Macrospace overview - www.macrospace.com

Founded in 2001, Macrospace is one of the world’s leading developers in the expanding global market for mobile games. With over 30 award-winning titles published to date, Macrospace is responsible for some of the most innovative and popular games titles available to mobile gamers. Macrospace publishes games under its own brand, and also in partnership with Cartoon Network, part of Turner Broadcasting Systems Inc. With expertise in Java, i-mode, BREW, Mophun and Symbian, Macrospace is at the forefront of cross-platform, cross-handset multiplayer and connected gaming.

To date, over 10 million mobile users around the world have paid-for Macrospace games on their handsets, with new games being added regularly through major carriers including Vodafone, Orange and O2 in Europe, Singtel, Maxis, DTAC in Asia and Verizon, AT&T and US Cellular in North America.

Audio for mobile games

As with PC and console games, audio is an intrinsic part of the gaming experience on mobile phones. When developing mobile games, the audio component isn’t just an afterthought: skilled use of audio can add much greater depth to the whole game experience. Sound effects can be used to give the player audio queues to help with puzzles or tricky actions, or to indicate when a critical game event is about to commence, like an end of level challenge, or an in-game milestone.

Fatal Force from Macrospace: a focus on quality and innovation across graphics, audio and gameplay

At Macrospace great care and effort is taken over the integration of audio into the overall game ‘experience’. The composition of theme music and sound effects starts when the game is still in the concept stage: it’s here where the game developer needs to decide how audio will be used in conjunction with the gameplay events. The result of this is an audio ‘map’ of the game, which is then used as a development guide while the game code is written.

This doesn’t mean that mobile games are limited to the simple beeps and bloops of retro 8Bit games, with which the mobile space is still compared. With their latest title, ‘Fatal Force: Earth Assault’ Macrospace has brought a new level of quality and depth to their game thanks to the power and flexibility of the Beatnik Audio Engine.

Beatnik’s MIDI-based audio offers developers a number of benefits. It allows them to continue using the audio authoring and production tools and techniques that they are familiar with and also to reuse existing content. Also as the audio is MIDI based it allows for extremely small file sizes, which can be sent over the air without compromising audio experience quality or bloating game files.

The engine’s capabilities are also accessed via standard APIs, dramatically reducing the development effort required to deploy games across all devices which support these standard APIs.

Kristian Segerstråle, Head of Products and Services at Macrospace, explains the audio development process in more detail:

“With Fatal Force we had an opportunity to be far more adventurous with the audio because of the capability of the latest handsets, most markedly the Nokia 6600. These new handsets allow us to access far more of the audio system from a Java environment, meaning that we could move away from a single looped audio track, and instead dynamically change the background music to match specific events within the game. On previous devices you were really very constrained in what you could achieve.

“With this game we decided to really make use of this feature, and have created distinct themes for each of the game levels as well as for the boss battles that happen at certain points in the game. This has created a lot more atmosphere when playing, and the feedback we have had from consumers has been really positive.

“In total the size of the audio file on the 6600 is around 15k; that may not sound a lot, but it’s 10% of the entire game file. We think it has really helped us to produce a distinct and exciting mobile game – it’s seemingly small things like good audio that can make the difference between a good game and a great one.”

About Beatnik - www.beatnik.com

Beatnik licenses scalable, standards-based structured audio software solutions for mobile devices, which enable rich multimedia content delivery and an enhanced user experience for games and device interaction. Beatnik markets its core software technology and audio content development tools to mobile device manufacturers and a community of creative professionals. Incorporated in 1996, Beatnik was founded by musician and composer Thomas Dolby Robertson.

Beatnik®, Beatnik Audio Engine™, BAE™, mobileBAE™, and RMF® are trademarks of Beatnik, Inc. All rights reserved. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.