Best Soundtrack 2012 Award by AdventureCorner
AdventureCorner , a leading adventure game site, polled their audience to vote for the Best Games of 2012. The best soundtrack award went to your beloved Knights of Soundtrack 🙂 for our soundtrack to The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav. It was a quiet, a different soundtrack, dark fairy tale style with live harp, live violin and female vocals… We really enjoyed working on that lovely game’s soundtrack…
New DARK trailer
Latest trailer for DARK, the vampire stealth game on which Dominik and I have been working for 10 months now… Trailer shows the non-final graphics and bits of our music, including my song “Dark Inside”, featuring the wonderfully talented Sonja Kraushofer (of L’Âme Immortelle, Persephone and Coma Divine fame). Coming soon to Xbox 360 and PC!
Word Wonders is out for iOS & PC
Word Wonders by our friends at Chimera / RCP / Dreamfab is now out for iOS devices and PC (with our music and sounds): It’s a combat word puzzle game in an Arabian Nights setting. We worked on a prototype for that one 2 years ago, too, good to see it finally come to fruition – and it’s fun! Check it out:
http://www.chimera-entertainment.de/en/products/word-wonders
12 nominations for games we worked on at Deutscher Entwicklerpreis
The biggest industry award in Germany – Deutscher Entwicklerpreis (German Developer Awards) – announced their nominations, 12 of them go to games we were involved with, including indirectly Best Sound for Risen 2, for which Dominik and Daniel were asked by Dynamedion to provide a few songs. The other games are: Wimmelburg, The Dark Eye – Chains of Satinav, Forge of Empires, Skylancer and Happy Hills. We wish all our partners and friends best of luck, see you there on the 12th of December in Düsseldorf.
We are working on “DARK” (Realmforge/Kalypso)
A new game we are working on: Kalypso and Realmforge just announced “DARK”, a stealth-action game in a modern vampire setting, to be released 1st quarter of 2013 for PC and console. What is BEST is that I am working closely with the developer, being in their offices once a week throughout the development process, doing sound design and integrating it! (a bit of a dream come true)
I am a big fan of the vampire setting, and I get along very well with Realmforge (we provided audio for their game “Dungeons”), so I couldn’t be happier.
But that won’t be the last surprise for this year, stay tuned… 😉 – Daniel
Risen 2 is out (with our additional music)
Risen 2 is out now (Piranha Bytes / Deep Silver), and we are happy to announce that we (Daniel & Dominik) were asked to compose some additional tracks for Dynamedion, who provided the soundtrack.
We have delivered 9 tracks (including variations) for this cool game. Check it out!
Lecture at the University of Vienna
Tomorrow I’ll give a lecture at the University of Vienna, Austria. I’ll talk about music for games with student composers… Vienna is beautiful and I am glad that I was invited. It’s the 4th educational facility I am doing this at, and it’s always a pleasure and an interesting change to my normal routine…
– Daniel
Wimmelburg is released for Iphone / Ipad
Check out this beautiful children’s game for Iphone/Ipad! It’s a sort of Hidden Object Game meets fairy tale picture book, for 2-6 years old kids, parents and grandparents… It contains our music (wonderful bard song by our very own Dominik), a lot of cute sounds (dozens of mini-cutscenes) and voices (8 voice actors total).
It’s doing quite good in the charts, getting good user feedback. Appgefahren.de loved it’s “great soundscape”.
Get it for Ipad: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/wimmelburg-hd/id509514469?ls=1&mt=8
Or Iphone: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/wimmelburg/id509537638?mt=8
Skylancer – Battle for Horizon
Skylancer – Battle for Horizon Closed Beta has started! This fantasy browser game by Chimera Entertainment and ProSiebenSat.1 Digital comes with our sounds, voices and jingles… Flying ships, all kinds of cool creatures… Check it out:
http://skylancer.browsergames.de/
Looking back at 2011 – Statistics!
So, it’s finally time for our look back at the year 2011.
Right to the hard numbers. We were even busier than last year apparently, having composed 155 tracks with a combined length of 214 minutes for 34 games and 4 other projects. Insane. We provided 3092 sound effects for 19 games and 3 other projects. We have silently skated over the 100 projects line, but the 100th game will be celebrated in style, hopefully this year…
The year started with the release of Dungeons, one of the bigger games we have worked on so far, that went on to hit #1 charts position in Germany and #6 in the UK, how awesome is that? It came with a cool soundtrack CD, we love that.
Then followed the releases of A Knights Dawn and Demolition Dash for iOS devices, the latter of which later received the Best Handheld Game award at the German Developer Awards (Entwicklerpreis). The betas of Bigpoint’s Ramacity (thanks for that big chance guys) and Ravenburger’s Memory® World Tour started.
After a rather calm summer, my article in Making Games magazine was released right on time for my favourite Gamescom so far… I had so many good chats there, so many chances, some of them wild and surprising… This year’s Gamescom will hopefully be as much fun…
I held my first lecture at SAE/Quantm Institute, making it the 3rd school I gave a lecture at. The 4th will follow this year!
The rest of the year saw the releases of Happy Hills, Triple Trouble, Dungeons – The Dark Lord , Rettungswagen Simulator and Sengoku (by the Swedish publisher Paradox). A totally new kind of job was the sound design for the music video by the band Nachtmahr.
We were also asked to help our friends at Games Academy with audio for the games Gargoyles, Nocturne and Call of Carlos. Anytime guys!
