DI MONTHLY #13: Studio Time

This time on Distant News, we set upon a quest to discover the legendary Brown Note.

Kept you waiting, huh?

Yeah it's been a while since I last wrote for this newsletter. I forgot how hard this typing stuff is, you gotta like, move your fingers about and think about words. And thinking is precisely the one thing I've been avoiding the most for a while. Also don't worry about last month. We just won't talk about it.

I've actually been away to do a lot of music-related stuff. I've been trying to start up a band, joined a lot of jamming sessions and spent some nights at a campfire playing acoustic guitar. All this is for a singular reason: If I write a great rock record, I can justify my alcohol addiction and mental illness as a legitimate business strategy.

On that note…

Motivic Development

After some cool stuff happened last month that Mors will probably yap about here as soon as he's recovered from being dead tired, I finally had an excuse to sit back in the studio to do some music work. It's been quite a while since I got to sincerely focus on that too.

The last time I have seriously done music crafting was in September of last year, for Cascadence (though I did lay down some stuff in January, this time for… it's successor), and for the last big project I got to focus in long term, that was with Khimera: Puzzle Island. It's been both exciting and scary to finally take a break from programming the engine nonstop and getting some game progress done.

We're heading into entirely new territory with our next game, being all 3D and kind of ambitious in scope, so I've known for a while that I'd need to step up my own game a little to make the production match the ambition on the design and development side.

I started doing music initially using trackers. This is what happens when your child grows up with old computers and thinks Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is the coolest shit. Trackers are based on old Amiga tech that's been slowly updated over the years, so it's really great for various chippy sounds. I still use it from time to time when a project calls for something that sounds a little primitive, the latest one being in Operius DX, if you know, you know. My tracker of choice is ModPlug, which looks terrible but I'm too good with it by now to switch to anything else easily, so it continues to haunt my machine. Even on Linux.

For most projects since the mid-to-late 2010s, I've used FL Studio to sequence a bunch of external synths and a few softsynths.

For the Next Game™ I really want to push beyond that. As I alluded in the opening paragraph, I've been playing more instruments live, and I kind of want to bring some of that energy into the studio as well. Guitars and basses sound nicer played for real, and it also makes composition a lot less of a pain since sequencing by drawing stuff on the screen is a lot slower than just playing the damn part. It sort of started with Cascadence, where the main track that plays during the gameplay was composed and mostly produced on a single MPC-1000.

This has meant that my composition style has shifted a little. I've had to start using sheets to write stuff instead of just making it up on the computer while producing. On one hand, composing is actually a lot faster now, but on the other, production is a lot more difficult since I kind of have to start from a clean table.

So what does all this mean for the next game? I dunno yet honestly. It's still the early days as the production has lagged quite a bit due to other commitments, so I'm still a little in the dark about how it will all pan out. The only thing I know for sure is that I'm going to lose money, because my Behringer mixer has decided to start breaking down which is making recording instruments a lot harder.

Stupid German bastard.

The Summit Was Peak and Other Tales of Unsurprising Discoveries

Anyway, here comes the monthly entry to the Vagueposting World Championship. Yeah, we're talking about the Next Game™ progress again. It's happening!

In fact, don't let the pessimism in the previous paragraph fool you, things are going really well. The prototypes I've been messing around as of recent are actually starting to resemble a game, which has been a long time coming. I made some demo videos about it and got a basic game flow working - levels load, worlds can be progressed through and a character controller exists and feels good. We even have some platforming challenges going.

Mors was busy meeting roughly ten squidillion people at Bitsummit this past week, some of which included potential future partners for the game. Despite the rough exterior of the game, he says feedback has generally been pretty good, so we're heading into summer with a pretty positive outlook and some goals to achieve.

Q.E.D.

Usually I'd write a long and rambling paragraph that ends on a vaguely funny note, but this month I honestly just want to get back into the grind and get that damn game up and running. Both the VS Code and the FL Studio icons are staring at me, judgmentally, for messing about in our website's admin panel as we speak. They are beckoning me. Progress is calling.

So on that note, see you next month! Unless something really strange happens again. I hope not, though.

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