Roddy Toomim

Welcome to audio.cagames.com! Hopefully you’ve reached this blog because you need some sort of sound or code for your game, video, movie, commercial or other project.  I am happy to be of service, so please get in touch with me directly (email below).  If you’re here on a quest for audio, please have a listen to the samples listed in the player to the right.

This is a blog as well, so you’ll find some chronicles of my work and discoveries I’ve made about myself as a musician, as well as my programmer side.

Contact Roddy: rtoomim (at) cagames (dot) com

Testimonials:

“Roddy was able to take the varying desires of our team’s requests and provide us with something that ultimately satisfied us all.  And on top of that, he delivered well head of schedule!”- Steve Westhoff, Whirled World Studios

“Very professional.  The music and sound effects fit the mood of what we were looking for exactly and the work was completed in a very timely manner.”- Joe and Vin Licari, Zero Emission Games

I’m actively looking for paid programming projects. Let’s do this thing!

Finally done with school (for programming). At least, as far as I know I am. I got approval for graduation at the middle of this semester. Let’s hope they keep their end of the bargain

Yet another repost from http://podcast.cagames.com

Finally, I got my hands on a PS Vita. I played the TGS build of Uncharted: Golden Abyss, which is a system exclusive. I can see why it’s difficult for games reviewers to get a sense of what a product (a game and system, in this case) will be like on launch just from playing a demo. The game demo was short, a bit buggy, but overall pretty impressive. The bug, if you’re wondering, involved Drake getting into a “ready” position to hoist an AI character onto a higher platform. The AI character proceeded to get stuck, and there was no way to cancel the canned animation.  Graphics from the Vita looked somewhere close to a 360, and possibly better, but it’s difficult to say with any certainty. There were high resolution textures, lots of simultaneous sounds, and a relatively smooth play experience. The demo isn’t enough to convince me that the system is worth buying, but then again, I’ve been soured by my PSP experience. I shouldn’t have to hack my system to access functionality I want it to have (to be specific, I want to play PS1 games I already own without having to buy them again). Hopefully, my annoyance will change with PS Suite.

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I like to share anything I write here, so I’m reposting my article from http://podcast.cagames.com:

Right now, if you want to make a game for the PlayStation3, you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an expensive development kit.  That same thing holds true, even if you just want to make some casual titles or PlayStation Minis!  It’s a different story for making PSP games as the devkit is quite a bit cheaper at $1500, but you’re still out of luck if you’re short on cash.  Luckily, Sony has seen the light (and the money signs), and is going to open the PS Vita as well as a few other platforms for use by the casual and low-budget indie developer.  I suppose I could have titled this “Garage Development Comes to the Masses,” but that’s already been done by the likes of XBox Live Indie Games, the PC and (last but not least) the short list of Apple iOS devices.  We heard about this new “hardware neutral” development environment in January of this year, but what does Sony plan to do with PlayStation Suite?
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I’m workin!  Can you believe it?

If you contact me, please allow at least 24 hours for me to get back in touch with you, as I may have other tasks yanking me in multiple directions.  This is not an affront to your importance!  You’re all important to me.

Heading to the Austin Convention Center in the morning so I can listen to and report back on interesting panels, discussions and roundtables!

See you all when the whirlwind decides to stop throwing small pieces of splintered wood at me!  Stop me and say, “Hi!” if you catch me either at GDC or ACL starting on Oct 8th!

A new song has been posted to the player on the right: Jewel’s “Foolish Games” as sung by my good friend (with a FREAKING AWESOME VOICE) Dawn Eminson, and recorded/mastered by yours truly. This is basically my first sung-vocals studio project and, in my humble opinion, believe it turned out pretty well.

Leave any recording/mastering-related critiques in the comments, if you’d like. I can certainly use it.

Note: the background track was not created by me, although I’m sure I could do something similar

It’s always good to have work to do! Thanks for hooking me up, Mark

Hope to be able to talk about the work going into this one at some point, as it’s certainly an interesting process.

The hugely popular Facebook game: Fantasy Kingdoms

My first major musical release, as defined by myself, has just taken place! Fantasy Kingdoms is a popular new game on Facebook with over 250,000 monthly players, and I was lucky enough to be chosen to provide them with an original score. Go check out the game if you’re of the Facebook gaming persuasion: http://apps.facebook.com/fantasykingdoms/

I hope you enjoy both the game and the audio!

The track for Fantasy Kingdoms was created with a number of tools and went through approximately seven iterations (there were minor changes I’m not counting which occurred in-between revisions) before we decided it was “complete”.  It was certainly an educational and interesting experience, as this was my first Facebook game for which to compose!

I’ll occasionally come back to the player on this site, listen to my old stuff and think, “That’s not half bad!” Yet other times (the majority of the time, actually), I think about how much I should have improved a track before releasing it into the wild, and that it was without a doubt below par for public consuption. Any other artists out there go through this see-saw effect when reviewing your old(er) works?