Tornado Outbreak + Wwise = Love
Well obviously it’s been really quiet here lately. A lot has been going on in my personal life, but the end is in sight. One of the things I’ve been doing is working on a talk for Audiokinetic for their 2009 Wwise Tour. I presented it over at Microsoft last week as part of a tag-team with Robert Ridihalgh of OMNI Interactive (he was the principle audio engineer on Tornado Outbreak).
Oh, did I forget to post on here that our game shipped? Wow, I totally did! Well, we shipped in September on 360, PS3, and Wii. Become a fan on Facebook!
The reviews have generally been in the B range, though Metacritic’s average is a little depressing at ~70. Nearly every review uses the words “Katamari” and “clone” which makes me think they didn’t really give the game a chance. The similarities with Katamari begin and end at the concept of “grow bigger”. Might as well call Call of Duty a Doom clone because they both involve shooting things to get to the end of the level.
But whatever… I’m proud of our effort, and I think it’s a super fun game. Hell of a job for a small team with a tech base built from scratch, to ship on time and on budget on three platforms.
Wwise Tour
One of the reasons we were able to ship on time was Audiokinetic’s Wwise. I’ve been evangelizing this excellent sound engine to everybody I meet. I just can’t say enough good things about our friends up in Montreal. I’d use Wwise on every future game if I could.
On Tornado Outbreak, I did most of the engineering and the initial audio rig design and prototyping. Robert and his team did the actual audio work, and took over management of the Wwise project. They probably did 95% of the audio related work on the project, which is awesome! As everybody knows, engineers are really slow and are pulled in 20 directions at once, so the more I could step out of the way, the better.
Audiokinetic asked me to put together a talk for the tour they’re doing right now to promote the product, particularly the new features they’ve been adding. I invited Robert to join me and we presented the two halves of our audio solution for Tornado Outbreak. We split the presentation roughly along the lines of our responsibilities.
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