Michael Bartnett

Sentient (Play Eternal) from Michael Bartnett on Vimeo.

Sentient is an unpublished PSN/XBLA title that I worked on from April to August 2011 with the cool guys at Play Eternal. Our audio team consisted of Mike Worth and Adam Schneider working on music and sound design, with me implementing the FMOD Designer API into the Vision Engine and Scaleform.

Although Vision already had a robust audio backend, we really wanted to be able to use FMOD Designer, so I did the programming to replace Vision’s default FMOD implementation and add support for FMOD Designer in the level editor. Since we were using Scaleform for UI, I also needed to make sure that the audio encoded in our FLV cutscenes was going through our instance of FMOD. We had the opportunity to do a small writeup on our audio system on Trinigy’s blog (since Trinigy was recently bought by Havok, their developer blog post series appears to have disappeared). That was then linked to on FMOD.org.(look for the article called “Tuning In – Combining Vision with Sound 15-06-2011). I’m a huge fan of the design of FMOD’s API–it’s just so clean and conceptually clear! Suffice it to say, I was on cloud nine when I saw they had linked our humble post.

Click the image to go to a page where you can play the game, read the instructions, or visit our Global Game Jam page to download a build. This game is compiled against Flash Player 11. This version is what we submitted on the final day of jamming. There’s another one in the works with cleaned up effects, many more levels, new backgrounds, and “sexier codez” (scientific term).

The 2012 Global Game Jam was a lot of fun. At first the theme, Ouroboros, had everyone confused, but before long plentiful tie-ins to game mechanics seemed to abound. I worked with Stefan Woskowiak, Kendall Noble, David Turchin, and Burak Karakas again. We were also fortunate to have Rahil Patel join us on Saturday.

For this game, I had a much more clearly defined role for myself. Burak makes awesome music, so we decided to just have him compose all the tunes. Then, he and I split up the work for sound effects. He took a little more, because I needed time to hook up the audio code. I also took on the responsibility of getting DAME working with our levels. It wasn’t terribly sophisticated code, but it allowed Stefan to stay up all night clicking together little tilemaps that could get turned into levels for the game.

Read on to hear about the audio implementation.

The MIDIdial homepage: mididial.bartnett.com

The weekend of October 2nd last year me and my friend Dalia Coss rolled up to the HackNY 2011 Fall Hackathon, and won. Our hack was a webserver that would interact with Twilio and allow you to transform your phone into a MIDI controller via a touch tone menu. It doesn’t even have to be a cell phone. We’d like to thank Andrew Montalenti for showing us the Tornado framework for Python and Rob Spectre for letting us bug him all night with questions about the Twilio API. Also, shout out to Hacker League for making an awesome hackathon platform and testing it in the field for the first time there.

It was called midiPhon originally but some people with an existing iPhone app named midiPhon sent us a nastygram, so we’ve since renamed it to MIDIdial. We got some fun press for it, people tweeted how thought they cool it was, and we were mentioned in a couple of articles.  Read on for info about how we did it.

This year’s Global Game Jam proved to be another awesome time. I had the pleasure of working with Stefan Woskowiak, David Turchin, Alex Krasij, Zhaowen Zeng, Kendall Noble, Athena Anderson, and Burak Karakas. And we ROCKED it. In fact, although we didn’t get any awards this year, we were invited by Arthur Ward to show off our game at Babycastles’ “Home Sweet Babycastles” exhibition/concert/crazy chiptune madness game party. Somewhere (Athena’s got it) there’s a picture of Ary Warnaar from Anamanaguchi playing our game and having a great time doing so.

The game is called World of Spacecraft: Extinction. And you can play it by clicking on the image below:

Update (10/8/2010): Deceptive Platformer: BABYCASTLES EDITION is the build that we had on display for Babycastles at Chashama. It takes the newer music system, but retains the old sequence of 4 stages. We know you love that last jump at the end–it’s back! Also, we had tried to make a less obvious name than Deceptive Platformer, but Reverser never seemed to stick.

Here is the game I’ve been working on polishing for the last couple of weeks.  Reverser Deceptive Platformer started as a Global Game Jam game, winning Best Overall Game at the NYU Jam Site. You can check out our GGJ Profile, play the old version, or click the link below this screenshot to play the latest version. If you play the work in progress, be sure to see what happens if you keep falling off the platforms during the first couple of levels. If you manage to get to the advanced levels, I’m afraid the “finale” music will loop continuously, as these levels were added to the build after the music states had been written.

Click Here To Play Work-In-Progress Version of Reverser

In Spring 2009 I took Audio for Video I with Langdon Crawford. Our final project was to recreate the sound for a 5 minute clip from a movie, so I chose an action sequence from Hancock. My onlyregret was that I didn’t have time to score the movie myself (there were a LOT of muzzle flashes to cover), so I chose music from a couple of my favorite game composers as temp tracks. Then again a lot of the bullet shots are a little too hot, and I could use a few more pings . . . but anyway, be sure to watch the second half! Brendan McGrady did an incredible job voicing Eddie Marsan’s character.

Hancock Soundtrack Reconstruction from Michael Bartnett on Vimeo.

WaterAid Mixology is a sound composer/visualizer application on Facebook in which players collect sounds and build and share songs while supporting the efforts of WaterAid.

Recently I composed 42 looped music stems to be included as an “instrument” with others that players can use to create their own songs. These songs can then be shared with friends to be included on other songs, making a sort of sandbox remix community in your friend network that spread awareness about WaterAid’s projects and mission.

My friend, Ema Ryan, had been working with the online video project, 8 Billion Lives, making a beautiful film about her grandfather. As a followup, she filmed and interviewed David Burke, the famous chef and restauranteur. She needed some music, so I composed some cues that I thought would highlight Mr. Burke’s unique combination of sophistication, wise-cracking humor, and down-to-earth love for cooking. The video has since been taking offline, but I still have the track up on Soundcloud.