Just recently the tower defense game "Shattered Colony: The Survivors" by Jonathon Lynn Duerig was released. It has been doing extremely well with more than 800,000 plays so far. It is currently the 'game of the week' on
Newgrounds and it placed pretty highly on Kongregate as well. We're glad we could support this game with an eerie zombie soundtrack.

The game is free to play - just google the name or find it e.g. at armorgames.com.

At this year's Olymptronica fair, Hans HiScore premiered a new idea: Creating the music for a video game WHILE the player is playing it!

In spite of big hits like Guitar Hero or Singstar, games completely designed upon music as a central element are still quite rare. There are wonderful ideas out there by independent designers and even some great indy games occasianally noticed during development competitions.

Thriving for deeper immersion of the player through emotional and responsive music, we're constantly talking to folks who develop innovative audio engines for computer games.

Some people ask: "Why do you at Hans HiScore use real instruments in your game audio instead of relying on cheaper samplers and software instruments?". We want to answer this question here.

Sorting any game audio artifact into a certain category can greatly help to organize production, spawn new ideas and create balanced and meaningful audio artifacts. The traditional framework to categorize game audio is a very production oriented one. It basically divides all game audio into

• speech
• effects
• music

On November 21st two representatives of Hans HiScore attended the periodic GamePlaces event in Frankfurt, Germany. This come together of the local game developer scene is always a good place to exchange ideas and opinions about music in games.