Brainpipe
A Plunge to Unhumanity
11.21.08
Yep.
The rumors (ahem) are true. There's a new Digital Eel PC game coming out soon. This one's called
Brainpipe (and I like it a lot).
Brainpipe is in the arcade game zone, and kind of retro. You fly through a psychedelic wormhole-like twisty tube avoiding abstract obstacles and collecting "glyphs" as colors, patterns, music and speed shift in intensity. There's no shooting or powerups, things we deliberately wanted to avoid as a kind of challenge.
I had a lot of fun contributing to Brainpipe's design with Bill and Iikka, and I'm proud to call it a true and equal collaboration. Everyone got neat ideas in that really helped to improve the basic game.
I had even more fun making music and sfx for the game. Artist Bill (
Phosphorous) contributed tracks too. Did you know he creates amazing soundscapes? True, and the stuff's great! Now, this "music"...A lot of it in the game is nontraditional, more ambient and uses techniques of
musique concrete, a realm of music involving found sounds and manipulated sounds that Bill and I have been into for a long time. Myself, since getting into composers like
Stockhausen and
Varese when I was a kid. Bill, falling into it naturally and doing it for fun, like jamming with multiple self-made ambient tracks playing in his art studio. Outer space, man!
You know, making this kind of music is fairly easy. The trick is putting it together in such a way that it doesn't make too many people want to throw up. Aha! It's dangerous. You're going on intuition and, to a great degree, giving it over to chance. You could end up with crap. But I don't think we did. The results in Brainpipe turned out really interesting. In fact, I think there are sonic surprises in store for folks who play the game all the way through to its conclusion.
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Originally Posted by James Sterrett
