Other nominees in the category include The Unfinished Swan, Dear Esther, Deadlight and Solitaire Blitz.

The award show takes place on March 28th as part of the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.

The nominees list is posted here and here and a few other places I’ll link to eventually.

WORLDS OF WANDER is a PLATFORM GAME CREATION TOOL that lets you build and share levels, worlds, and whole game experiences with other players. But making a game can be daunting, so it starts with a COMPLETE GAME for you to mess with — the spiritual successor to Commander Keen — SECRET SPACESHIP CLUB! You can read more about this at the Kickstarter page here

Tom asked me to write some music for this game, which I’m extremely excited about. Also contributing to the soundtrack will be Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland) who was responsible for the Fez soundtrack (in addition to many other games).

There are 10 different apps in all, ranging from language apps (Spanish, German, Italian, French, Chinese) to SAT vocabulary to Math and Geography. Musically, we created a theme/melody as the “MindSnacks theme” and then recreated it for each app to reflect that apps’ lesson, so the Spanish app has a salsa sounding theme, the German app has a polka theme song etc, but they all share the same melody.

Each app has several mini games, each with their own unique music and sfx bundle. To date, MindSnacks has been the top grossing educational app on iTunes.

An article I wrote on the audio development of the Loot Drop/Ubisoft title, Ghost Recon Commander was published today on Gameaudio101.com. I discuss the reconciling of creating a core-game’s audio soundscape with Facebook game expectations and provide a lot of audio examples, discussion of the game score, the VO, the Foley and Sound Design along with some of the thought process that went on behind the scenes. Click here to check it out!

UPDATE: This article was also posted to Gamasutra and promoted to the front page as a “Featured Post”

I just created a Souncdloud set with several different music reels and wanted to post it up here. It’s mostly game music, but there are a few library pieces, and music for other media, such as Nvidia (GTC, and Project Shield etc).

Idle Games‘ Video Poker Tour is available on iOS, and I provided all of the sounds for this game, including all of the retro, espionage big band flavored musical stingers. I also worked on Idle Games‘ Idle Worship game a couple years ago. Here’s a link to iTunes for this one.

GREE released MLB Full Deck, an official MLB licensed card game. I provided the sounds and some music (though there is some music in this title that I did not write). MLB Full Deck is a universal iOS game available on the App store. Not to mention, I did all the ‘umpire’ and ‘food vendor’ voices!

MobilityWare released an update to their very popular Android game, graBLOX, with well over a million downloads on Google Play. The new update includes several new worlds, a couple of which feature some new music I wrote (my level music includes tuba, for what it’s worth). I also created some voices for the BLOX characters so they have a bit more personality now. Woohoo! Here’s the link to Google Play for graBLOX

Lastly, The Playforge released new versions of of their popular games, Zombie Farm 2 and Tree World on iOS universal, which have expansions that feature more of my music and sound design. Zombie Farm has over 15 million downloads. Watch out for Dr. Groundhog!

It will be a 1st person perspective, for Mac/PC/Linux made on Unity.

The $30 commitment will include the soundtrack (that I’ll be writing/producing/sweating) but there are all sort of fun rewards, including a day at Disneyland with Tom, Brenda and John Romero, or they’ll show up on your doorstep and deliver the game to you on a red velvet pillow.

Anyhow, I’m quite excited about this project and the Kickstarter is going very well so far. Check out the video below!

UPDATE: this kickstarter has been cancelled, and they are rethinking the concept before presenting it again…

SEPTEMBER 17th – Game Design Con in San Francisco at the Fairmont Hotel

Speaking on early audio integration into game design, showing some examples where early preproduction meetings led to fun audio design decisions that integrated nicely into the game design. Here is the link for GameDesignCon

SEPTEMBER 26th – I will be moderating the G.A.N.G Summit – Philosophy of Music Design in Games: Portal 2 and FEZ

Audio for Video Games Workshop Sept, 26th, 2012 | 7.00 – 10.00 PM at Pyramind in SF, CA

Click here to register for the event, FREE for GANG members

And here is the description:

GANG & Pyramind are proud to present an evening with two of the game industry’s most interesting people. Composer/sound maker/game maker, Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace)discusses his philosophy behind his soundtrack for the indie game hit, FEZ. FEZ gained a lot of press, not only for it’s many pre-release awards but also for it’s inclusion in the film, INDIE GAME, The Movie.

Our other speaker, Mike Morasky (VALVE) will discuss his audio/music work in the award winning PORTAL 2, which blurred the line between music and sound design, and had some extremely clever audio implementation that was deeply integrated into the game design. Following the talks will be a panel and Q/A session to discuss some of their game audio philosophies in further depth.

This one should be really fun.

Oct 25th – GameSoundCon – San Francisco

On Thursday afternoon, October 25th at GameSoundCon I’ll be on a game composer’s panel with Tom Salta and Lennie Moore. If you are interested in attending GameSoundCon, you can still register to go at their website here. Brian Schmidt puts this excellent conference together every year for those who are interested in learning more about a career in game audio. It’s aimed towards students and those in traditional media (film/TV/music recording) who would like to learn about the game industry and the different approach needed to create audio for games.

Oct 27th – AES San Francisco

I’ll be taking part in the SPARS sponsored speed mentoring session on Saturday Oct. 27th from 3:30-5:30, and during AES I will take part in a game audio demo derby panel (taking place on Sunday Oct 28th at 10:45 am-12:45). You can sign up for the speed mentoring here and there are other great folks participating in this as well, in many different areas of audio, not just game audio.