Where Cards Fall 
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WCF Version UpdateNov 8, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsBackend clean up and version updateWhere Cards Fall is now available!Nov 4, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsWe are thrilled to share that Where Cards Fall is now available! In Where Cards Fall you build houses from decks of cards to solve challenging spatial puzzles. These houses will create pathways that allow you to traverse dream-like landscapes and reveal formative memories of the main character. The mechanics used to build these card houses may seem simple on the surface, but offer quite a bit of depth as the levels progress. Our team has been working to keep the creative gestural controls feeling natural on this new platform so that players of all levels of experience will be able to approach the game intuitively. What started as a USC student project of The Game Band’s Creative Director, Sam Rosenthal, led to a decade-long journey that saw many talented people lending their skills to make the vision a reality. The story of Where Cards Fall is truly as unique as the puzzles themselves. You can read more about it on The Game Band blog. In a way, the narrative of the game’s creation mirrors the coming-of-age narrative of the game, capturing the highs and lows of life as we change and grow. From the teams at Snowman and The Game Band, thank you for being along for this journey. And if this is your first time learning of the game, welcome! We can’t wait to hear what you think of Where Cards Fall. You can follow @wherecardsfall on social media to catch all upcoming news and reach out to let us know what you think of the game. Where Cards Fall—Coming November 4thOct 14, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsWe are excited to reveal that Where Cards Fall is coming to Steam November 4th. The game’s controls have been carefully configured for PC; a platform that was always envisioned as core to development, since the project’s inception nearly ten years ago. As our teams at The Game Band and Snowman prepare for the next chapter of the Where Cards Fall journey, we reflect on the making of the game and all of the talented individuals who helped make it happen at The Game Band (AKA the studio behind Blaseball). Check out previous recent news posts where we highlight the animations that brought the story to life and the hand-crafted audio that makes Where Cards Fall such an immersive experience. We're so excited for you to experience the meditative gameplay and inventive puzzles of Where Cards Fall in just a few short weeks’ time. Follow us on social media at @wherecards fall to stay tuned for further updates. - the Where Cards Fall team The Sounds of Where Cards FallJun 17, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsGame audio can be so immersive that it’s easy to overlook where the sounds in fact come from, let alone consider that a sound designer has spent time designing a unified experience for players. To achieve this seamlessness in the world of Where Cards Fall, audio director Kristi Knupp carefully crafted much of the audio from scratch, creating a collection of sounds that matched the tactility and organic feel of the game itself. We had some burning questions for Kristi about her creative process and hope you learn as much as we did from our conversation! - - - How did your background in music and audio engineering lead you to a career in game audio? I started playing the piano at age five. In my teenage years, I ventured on to drums, guitar and vocals. I started a few bands throughout that time. After high school, I attended Full Sail University for audio engineering. In 2004 moved out to Los Angeles and worked with world renown composer/DJ — Brian Transeau (BT). My jobs for him were many, including but not limited to, composers assistant, gear set up/tech and tour manager when on the road. In 2006, I graduated from Berklee College of Music and moved back to Los Angeles shortly thereafter. In 2008 I started my career in the game industry as a Quality Assurance Tester for Vivendi Games. A short four months later I landed my first audio job at Electronic Arts working on Boom Box Bash Party, and since then I’ve worked for a number of AAA game studios worldwide on various types of projects. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/27835411/103c6df7e0afd1342db9294a29c38956efb2e301.jpg What does your sound design process typically look like from pre-production through to production? During pre-production, I try to ensure the audio pipeline is being considered as early on as possible before custom tools get built out. Production tasks can range from taking on the role of a project manager, to the more hands-on technical and creative side. Creating and maintaining a road map of audio needs across the game Creating and maintaining a road map for dialogue/localization needs across the game Creating sounds for all categories of the game (Ambience, SFX, UI, etc) Hiring and working with composers Implementing all sounds, dialogue and music into the audio tool/game engine Audio QA on a regular basis to ensure audio is working properly in-game Managing other sound designers if budget allows for additional folks on the audio team Working with production and creative director as needed to ensure the style of the audio meets everyone’s expectations How did you create a whole language for Where Cards Fall? What was the process of recording it with the voice actors like? I created the language for Where Cards Fall