When Aleph’s development finally fell apart, the four founding members of Fishbeat decided then and there that the dream would not die.  We would release a successor to Synaesthete under Fishbeat, and we would do it our way.  With a great new soundtrack being created by William Towns, and an eye-blowing visual style, Pew Pew Pew is the culmination of that goal.

We’re all working 9-5 jobs now to pay the bills, so development is a little slower than last time.  But it’s also entirely a project of passion.  Just Fishbeat, making the game we want to make.  We hope you’ll enjoy it.

We’re shooting for mid-late summer 2011.  You can see preview materials for the title at http://pewpewpew.fishbeat.com

Well, we only have one trailer right now, but we’ll be updating it soon.  Some of the stuff in here is actually old already!

P3 teaser from Fishbeat on Vimeo.

Time for some screen-shots! Come with us now as we show you around the first level of the first world of Pew Pew Pew!
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Well, now that this IGF link is up, it’s time for Fishbeat to open up about our new project.

Expect some posts tonight and tomorrow for media and an introduction to our newest title and true follow-up to Synaesthete: Pew Pew Pew!
The Zaikman and his world have evolved.  Get ready for a new level of multitasking challenge!

What’s that you say? Synaesthete’s soundtrack is totally awesome and you want to be able to listen to it whenever you want? Well – you’re in luck!  These wonderful pieces of audio were composed by one William Towns, Fishbeat’s technical director and audio guru.

All Tracks – Single Download

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Here is a collection of videos taken by ourselves and others, found on the glorious conglomeration of videos known as YouTube:

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Follow me now for a visual tour of our first game, the student/indie title known as “Synaesthete”.  Click on any image to view full-size! (of course)
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Well folks, it seems like Synaesthete’s page on DigiPen has gotten lost in some sort of site upgrade…But no worries, that just means we’ll have to bring it over to Fishbeat proper! So expect some posts related to our ‘first child’ today as we build out the pages. Will you join us for a trip down Memory Lane?

A conversation between Andy and I a couple weeks ago sparked a new addition to the Fishbeat engine: support for MIDI controllers as input devices. We already support keyboard, mouse and gamepad input, but it seemed appropriate for a music game engine to also recognize the industry standard for transmitting musical data electronically.

As an aside, it’s interesting to consider the possible applications of a MIDI keyboard in terms of level creation and world building. Consider that most prototypical content  creation tools concern themselves with object placement and modification in a virtual world. The majority of actions in 3D Studio Max, for example, consist of manipulating various abstract widgets via key presses, mouse clicks and mouse movement. The computer keyboard, in this case, has been demoted to a panel of buttons, with mostly arbitrary functionality assigned to each key. A device intended to be used for forming words and constructing sentences is now a dumb operating terminal. Why not replace it with something more suited to the task?

There is a plethora of knobs and buttons and sliders available on a MIDI keyboard, all of which would lend themselves well to manipulating widgets in a more intuitive way. Turning a knob to rotate an object in three dimensional space feels so much more natural than using your mouse to drag a slider back and forth. I expect that our future content generation tools will take advantage of this kind of device, which I’m sure will be the topic of a future post.

As Andy was wiring up the input engine to support MIDI, I started forming a sandbox in our engine in which to test these new changes. Sure, we could do something boring like using printf() to output the note index or velocity when a key press is detected, but it’s hard to resist playing with a new toy…

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It begins!

My latest obsession/side-project has been revolving around digital organics – that is, a system of generating trees, shrubs, flowers, etc. on the computer.   This all emerged from a desire to make a small, simple tree widget.  As I worked away, two ideas arose that inspired me to develop this into a larger, more robust system for generating and visualizing organic structures.  I’ve been plugging away at this for around two and a half weeks now, and while still early in development, there is enough going on now for me to write about.

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