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More Sindrel Song!!

6 years ago2,534 words

Here's quite a bit of stuff I've been doing on Sindrel Song, including a couple of videos showing improved gameplay and the sheet music structure of playable songs I've been composing for it.

I'm still not feeling great! I feel the need to get that out of the way before talking about anything else. I had a bad cold for ages, which was made far more annoying by the effects of radiotherapy, but thankfully it seems to have mostly subsided now. I'm still feeling the effects of my brain basically being melted for weeks - it feels like I'm not quite attached to reality, and I'm concerned I'm doing some even stupider things than usual - but it's not so serious that I can't at least try to focus on making things. Well, as I write this now, anyway; I did spend quite a lot of time over the past few days or weeks just lying in bed. Today's probably the first day in a while where I haven't spent hours in bed, actually... Hmm. No, I've just spent all of it in my pyjamas sitting at my computer instead. What a life I live.

Anyway, I've been making what I consider good progress on Sindrel Song, though it's probably more complex of a project than I originally anticipated, and considering that and my reduced energy and general feeling-awfulness, it's hardly coming along at rocket speed or anything. Still, I'd rather spend a while making something I feel genuinely proud of than just... well, the opposite of that.

Last time I wrote ∞ a post about Sindrel Song ∞ (3 weeks ago?? God), I included a video of what I had of the gameplay at this point. I've got another one of those, which shows how the levels will likely work in their entirety. Rather than waffling on in words, here, look:



And like before, here's a static screenshot so it'll show as the preview image for this post:



I think it's far more enjoyable to play than to just watch, but it should give you a good idea of how the game will work!

Some technical irritations: The video quality is poor and the mouse is showing, again; I'll need to look into better screen recording software one day, though it's hardly a priority right now so this'll have to do. Much of the graphical stuff is annoyingly temporary, most notably the animations, which I need to put some proper effort into eventually (Glimmer's idle/singing animation - which to me just looks like she needs the toilet, and which doesn't loop smoothly at all - ideally should be some kind of swaying in sync with the music, but I've not made that yet... and it also keeps playing after the music ends, but I can't be bothered redoing the whole video because of that!).

The video also ends suddenly. And I want there to be emote animations, changing facial expressions, etc. And those grins look weird! Problems, problems!

I also still want to add 3D backgrounds, rather than the rough paintings I have currently, but that's not trivial to do, so I'll need to figure out whether it's worth the effort when I'm able to devote my attention to that. I can't focus on everything at once though, to my stupendous chagrin, and the mechanics and music seemed most important, so I've been focusing on those.

In the older version, shown in the previous post and the video in that post, I had the gist of the general idea I was going for (a melody mimicking game), but it wasn't exactly compelling to play. It worked, but it all felt quite hollow, like the melodies weren't really 'attached' to anything, weren't a part of anything. Plus there were big gaps between hearing the melody and being able to mimic it, and a general sense of aimlessness or lack of progress or something.

I effectively rewrote the basic mechanics over the past few days. Now, each level has a distinct song to it, revolving around a 'personal melody' that each character has, which describes in 'lyrics' their general attitude to life (particularly to their 'immortal' life, having transcended the natural flow of life and death, as is the setting of the game). This is an extension of something I've been doing for a while anyway; I talked in the previous post, I think, about Glimmer's Theme, for example, and how she has a personal motto ("Smiles are brighterous beacons that wake us up from daymares") which is reflected in the melody of her musical theme. Though I can't have sung lyrics due to, well, that requiring a human who can sing, I do quite like structuring melodies in this way, so it's nice to be making something that explicitly revolves around that. I also like that it gives characters a sense of character that you find out through the gameplay, rather than them just being, like I said before, "Green Bird" or "Red Bird" or whatever, with whom you sing either plinky-plonky barely-music or a popular generic lust song. Yes.

So now each melody you play is a fragment of a whole, and as you go along, they come together, offering you to sing duets using the melodies you've just learned, etc. I've tried to structure the songs sensibly so that people would learn as they go, so they'd feel involved and immersed and not overwhelmed and frustrated, but I have no idea if it'll turn out that way for other people. Something particularly irritating is that I can't play it naively; that is, I already know the songs, I composed them and I've practised them, so I don't know how someone who's never heard them before would perform or feel during this. I suppose I'll find out through play-testing, when I get to that point.

The song in the video is the first level, and I think it's quite basic. Maybe not trivially easy, but the aim would be to eventually 'get it' through practice, rather than to succeed completely in your first try. I suspect that learning actual music might work this way anyway, or at least it has for me, though my self-taught musician skills (playing, I mean) are on the low end of amateurish, neglected. I don't know whether people would get put off by not winning in their first go, but personally I find it far more satisfying than something that just isn't a challenge. Also the game would be less than an hour long if people achieved mastery immediately.

Something I've been intending to do though is have easier versions of the songs that you play first, then once you've met all the characters and played all their songs, you can go back and redo more complicated versions of them. I'll probably end up doing some variation of that, to appease people who want a mostly-mindless completion, and those who want a satisfying challenge.