Very happy we are for the cooperation with our friends at Dynamedion, who were so kind to take us on board for a few projects which are mostly unannounced – yet!
And lastly, greetings to the games we worked on in 2011 that are still unannounced (many they are), to those we are working on (hello Asylum, The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav and Forge of Empires) and to those that will come out in 2012 (we have some big surprises in store), and to those sad few ones whose future is a bit dark at the moment…
A BIG THANK YOU to our friends, clients & contacts for the great games you create, for allowing us to help making them, and for your general existence 🙂 Wish you all a great year and who knows – maybe we’ll work together on a project in 2012?
Cheers,
Daniel, with best wishes of Dominik, Heike and Simon
Music and Sounds for Forge of Empires
It was about time I finally mention that we provide music and sounds for Forge of Empires, a new strategy online game by the awesome folks at InnoGames. It’s a browser strategy game with a few twists…
Check out the trailer below, or go to the website to play the beta.
Mission Genesis: Closed Beta launched
Knights in Space! We have provided sounds and some of the music for Mission Genesis, a scifi online game by Chimera and DTP. Check out their website:
Music and sound for The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav
Happy to introduce you to a game we have accompanied the last year: The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav is another adventure game by Daedalic, and it’s based on a fantasy license: The Dark Eye (“Das Schwarze Auge”) is the biggest pen & paper franchise in Germany, and renowned around the world. The game is a beautiful fairytale fantasy adventure, Daedalic at their best…
Our soundtrack is something special, too, I think. We were joined by a few live musicians for a calm, emotional fairytale soundtrack…Thanks to Kathy Lestrémau (Violin), Sarah M. Newman (Vocals, Fiddle) and Angelika Voigt (Harp).
Here is a little taste:
We will talk more about it soon, but let’s just note that the release is scheduled for March 23rd in Germany, and here is the website if you want to see more.
Demolition Dash gets Best Handheld 2011 Award
Hi guys, Demolition Dash received the Best Handheld 2011 award @ Deutsche Entwicklerpreis (German Developer Award). Congratulations!
Also a friendly nod to the other games we helped with, which were nominated and didn’t quite win: Ramacity (Best Social Game) & Dungeons (Best Game).
Sound Design for Music Video by Nachtmahr
Thomas Rainer (of L’Ame Immortelle fame) asked us to provide sound design for the music video of his band “Nachtmahr”. The provocative, military-styled, girls-in-uniform loving band has invaded dance floors and festivals around the world, so I am quite proud to post the video here. I did the SFX, the ambient music at the beginning, ADR and foley.
Guest lecture at SAE
Yesterday I had the honour to speak at the SAE Institute in Munich about (guess!) Game Music. We talked about what Game Music is and can be and about the problems actually occuring all the time between composers and game developers. We ended with a 2 hours Q&A part, which was lucky for me filled to the end with questions and me ranting.
Thanks to all present, and for the invitation. It’s a lot of fun, and I at least think I get better and better with those lectures, looking forward to more of them…
Out: Dungeons – The Dark Lord
Another game with our music and our sounds is out: “Dungeons – The Dark Lord”, by Realmforge/Kalypso, a standalone add-on to #1 charts hit “Dungeons”. 🙂
Check out the trailer with Dominik’s music (not the Kalypso logo though):
Out: Sengoku (Paradox Interactive)
Sengoku by our friends of Paradox in Sweden is out! We provided 22 songs for this massive feudal Japanese Strategy RPG. Check out this release trailer with one of Dominik’s tracks:
Happy Hills is out for Iphone and Ipad
Yea! It’s out! And it’s free to play!
Happy Hills is a wild action-physics-puzzler, with our dynamic music, sound effects – and voices by my son and me 😀 Grab the game for free, or check out this trailer:
Demolition Dash for free and #1
Hi guys, Demolition Dash is currently #1 on the App Store among the free apps in a few countries, and as it’s a game we did all audio for, and I am a little proud of the results, I can recommend it again to you, it’s for free until Sunday!
It looks awesome, and has among other things music in 10 different styles! Not bad for iOS me thinks, ey?
Our Article in Making Games
Making Games Magazine is the leading game developer magazine in Germany. I was asked to write an article about audio outsourcing and the relationship between outsourcing partner and developer. Turned out to be 4 pages, so if you are interested, check it out. -Daniel
Making Games August 2011
New Asylum gameplay video and Knights Dawn update
A Knights Dawn (Iphone/Ipad) has an update with new content, check it out (music & sounds by us).
A Knights Dawn
Asylum by Senscape (Argentina) now revealed a first gameplay video in which you can hear the first tracks of music we prepared (see below). The game is far from done, it’s a preview, and you can’t see anything of the story yet (believe me, by far the best about the game. The best script I ever was given to read).
Memory® World Tour in Open Beta
We are happy to announce that we provided the music for Memory® World Tour by Ravensburger Digital. It is now in open beta and playable in Facebook, check it out, and give it a nice rating if you like 😀 Fitting to the game, my music tries to evoke a feeling of international travel, vacation and warmth… I think it works out quite well, what do you think?
http://apps.facebook.com/memoryworldtour/
Ramacity Open Beta has started
Open Beta for Bigpoint’s Ramacity has started. Check out the game, our music, and the first sounds and voices here: http://www.ramacity.de/
Knights Of Soundtrack 