Sounding Off

I'm still immersed in the depths of GoatTracker!

Since the last blog entry a few days ago (read here), I've completely rewritten my 'get ready' tune so it now sounds more 'urgent' and suspenseful.  Well I think it does...

I've also written four more level tunes to accompany the one written the other day!  I was originally going to make them spooky sounding, but found that style didn't actually suit the gameplay.  More 'driving' bass lines are needed to motivate the player along.  Each tune is between 40 and 60 seconds long before repeat; I've deliberately made them short so I can have more tunes in memory for more variety for each level.  As mentioned in the previous blog entry, these tunes are written using only two voices, leaving the third free for sound effects.

Along with the level tunes, I've composed a really rather jolly game complete tune!  A bit premature maybe as I don't even know if I'll have a game complete screen yet, but it gives me options further down the line.

What?  You want proof I've actually written some music?  Below should be a player containing a test recording of the music currently assigned to Level 1 (this was recorded using SidPlay64 on my 8580 equipped C64c playing through my Dolby amp).  If the player doesn't appear from some reason, hear it on my SoundCloud page here.





Next diary entry...

Sound Start

After another busy week in work I've fancied a change from level designing, so yesterday evening I started work on some music for the game.

Now I will be honest, I did start writing some music quite a few months ago and by that I mean the first 10 seconds of the title screen music, along with some place-holder notes for the 'get ready' screen so I knew that the music was being called/initiated and played correctly for the sequence of screens from the title screen, through the get ready screen to the game screen.

After yesterday's bout of composing, I have now refined my first 10 seconds of title screen music, modified my get ready music and added a (very) short piece for game over.  The biggest addition though is a brand new piece that is currently around a minute long that I'm using for the in-game music.

Of course, all this music will be refined, extended or even deleted and composed again from scratch as time goes on.  At present, I don't really want to aurally share the music in it's current state, but here is a screen dump of GoatTracker in action:

When being assembled, the code is loading the music to $0900, with the next block of memory being used by the charset at $2000.  This gives me just under 6K of memory for music at the moment.  Quite a bit!

I've decided that I may do short, simple repeating tunes so that each level has it's own music.  To this end, I did dive into the code and add a short routine that can detect the level number then initialise and play a different tune for each level.  Naturally, this code will be removed if I run short of memory in the future and only end up with one in-game tune.

I've written the first in-game tune with only 2 channels, keeping the third free.  I'm toying with the idea of having some sound effects too in the future, maybe for jumping or energy depletion.  Maybe...

Next diary entry...