I've got six characters planned - what with that being the thematic number of Alora Fane and all - and I've been composing melodies for the characters at the rate of one a day, which I'm quite happy about. I've done five now; I should finish the final one tomorrow. Each one has turned out better than I expected it to, and they all sound quite distinct, if I do say so myself. I have an urge to show them all here, but I suppose that might spoil the game a bit once it's done. I will however include the one I composed this morning, to give an idea of the level of complexity they reach compared to the first one in that video. This one is from the penultimate level, and it's the song of a female sindrel called Course who's having doubts about her immortality because being off the 'mainstream' path through sindrel life - birth, six days of breeding, then death - has left her aimless and full of doubt. In particular, she was quite successful in the mating game during her six days, but sindrels can only produce offspring by having their own bodies dissolved in nectar pools after they die (at which point they're 'recycled' by their house plant into one or more 'children', who they never meet). When Hearth offered her a way out of death, she took it because she says 'yes' (or "'course!") to opportunities, but in doing so she's unable to complete her biological imperative, and that's troubling to her. So that's... something a little bit different, interesting maybe? Perhaps even relatable in a way too (haven't we all transcended death and felt bad about it because we can't be recycled into children we'll never meet? So many novels and songs and films are about this; it's embarrassing actually how trite I'm being).

Anyway, this is the song you'd sing with her. It's fairly obvious which bits are her playing (she plays a guitar) and which bits are the player mimicking or playing a duet.



I've uploaded it in this format rather than an mp3 because I feel that the 'lyrics' accompanying the phrases - which would of course be 'spoken' in a text box by the character, as in the video - add so much to the sense of a musical journey. I only came up with this in like three hours this morning, so I'll probably change it later, especially once I add it to the game as a playable level, but already I'm quite pleased with it, as I am with the others. Course has rivers as a motif, so I tried to give this a general feeling of a flowing one of those. Uncertainty, too, and trying to find herself; I think that's fairly clear from its structure too, as it jumps between the dark and light modes.

Technically, this format has a lot of limitations, and that isn't a bad thing. I've decided to use just four percussion sounds - a timpani, low and high bongos, and a shaker - so as not to overcomplicate things, and keeping a persistent rhythm pattern is important so then the player can mentally latch onto it and feel grounded during the levels (though it also changes up a bit at some points to keep interest). I'm also using just two six-note scales ('light'/'day' and 'dark'/'night' modes - Bb D Eb F Ab Bb (Mixolydian mode with a 4th) and G A C D E F (Phrygian 7th with a 2nd), respectively), which very much limits the musical movements I can make. I can't go above those high notes, or below the low ones; it's almost like being trapped in a box, creativity-wise, and I have to keep resisting the urge to take the melodies in directions that feel most natural to me. I've been including a lot of hopefully-not-too-challenging-to-mimic patterns too, and making use of repeating and building themes. Plus I've included accompaniment, but it's limited to a warm pad instrument because I feel that's effective at evoking a mood but it's very unobtrusive, not distracting. It seems like it should be frustrating, composing within strict confines, but it actually removes a lot of uncertainty, gives a clear sense of direction and purpose (a clear course!), which is why I've been able to come up with these things so quickly. I find it interesting, anyway.

I'm composing them in my usual program, Sibelius, which is what generated that video, but to actually get them into the game, I manually convert them into text files with a format like this:



(Some slashes turn into italics; annoying.)

Simple, right?? It's a deviation of a conversation system I've been working with for a while, which basically parses through the file line-by-line and makes heavy use of regular expressions to run appropriate commands. The game plays - and alters the pitch and duration of - single-note sound samples as appropriate; these tracks aren't imported in their entirety as mp3s or anything. It's kind of like a far more rudimentary version of midi, and I can imagine technically-savvy people wondering why I didn't just use the midi format during any part of the process, to which I say "your mum's a midi!!" while scurrying off to hide in a hole. It works as it is, anyway, which is the only thing that really matters.

(There are also ambient versions of each song that play in the background while talking to the characters - you can hear one briefly in the video - which are imported as mp3s. They're extremely simple, and easy to make, but I think they're nicely atmospheric, and are a good way to avoid silence without making new music which would distract from the playable music. They also contain the current character's theme, which I think would be nice for players to notice.)

The songs - the motif melodies in particular - have been real ear worms for me, which I think is a good thing (if annoying at times). I'd hope that other people might find them appealingly catchy too if they put particular effort into learning them in order to pass the levels. But I know other people's tastes in music are different from my own, so who knows!

Before I end this, I'll also include this beautiful, gorgeous image:



I haven't exactly had the motivation to do any proper concept art, but I needed to have an idea of what the six (or I suppose seven) characters generally looked like, so I have this. It bothers me because it feels like I should put more time and effort into the character design, and I might once I start making models for them properly, but these designs would probably be functional as they are. There are a lot of details I put thought into and quite like, but I wonder how accurately this will reflect what the characters will finally end up looking like. Again, who knows!

Each character is based on one of the six runes from Taming Dreams, as I think I talked about before. The order in which you'd sing with them is: Remedy (Feeling), Hammer (Tough), Dolour (Grave), Melody (Jolly), Course (Realistic), and finally Hearth (Abstract), though you'd meet him first. Also, Course should be paler than that if she was successful at attracting many mates, and they're all meant to be white-ish because of the whole pigment-fading thing that defines wintrels... mumble. The kinds of things I think when looking at my own things like this. There's always something that needs to be different!

Anyway, I'm going to get back to working on this thing now.