by reading books and taking pieces of words and mashing them together. So like the beginning of one word and the end of another, for example. The next step was to figure out how many different length phrases would be most commonly used in the game. I would then mix and match diff...Behind the Frames of Where Cards FallJun 3, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsWhere Cards Fall has come a long way from the student project that it started as 9 years prior. The concept for the game evolved from paper prototypes into decks of animated cards that would still need to maintain a sense of tactility on screen. In addition to mastering the right feel for the controls, there was also a coming-of-age story that had to be told through the visual and audio elements of the game in hopes that it would offer players a moment to reflect on their own narratives. Welcome to our Behind The Game series, where we’ll be shining a light on the people and processes that made this happen. We got behind the frames with lead animator Cedric Adams to find out more about how he and his team helped bring life to the world of Where Cards Fall. - - - In your Pocketgamer interview, you mention that you started out in mostly commercial animation work before getting pulled into games. What’s the story there? My first job was for a commercial VFX studio in Knoxville, TN. When that job ended, I used all of the impressive pieces to make a post-college showreel. That reel steered my freelance career in a very different direction than working in games. I volunteered to work for a few indie game studios looking to hit their Kickstarter goals and slowly built a reel from those game assets. My freelance game reel was removed from Vimeo though and I lost all that content to show. I eventually took a contract film job and met the animator that would recommend me to work for The Game Band. Which tools do you use to animate and what do you recommend for someone starting out? I generally animate in Maya. Starting out, I recommend learning Maya or Blender as the free alternative. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/27835411/8002185a4ce7587358b87a434145b10955aaa18f.jpg What are the main methods for animation in games and which were used in the making of Where Cards Fall? There are two primary ways of animating in games. There’s hand key animation and then motion capture animation. Where Cards Fall was done with hand key animation, which just means that my animators and I had to make every action from scratch. What inspired your approach to animating the characters in the game? When I started animating for Where Cards Fall, I thought about the tone of movement someone would have while listening to Radiohead’s song House of Cards. House of Cards is a very chill, melodic song and it was a big reference for Sam, the Creative Director of The Game Band. I get a calm and gentle feeling from all the subtleties in that song so I tried to make all my animations calm, precise, and subtle. Beyond that, I animated what I thought looked best. What’s something a lot of people may not realize about the animation of Where Cards Fall? One weird little quirk about Where Cards Fall’s animation is that almost all of the character movement and facial animations were done separately. Around 99% of my team’s work was done on faceless characters. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/27835411/83a42db1fa4b56c1878a...Where Cards Fall is Coming SoonMay 25, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsWhere Cards Fall is coming to Steam 2021 and you can wishlist it right now. With its immersive audio, unique art style, and innovative controls for mouse and controller, we can’t wait for the Steam community to embark on their journey through Where Cards Fall. https://store.steampowered.com/app/589450/Where_Cards_Fall/ Sam Rosenthal, Creative Director of The Game Band (AKA the studio behind Blaseball), first started making the game over a decade ago as a student project. A lot has changed since these early days, but one thing that remained constant is that the game was being designed with PC in mind. It means a lot to us to bring the game to platforms it has long been envisioned for. You can follow @wherecardsfall on social media to catch more updates about the launch. Or jump into our Discord and let us know why you're excited to play: discord.gg/snowman. Until next time! The Where Cards Fall team {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/27835411/b243065c47b93b7417e1d712e1259b4daf23f21e.gifWhere Cards Fall - Narratives Puzzle-Adventure für PC und Nintendo Switch angekündigtOct 21, 2020 - pressakey.comSnowman und das kalifornische Entwicklerstudio The Game Band haben angekündigt, dass das Puzzle-Adventure Where Cards Fall im kommenden Jahr für PC und die Nintendo Switch erscheinen wird. Das "Slice of Life"-Spiel ist ein traumhaftes Stück Lebensgeschichte, in dem man Häuser aus Karten baut, um prägende » Komplette News auf pressakey.com lesen The Blaseball team are bringing their puzzle game to PC next yearOct 19, 2020 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun The Game Band are presently known as the orchestrators of Blaseball, an odd democratic simulation of a baseball league that I gather folks are quite fond of. For a slice of something quite different, the studio is releasing Where Cards Fall, a puzzle game originally prototyped a decade ago. It’s already out on Apple Arcade and is coming to PC and the Nintendo Switch early next year. (more…)
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