sound artist | composer
STATIC
Factsheet
Developer:
Elijah Cauley & Amit Rai Sharma
Based in New York & London
Description
A surreal walking simulator with audio puzzles inspired by modular synthesizers and Haruki Murakami.
Release date:
September 2019 (itch.io & Steam)
Platforms:
Steam PC/Mac/Linux
History
Eli and Amit met accidentally in August of 2018. They were not introduced through friends or colleagues, they simply bumped into each other in an ad-hoc co-working space. In that first meeting, they both realised they had a number of common creative interests and began, almost immediately, passionately sharing their individual projects and ideas.
STATIC started life out as a small project for an audio game jam. It was never submitted because the ideas grew wild and fast and soon what started out as a one-week collaboration became this larger project about audio puzzles, voicemails, a peculiar island populated with phone booths, and other out of place artefacts.
Features
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STATIC is an hour long first-person game, designed to be played in one sitting.
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Solve a series of incoming audio puzzles using cryptic machines inspired by modular synthesizers.
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The game involves puzzles which REQUIRE AUDIO to be solved.
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Explore and traverse an abstract island guided by the distant ringing of phone booths.
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The game environments become increasingly surreal as the player progresses.
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Experiment and create in the stand-alone area: the 'Toy Box'.
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Content Warning: Themes of loneliness and isolation.
Awards & Recognition
Video
Images
About Eli & Amit
Elijah Cauley is a young freelance programmer and game maker based in New York, using games as a way to distil and share his personal experiences. His works up until now have been short narrative pieces that place a line between commentary and diary, and then blur it. They are, at once, sensitive, playful, bold, and intriguing. It would not be a stretch to convey that some of Eli's digital projects would be equally valid as part of a contemporary art practice. With a strong sense of aesthetic and a conscious effort to avoid repetition, Eli is rapidly developing his own visual and narrative language within games.
Amit Rai Sharma is a sound artist and musician based in London, exploring the curiosities of sound through collaboration and personal musical and non-musical projects. With a BA in Fine Art and MSc in Psychology Amit's work on each project is quietly underpinned by a solid conceptual framework and scientific approach. At the forefront, Amit's audio works are always in service of the audience experience, driven by a single question; what can be done to bring the viewer/listener further into the piece or work? For Amit, a successful audio implementation can draw little-to-no attention to itself, so that it may direct attention to the work overall. Up until now, Amit has been unintentionally private about his personal work and practice however, he will be releasing his first record of personal music in late 2019.
Team
Elijah Cauley
Art, Programming, Level Design
Contact
Inquiries
Amit Rai Sharma
Sound, Composition, Puzzle Design
Eli @small_signs
Amit @soundletters