After having a great success with their previous N-GAGE mobile fighting game, One, Digital Legends developed this improved sequel, specially designed to push Nokia's new game platform N-GAGE graphic capabilities to its limits.

One Sequel won the Excellence in 3D International Mobile Gaming Award in its 2007 edition.

One Sequel won the Desarrollador_ES' Best Mobile Game award in its 2008 edition.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

One Sequel features a cross-platform audio engine and 3 hardware abstraction layers for 3 different platforms (PC/Windows, Symbian S60 and N-GAGE) The engine consists of a multichannel mixer based on an own message-based score format (Interactive Fast Translation Module), an own audio scripting system (Interactive Module Script, text-based) and an own uncompressed sample bank format (Isolated Sample Files & text-based Sample Lists) We also coded a module converter and a separate module optimizer to reduce sample data as much as possible. A MIDI converter supporting DLS or SF2 sample libraries might have been also possible, but wasn't done due to time constraints.

The engine was designed to keep CPU usage at a minimum. The setup used in the game (8 virtual stereo channels, 22050Hz 16-bit stereo output) needs 3.59% to 4.04% CPU raster time in a N73 reference unit. The engine features a 32-bit mixer with linear interpolation to prevent sample aliasing, a parametrizable environmental delay effect and interactive music capabilities to change between different fragments of music modules smoothly during the action.

INTERACTIVE MUSIC

One Sequel features 8 original tracks, 7 of them including interactive scripting. Tracks were composed recording real instruments (electric guitar and bass, keyboards and other ethnic instruments) and finally adapted to the engine's format. Almost all instruments were multi-sampled from different notes, fifths and chords and carefully processed through a complex pre-mixing stage to maximize the final sound quality. Samples were originally recorded at 48000Hz 24bit (DVD quality) and downsampled to 22050Hz (using 8 or 16 bits depending on its harmonic content to reduce overall sample data size) with a filter we specifically designed to keep high frequencies up, avoiding the usual loss of high range frequencies in most commercial programs' downsampling. Samples were also processed to avoid the resonance peaks between 2KHz an 3KHz found in most phones. However, we took a compromise between smoothing those peaks and keeping those bands on external earphones. Final sound quality could be much better in both systems if we could focus each system separately.

Music was composed with a special module editor and scripted in an own format. Combat music starts with a short prelude loop followed by a short transition to the action loops. We made 2 type of action loops that can be swapped depending on the character's distance. When characters are far, some rythmical elements are removed, when characters are near, they're brought back again. As characters' lifebars are reduced and time runs out, music pitch is raised too. We'd like to do differents loops for each case, but couldn't be done due to time constraints. When each round ends, a transition fragment is played, very similar to the prelude loop, which evolves into the appropiate action loop as the new round starts. When the combat ends, a different end combat loop is played before getting back to the menu. Each module contains more than 250 jump points to produce seamless music transitions.

Music and samples were finally exported with the converter. The entire soundtrack's size is packed in 1.47Mb. Not bad for 12:22 minutes of music; feel free to compare these compression ratios against any other compression alogrithms like MP3 or OGG.

SAMPLE MUSIC
	Menu	Download
	Germany	Download
	New York	Download
	China	Download

SOUND EFFECTS

Effect samples are packed in 296Kb. We also syncronized them, which required a lot of time. There are only 42 effects, but they appear almost 2000 times in the huge number of animations contained in the game. Some effects where sampled live while others were taken from libraries. We went for dramatic effects instead of realistic ones, though some of them might still feel too realistic. Ambient loops for each scenery were also created but weren't included in the game due to RAM size constraints. Effect pitches and volumes are randomized to avoid repetition. However, the voice set is very small (again due to RAM size constraints) so voice effects can still feel a bit repetitive.

TRAILER

Here's the official trailer of the game from YouTube (Please note that this time, trailer's music wasn't made by synchrnzr)