Interstellar Tortoise

3.11.09

Frag. I am not sure whether or not to keep this whole dynamic music thing. It’s a fair amount of extra work, it doesn’t always sound as good as something planned out, it only saves a little bit of space, and the melody sections still get repetitive after a little while… And it broke my sound effects slider.

Also I would need to keep the music inside the file as opposed to an external directory. And this bloats the size of the working file considerably and makes it unpleasant to do just about any development. Oy.

I just don’t know. I guess I will put aside the sound for a while and just focus on visual art and gameplay issues.

BTW – I just started playing Super Metroid again – and I am just floored by what a fantastic opening sequence that game has. Possibly the best in video game history.

(2.24.09)

Haven’t actually gotten down to balance and refinement for the Prequel game – I decided to start looking into sound recording and have allowed myself to get totally sidetracked down that direction for a while. I bought a program called ‘Mixcraft’ which lets me plug my guitar right into the computer and record with almost no setup at all. It is all addictively immediate.

I also figured out how to write a series of scripts that dynamically draws music loop tracks randomly from a set. This will allow me to have quasi-random music generation. This is exciting for two reasons: 1. From a relatively small set of music samples, the music will play with a LOT of variations. This will (hopefully) keep the music from getting stale for the avid player.

2. This will help to keep music file sizes much smaller than they would be if a finished mix of the same length was recorded using traditional linear music tracks.

Unfortunately, I believe that this whole excursion has bounced me a bit off focus. Not sure whether it was worth it or not yet. We will see.

(11.26.08)

Well, I got a sound effect and music slider into the game. That is good. The urgency for me to do this was in part because the (place holder) music was too loud and makes it hard to think while testing. If I can’t get by without this function, the chances are that neither can anyone else.

I’ve added a bunch of cutscenes and new art in. It’s a coming along.