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Atonal Dreams Weekly Update 26 - Music, Mostly!

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago972 words

2021's got off to a decent start, productivity-wise! I composed three pieces of music for Atonal Dreams! I've also added an additional album of my old music to the Bandcamp page I set up recently, which is something I intend to make a weekly habit of.

Atonal Dreams Progress

The three pieces I composed were themes for the game's three factions: the Seraphim, the Blight Wolves, and the Beyond Ponderers. I'm really pleased with the first two, though the third is something that's taking time to grow on me.

Previously I've included music I composed for the game in these blog posts, but this time I've only posted them to ∞ my Patreon ∞. I want supporting me on there to feel worth it, which I think would be lessened by just releasing the music everywhere else anyway!

There's not really much else to say other than that! I also did a bit on the Pierce battle at the beginning of the game, and it seems likely that I should have a new video of that with the revised script by next week. I intended to fully complete the script before doing anything more with the actual game, but it might be a better idea to get the intro working so then I can do the demo I've been talking about for ages, and so then I'll have some visual stuff to show on Twitter in response to the various "show us the indie game you're working on!" tweets I see.

Music Album of the Week

As I said a while ago, I took some time arranging all my old music into a series of albums, which I'd like to release gradually for archiving purposes as much as anything. The first one I released - Cambrian Explosion - had some of my earliest non-game works from when I was still learning, and while it was technically for sale, I didn't actually expect anyone to buy it (though hoped they might). I got an email from Bandcamp though telling me I'd passed my first $50 in sales, so that's not nothing!

All this old music is really meaningful to me, and I personally get a lot out of it. So if anyone else gets even a little something out of it, then that's something that makes me happy!

Writing these blog posts every weekend is something I actually look forward to, and which keeps my life slightly organised. So I'm thinking I could upload one of these albums every weekend too! Obviously I don't have an unlimited amount of them, but I'd like to get through all of them eventually. Most are soundtracks for (mostly unfinished) games, though this time it's another of my old non-game music:



Link: ∞ Piano Rambles ∞

I've composed a bunch of these 'rambles', the first of which were included in ∞ Cambrian Explosion ∞. I consider these ones a second set, and they're all fairly long solo piano pieces (they have too many notes to be playable by a human).

They were composed when I was 18-20, during the period where I worked on MARDEK, and I think I released all of them on Fig Hunter back in the day, so you might have heard them before if you were around then.

They just had names like 'Ramble 17' before, though I listened to them all last night and gave them evocative titles based on whatever came to mind. It might be more interesting though to listen to them yourself and just let your mind conjure up whatever imagery it does; I remember that being one of the most interesting things about them back when I composed them, how everyone imagined different things.

Like with Cambrian Explosion, I was still learning here, so the harmonies can be dubious or naive. They're outpourings of pure creativity that I wouldn't be capable of these days because I'd be too concerned about achieving a certain goal or doing things 'properly', so I look back with appreciation and some envy on them! I think they're interesting if you just want to stand under a waterfall of pure creative exploration for a while.

I've listened to these a lot over the years, and I'm still enjoying listening to them as I type this!

Other Indie Games

I'm also trying to make a weekly habit of playing other indie games! I started this week with Timelie, which I ∞ wrote this post about yesterday ∞.

I need to do more research into other indie devs' promotional efforts too, so I might try to make a habit of commenting at the end of these weekly posts with some things I've noticed over the week, like this:

I saw ∞ this post on Reddit ∞ about a person's one-man indie project, which is in r/gaming and currently has 91.2k upvotes. Notable, since I was under the impression such promotion wasn't allowed in r/gaming.

I was blown away by ∞ this Patreon ∞ that I found via Twitter. He makes pixel art assets or... something? And has 718 patrons giving him $3273 a month for it. Wow. How did he manage that??

Hmm, I thought I had more, but I can't remember! In future I'll make a list of stuff I notice over the course of the week.



Also, I'm aware this website looks like crap on mobiles, so I'll be looking into that. It may or may not even be fixed by the time you read this!