Hey guys, it's been a while.
(There's a TL;DR for this first bit if you just wanna skip it and find out about new music)
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I've been super bogged down by University work, which has really been brutal during this lockdown, which is why I've been so quiet. I would have liked to have come into this new account with a new burst of productivity and uploads, but since that hasn't happened, I'd probably like to make sure when I do come back I'm uploading more frequently.
That said, I have been working on something. If you didn't know, over Christmas I made the jump from a barely functional laptop that I would need to wait up to 90 minutes just to turn on, connect my headphones, and open FL with, to a gaming PC - so first thing I did was start spamming Vocodexes, since I love to use them, but on my laptop it was basically impossible for it to handle more than 2 existing in a project at once. I found that this new PC would not lag at all, no matter how much CPU-devouring stuff I spammed, which is exciting. I decided I had to make a Colour Bass track, since I'd always wanted to make that sorta thing, but the difficulty of using Vocodex before made it essentially impossible. (Colour Basses are almost always made by making a bass and vocoding it to some kinda harmonious chords/melody)
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TL;DR: Uni is killing so I haven't uploaded, but I have a gaming PC now so I can make music way better, and I have been working on something this whole time.
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(heh, no TL;DR for this bit >=)<)
So anyway, there's a Colour Bass track in the works right now, which is close to finished; just needs a second drop and an ending. In fact I'd even say for once the mastering shouldn't need any polishing for the sections I have finished already, it's sounding pretty good to me. Besides that though, I have been doing other non-dubstep music too.
Ever since Undertale first inspired me in 2015, I always wanted to make a story-driven game in the same vein, but for the longest time it looked like this idea wasn't going to take off. I started actually thinking of some characters and story in 2016, but for a long time I sorta hit a roadblock, and whenever I tried to think of things to bridge the gaps in the story what I thought of ended up being too similar to Undertale. Whenever another game came along and gripped me as much as Undertale did like with Oneshot, the Persona games, and Omori I would want to bring this idea back. For a long time I just gave up on it, and only added one or two new character ideas over multiple years until now, when it's all just sort of come together. I know what I want almost every major character to be like, I know what I want to do with the story and its 3 main endings, and I'm now pretty confident that the idea has set itself apart enough from Undertale - so I've started working on it. I've started making assets, and more importantly music.
I've actually got quite a bit of music done for the game so far, since I've found this soundtrack stuff a lot less stressful to do. I absolutely enjoy making dubstep, but the one thing I don't like about making it is that I know I will have to have dozens of multiple-hour-long sessions in the FLP before it's done, and when you're not getting anything uploaded and you have Uni work to worry about that starts to become less of an inconvenience and more of a serious worry. For that reason, making this soundtrack stuff has actually been kind of perfect for me. I still put a lot of thought and effort in, but just about every track only requires me to sit down and have one session or maybe two and it's done. Also, it's just a nice change of pace to try this "emotionally meaningful" and stylised music.
Main Point of all This:
I bring all of this up, because I actually wanna ask you guys, would you want me to upload the music I've been making for the game so far? I thought I wouldn't do that, since you wouldn't be able to fully appreciate the tracks hearing them removed from the context, especially because I wanted to put a lot of emphasis on portraying the emotional state of the characters through the music - but I know if I don't upload them you guys are gonna have quite the draught of content from me, and to be fair a lot of what I have made so far are character themes, which give you a vague idea of what the characters are like anyway.
I have 8 tracks made for the game so far (they vary a lot in length, some are only about 20 second loops, some are a couple minutes long), so that would be quite a lot of stuff I could put up for now. Since most of these get made in 1 or 2 nights, you should be able to expect more pretty soon as well.
Anyway. Thanks for being patient, and tell me what you think below.
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As a last thing, in case you were wondering about how the making of this game is going, at this point it's:
Story - Basically all planned out
Art - I've made 132 dialogue portraits so far, I may need to make some more for some of the characters I've already made ones for, but if I don't there's 4 characters I have them done for and another 4 characters I know will need them. That's all I'll need, but I'll probably end up doing portraits for the more important side-characters too.
Music - As I said, 8 tracks. There are about 10 more I know I'll need to make, but I expect to make a whole lot more than that by the time I'd be satisfied to call it finished.
Programming - Nothing yet, I'm still only in the first year in my 4-year C++ Game Development course, so I may end up waiting a while before I start on this. I'm mostly concerned about whether I should program it in C++ using SMFL, or in Unity with C#. If I choose Unity, a lot of the work will be done for me by premade Unity code and components, but that also increases the chances I'll run into bugs I don't understand because I'm using code I didn't write; while on the other hand, if I choose SFML my game will be a whole lot more memory-efficient
That's all mostly just to re-assure you, while this is going to be a long way away, it is not something I am going to give up on; and I will be working on it bit by bit over the next few years. I know I have had a really bad tendency in the past for starting projects that never get finished, and this probably just sounds like another project too big for me to ever finish alone, and I couldn't blame you for thinking that honestly. In the past I would actually start making stuff I knew I'd never be able to finish a lot, just because at the very least, I knew I'd enjoy doing it even if it never came to fruition. This one feels different to me though, especially because I don't have to make some big leap at any point and try to do something I'm no idea if I'm capable of - instead I have to do a lot of things, but they're all things I know I can manage and have done before.