Hey, what's up everyone!
I've been trying to amp up the game audio education at my university. There's a massive availability of film students over here (NYU), and thus plenty of films in need of scoring and sound design. But, the same can certainly not be said for games. We have a single game audio course which is supposed to be pretty good, as well as a
graduate (darned master's and PhD candidates get all the fun) game scoring course in the works, but it keeps getting pushed back.
So, I've started up this NGAMA thing--the NYU Game Audio and Music Assocation--that fund raises by hosting Guitar Hero parties, educates music composition and music technology students about techniques and trends in game audio, and tries to foster and facilitate collaboration on game development projects.
The collaboration part is what I think would be the most valuable:
actual experience working on game audio. Problem is, it's difficult and time consuming trying to get a hold of the computer science department, the art department, the new game theory & design department at Tisch, the polytechnic school, etc. and many people are either unaware that games exist, or aren't interested in making any with people outside of the circle of colleagues they already know.
So! Next idea: Our film scoring department has a gigantic collection of short student films that are stored on a network drive that students can access, download, and score. I'm thinking it'd be great to get a collection of games that either lack a whole ton of audio to begin with, or have had all the audio stripped out. I thought to myself, "Where could I find a ton of games?" And naturally, I thought: TGC! Especially since DGDK, and now DBPro are free, NGAMA can amass a collection of games and hold game scoring/sound design events and competitions.
Which brings me to the main point of my post.
Are there any of you game makers here who have games that are at least somewhat complete, and would be willing to contribute them to an educational effort? Giving students the source would be ideal, since then they could learn the structure of game code and even implement their own adaptive audio systems if they pick up DB or GDK/C++. However, there's always the paid plugins to consider, in which case we can't just go tossing expensive plugins around university networks, so just an executable with the media files not embedded could suffice.
Any takers, comments, or criticism? I'd love to know what you guys think about this. I'll likely approach other communities for the sake of having a diverse catalog of development tools to learn and work with, but TGC's got a great community and awesome software, so I figured I should come here first.
