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AGL Releases the Lost Garden

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Scott Smallwood

The Audio Games Lab is excited to announce the final release of The Lost Garden, a 3D first-person audio puzzle game designed by Scott Smallwood, Nicolás Arnáez, and Jessa Gillespie. This game has been in development for 3-4 years now, off and on, with many related side projects and pieces as well. Although some early versions have been available for some time, today marks the release of the final complete version, available to download for FREE for either MacOS or Windows computers.

The Lost Garden features five levels of sonic exploration in a seemingly abandoned underground urban environment. As a stranger here, the player explores the soundscape of a world cut off from nature, perhaps a future us, by interacting with sonic puzzles that open doors to new areas, and, ultimately, the lost garden. Through listening and interacting with sounds, collecting objects, and exploring, players are encouraged to consider the fragile nature of our natural soundscapes, and to speculate on what the story might be for the abandoned game world. As puzzles are solved, clues are revealed, and doors to new areas are opened, ultimately leading the perceptive player outdoors, to the lost garden.

Special thanks to my primary collaborators Nicolás Arnáez, who contributed to much of the sound and music in the game, as well as puzzle concepts, and Jessa Gillespie, who created the majority of the maps and graphics in the game, followed by my own clumsy efforts with both custom graphics and licensed assets. Thanks also goes to composer Stephan Moore, who also contributed sounds, music, and puzzle ideas; to performers Chenoa Anderson (piccolo), Joel Taylor (shakuhachi, suling), Guillaume Tardif (violin), Yue Deng (violin), Leanne Maitland (viola), and Colin Ryan (cello); and visual artists Sean Caulfield, Peter Rockwell, Sean Graye Xavier, Benton-C Bainbridge, and Madeleine Gallagher for their contributions as well.

In addition to the game itself, we are also releasing The Lost Garden soundtrack album with the main musical pieces featured in the game, with music by Scott Smallwood, Nicolás Arnáez, and Stephan Moore.

This game, along with MANY other games, musical pieces, and installation projects, was funded in part by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), the Edmonton Arts Council (EAC), and the Sound Studies Institute (SSI).

Evidence creates prototype maze game as an opening “track” for upcoming album.

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Scott Smallwood
Evidence: The Way In

As a duo, Evidence, a duo of sound artists and performers featuring Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood, has collaborated over the past 20 years on a variety of projects, including hundreds of live performances worldwide, several full-length LP albums on several different labels, and multichannel installations.

We have both been fascinated and captivated for years by the possibilities of video games as a medium for exploring music and sound, which is one of the reasons for the initial establishment of the Audio Games Lab in 2017.

This work was begun as multichannel installation we were creating for a the Sonorities Festival in Belfast in April of 2020, based on a recording project we did in 2018 at The Tank in Colorado. Due to covid-19, our plans were thwarted as the festival cancelled, and we were unable to travel. As we contemplated a new way to think about this project, we became excited by the possibility of using this material to create a kind of videogame-album hybrid.

We will be writing more about our compositional process in an upcoming paper, and will be working over the next couple of years on a full-fledged album game containing several levels as “tracks,” in which we experiment with spatial composition in a gameplay environment.

Meanwhile, this prototype, The Way In, is available to try out, and we hope new music lovers and gamers alike will give it a try and let us know your thoughts!

Audio Games Lab game cabinet officially installed in FAB/Hub Mall Pedway at the University of Alberta

Posted on June 7, 2020 by Scott Smallwood

The Audio Games Lab is happy to report a successful public year of operation for the Audio Games Cabinet, aka Super Paulino, albeit stunted by the recent covid events. This past summer we officially moved it from the quiet corner hallway niche outside of our lab to a much more public location on campus: the pedway between the Fine Arts Building and Hub Mall!

Currently, the cabinet contains one game: Super Paulino, containing seven levels of play, each with custom music and sound effects created by University of Alberta students. The game is a Mario-inspired platformer game in which sonic collecting and exploration are key. The game can also be played via the www web-GL version on this site.

The cabinet will eventually feature other student-led game projects that focus heavily on novel uses of sound.

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