Hello everyone! I’m here today to post some info about the sound design of Qasir al-Wasat.

The concept behind Qasir soundscape came mainly from a perception trait of it’s protagonist. It is not from this realm, and thus have a tenuous distancing posture that brings a layered perception based on its opinions/view of this realm. This generated a scale: things of its realm are less abstract than our objects that are less abstract than our animals that are less abstract than humans. Unfortunately, animals had to wait due to scope limiting and they are planned to appear only in a eventual Qasir sequel. Everything that appears on the game is put somewhere in such scale of meaning before producing it.

Objects have a blend of normal and reverse sounds, animals would be reversed with a strong filter, and humans are so abstract that the they lose completely it’s reference. Every sound emitted by them are heard as a musical note (thanks to Prokofiev and the first animation sound designers). But it is not music itself, as it lacks several attributes. However, one attribute not missing is that every note is under a specific scale, strongly referenced to the Arabic Maqam, an ethnical “”melodic mode”" from traditional arabic music based on improvisation. Also, each distinct kind of human has its own instrument, all of them chosen to better represent the feel of the ambience of the game.

One of the biggest issues we had during the audio development of the game is that everything was… empty, dull empty. We did want to create an eerie atmosphere and work with the solitude of the protagonist in a not so comfortable zone, but… it got too dull. Fortunately, two masterpieces got into my hand (or.. ear =). One was the indie game Limbo and the other was Tarkovski’s movie Stalker. Both of them has a very similar approach to soundtrack, as they don’t really work with music in the common sense. But they create GREAT atmosphere with sound only, and we adapted several aspects according to what we have learned with them.

Wanna check it out how things are now? Download our public demo or pre-order it on Qasir’s website! ;]

In this same day, 4 years ago, some friends got together because it would be fun to do a game. Why not? As we planned that it would take only one single day every week? One game, it shouldn’t be that difficult…

4 years have passed since that original idea. A single project transformed into an entrepreneurship that would make projects, several of them. The team perceived together, learning from their mistakes as making games turned out to be a little bit more complicated than it seemed.

Now, after a few projects and one release soon to come, we thank everyone that supported us in this walk that is, still, only in the beginning.

=]

Ahoy folks!

So, as you can see we have “finished” two projects in this last trimester. But we have to use the quotes here because there is still one last step so we can call a project finished: make it avaliable in a game portal so that you, our beloved player, can invest into our future games while playing the current ones. (i.e: to buy ; )

For several strategic reasons thoroughly discussed by our team, we decided to make available the current versions of Semblante and Mnemons for free here in the website. Nevertheless, we have implemented this fantastic PayPal’s donation button (just by your side, if you are viewing this post in owr website). It is quite fast to create an account and contribute with the ammount that you feel it’s fair enough!

If you enjoyed our games, or if you like Aduge, and wanna see more results sooner: just click it! x ) Many thanks, pal!

Hey all!

Although our activities has slowed down and Tsar Project is taking a little nap, Adugans are right now in full speed finishing our Semblante’s port to Scirra’s Construct, along with a quite big remake. (For first time readers, you can find some more information about Semblante throughout our blog)

All this effort is to take part at this year’s IGF (Independent Games Festival), mostly to obtain valuable insights with their feedbacks as Tsar will be a fierce opponent next year! ;B

Soon you’ll be able to check out the results! For now, you can check our team in a serious decision meeting.

Young! For all of you that wants to understand better what the hell is a sound designer, we found an interesting text - but portuguese only… (Portugal portuguese, btw).

We will start a brief-post-serie about what Tsar sounds will be and from where all this idea came from.
To begin with listen to Peter and the Wolf from Prokofiev (with a bonus: this version has Bowie as narrator!). It’s a composition written in 1936 at Soviet Union in which each character is represented by an instrument. More info at wikipedia, an interesting reading.

And what about Tsar? Yeah, this idea was our starting point, mix it with the game’s conceptualization and in the end each character will be represented by a different instrument!
Wtf? How can this happen?
Stay tuned, more sound updates soon!

After 11 months working on Tsar Project we are finally “ending” the pre-production stage. The pre-production was all about a discovery process, mostly the first opening of a double diamond process,  that in a way validates the early concept stages.

What must mark the beginning of production is a stage where we do not have any kind of uncertainties or doubts and can work on a “final” version of the software, without getting around different ways of doing things and without any big scope or feature changes.

The Production Planning we discussed the answers to questions that our testing and experimenting didn’t solve 100% and even the ones that testing and experimenting themselves had raised. The end result of our planning was excellent. More details… on the next chapters!

By the way, the one posting is Marcel Pace, executive producer of Tsar Project. (I rarely post here… You know, sound, music, project managing and process managing… kinda busy here, hehe! )