[24] L'lasons de Aether ver Beinags #6

Sound design is an often essential part of a game's design. This goes especially for horror games. Now, I wouldn't at all consider this game to intentionally evoke fear. If nothing else, I'd like to put across some notion of a dimension that's shriveling at its seams.

I honestly don't know how I'd go about creating that theme through anything but sound first, so I thought I'd make a couple of short loops/tracks or whatever, to get a better feel for what I actually even want.

I'll try to keep these descriptions somewhat short, because it took me all day to gather the media for this post before I started writing this at 1:20AM.

Firstly, I finally figured out how to make pads properly, so I made this to scratch that new itch:

Next, I came up with an idea on how to make some form of dynamic soundtrack, that wouldn't be all that hard to implement, theoretically. This idea stemmed from me remembering how LSD: Dream Emulator handles most of its own soundtrack. Basically, what it does is randomly picks a midi-like sequence from a list for a given area, and applies a random sound font to that sequence, to create often unlistenable garbage. My way, however, boils down to assembling audio stems together either randomly, or by various measures, to create a new song.

For that, of course, I had to make some basic system to play multiple audio clips at once.

I didn't actually make enough audio stems that I could test with, and was disappointed because of it, before realizing I actually ripped the silver surfer theme's stems from its semi-raw NSF form. I'm sure you've heard the actual song, so I'll show you the stems alone before I show the system in action:

In order, the clips go: square wave 1, square wave 2, triangle wave, and noise wave respectively. (note how the triangle wave voice serves as both the bass and most of the kick, with only one being played at any given time.)

Now for that demo of the audio system playing all 4 at once:

Mostly just followed a tutorial Vives sent me with some help, but I'll get a stern talking to if I don't post the code:

As for the sound class itself:

Lastly, I thought I'd have a go at making something using only some of the LSD: Dream Emulator soundfont samples I ripped a while back:

(35 seconds is about as far as I got before I started writing this post.)

So yeah, that's it for the week.