Project Nimoy : First Audio Attempt

I've been playing around with FamiTracker the last couple of days. It's a great little tracker that allows you to compose 8-bit music. It's broken down into five channels:

• Square One and Square Two for "instruments" (sounds that can be adjusted for tone, pitch, etc.)
• Triangle - for drums
• Noise - for effects
• DPCM - I didn't use this channel (more advanced and didn't require it)

Only using the 4 channels, I broke down my background image into sections, then assigned a note for that section based on either the order in which the colours appear or by the amount of colour, just to see how those differences would affect the sound.

For my first attempt I broke the image down (left to right as that is the direction of scrolling when I get this into a game) into 16 segments and listed the notes in the order that the colours appeared from top to bottom:

I then plugged these into FamiTracker, assigning first note to Square One, the second to Square Two, the third to Triangle and the fourth (where there was one) to Noise.

Here is the result (bear in mind this uses the default tone for all fields, so it's going to sound rough).

I tried the same thing, this time breaking the image down into 8 segments and listed the notes in the order of amount of tone in the segment:

Here's the result.

Dramatically different but equally strange. It does work, however. Also I used basic rules, which could alway be changed so long as the design theory holds, that the background image dictates the music. I don't have to play each note every time....the first playthrough could just use the note in Square One, and the second playthrough could use Square Two, and I could alternate. Also, I need to create new "instruments" so it doesn't sound so generic.

The important this is that this DOES work, so for now I'm going to hold off on spending the time composing the music and focus on the Flash implementation of the idea.

Project Nimoy : The Concept

Listening to Monday Jazz (#113 by Duende Beat) while I write this and totally diggin' it.

The basic concept of the project is this - take a basic image that consists of colours on a basic greyscale, assign a musical note to each of the tones, then use any instrument to play the song of your work.

I expanded on this concept. I've always been interested in the rhythm of gameplay you feel when you're playing a sidescroller and know what you're doing - when to jump, when to dodge, when to fire. I've wanted to tie this into music, not really knowing how. I still don't, but this project seemed like a good place to start.

So here's the image I chose:

Nothing says geek cool like Nimoy chilling on his '64 Buick in a Starfleet uniform.

From that I pulled a small image, the Starfleet logo on his shirt and a bit of the surrounding fabric to get some different tones.

I dropped that into Photoshop and painted over the image to make the tones more distinct:

Now we assign a musical note to each of the tones, based on this scale:

Draw an imaginary line through the horizontal axis. As the background image scrolls, different tones will be in contact with the line. We then play those notes as the background music.

I'll be using FamiTracker for the music, so this will make more sense when I get into that.

Unemployment : Week Two

I just finished watching Batman : Gotham Knights. Great movie - I love the concept of a series of connected short stories done by different artists and writers. The Animatrix did something similar, but it revolved around different characters. It's something I need to keep in mind for a project I may be working on.

Speaking of projects, I've decided to resurrect one that I was working on when I took a Creative Process class at Emily Carr. The idea behind it was to find a simple black and white image that contained a very few number of tones (less than 8) then assigned a musical note to each tone based on where it lay in the scale. I had the idea to create a small Flash game based on this.

I'll post more tomorrow.

Unemployment : Day One

So it finally happened. The game company I worked for laid me off. I can't say I didn't see it coming, nor can I say I wasn't partly responsible.

I say "partly" because after a year of being screwed over by my career managers (both of whom managed to avoid the layoffs I might add) I did my best to as little work as possible. This decision involved two factors - the fact that there wasn't any work for me to do (5 Producers on a team of 20 people) and the fact that all previous attempts by me to create projects to work on were shot down by the same managers.

The plan then - get laid off, get EI and use that time to work on my own projects. The end goal? I'm not really sure. I have a few ideas kicking around, one of which I'm anxious to get started. After having the creative energy and love of games sucked out of me I just wanted to remember why I loved making games in the first place.

But past is the past. I just finished my EI application, so while I diligently look for work over the next period of time (*cough cough*) I'm going to use this opportunity to it fullest.

And maybe take a break to play some Borderlands.