balanced by hanging out in nature, touching soil and exploring the world. Having down time and switch off is an important part of the creative process as it tends to supplement deep work.

Having a design philosophy, especially if you’re pursuing creative work, is vital. It lays the foundations of intent in your work and opens the doors of potential in the pursuit of goals with greater purpose. It’s something that all game developers who are starting out should work to define. You’d be surprised at how many developers never seem to consider this kind of stuff or just shrug off its value. At first, it perhaps doesn’t really matter what your design philosophy is, so long as you have one. All that matters is that you’re thinking about why you’re doing what you’re doing and what’s important to you as a person.