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.

3.6.09

Okay. It will be okay. I was thinking that I may have to throw out this whole dynamic music thing due to a conflict with the sound effects. Here is the gist of the problem: I have separate volume sliders for music and for special effects, but for some reason the SFX volume was overriding the music volume – so if your sound effects were up but the music was down low, the music would suddenly become super loud (on every click).

I am sure I could figure out the problem if I dedicated enough time to it, but don’t want to get hung up on this issue. I was starting to think to scrub the whole dynamic sound thing… But I think that I will actually make all music and effects volume go on one slider (at least for now).

Out of the two features, having dynamic music generation is FAR more interesting. It could even be thought of as a USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

So I guess the SFX slider is going out the window. Maybe I’ll be able to resurrect it later on.

3.4.09

AAAAAaaaah frustration!!

My code for the dynamic music works, but when I dropped it into the game, it caused all sorts of bugs and anomalies. What’s more, the working file is much bigger – so it takes longer to do ANYTHING in game.

I may have to wipe clean all of the temporary music code and rewrite it from scratch. Grrrr!

I'm grumpy!

(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.