[Philip Lelyveld comment: this is the only 3D reference in the article.]
[Complex]
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Q-Games – PixelJunk 4AM
Audience Member: For Rowan. You use the Move controller for 4AM. Usually we see that when moving for multi-control games. It’s pretty easy to tell how it works, whether you’re sword fighting or shooting basketball, but with4AM, how exactly is the Move control used to manipulate the tracks and layers and all that stuff?
Rowan: That’s a good point. We’ve been struggling to communicate that exact point, because we’ve found still images and videos sometimes don’t do justice to how much control the player has over the music that’s playing. It uses the entire 3D space in front of the player like a cube, and it uses all of the x, y and z axes. It uses a rotation axis on z, as well. It uses the accelerometer, the gyro, the camera position; it uses absolutely everything. We exposed all of the parameters available to us on the Move and took all of it and said, “What can we make as an interactive piece of art with this controller that no one else has tried to do before?”
So when you see Baiyon playing it in the video, what he’s doing is he’s pulling in those loops or sequences of music out of the air and he’s adding them into the song and painting with them. Then he’s able to add DSP effects, things like a reverb or low and high pass filters. And he’s adding these filters onto different tracks in real-time while he’s playing. So it’s kind of like a cross between like your Ableton or your other sound editing software, but we’ve managed to distill it down and let you do it with the Move.
It’s kind of hard to describe. The best way to do it would be to go try it near the door after you’re done. After you’ve got it in your hand you can understand where it vibrates and where it comes to life, where there are different bits of music when you’re touching it. Touching the AR canvas that’s in front of it.
Robin: We had a similar problem with Flower, it was the same thing. You can’t really describe it unless you play it. If you see screenshots of it, it just looks like a pretty screenshot.
Read the full article here: http://www.complex.com/video-games/2011/10/panel-interview-indie-devs-talk-about-what-its-like-to-be-published-on-psn