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Weekly Update - Final One of 2021!

3 years ago676 words

Some more work on the music system this week! Also some plans for stuff I want to write before the end of the year, looking back on progress and decisions and such.

It's Christmas Eve! How did that happen so fast??

This week, I carried on with what I was working on last week and got the intro section (almost) fully working with the new music system. So that's something.



There is one thing I still need to decide on, though. The intro section takes place in Collie's Psychepelago, and the first few minutes take you through several different scenes where Collie fights and kills the 'Preyloot' - a manifestation of the innocent victims she preyed upon as a Blight Wolf - then meets Savitr (as her dreaming mind sees him). During that, a single music track - titled 'Preyloot', as in 'prelude' - plays, shifting between parts based on what's happening. After this section, though, there's a relatively brief exploration section where the 'normal' background music for Collie's Psychepelago plays, and this section includes a couple of short battles.

Previously, those battles had no music - the background music continued to play - but it never felt right, and it definitely wouldn't feel right with the new musical combat mechanics (though it's coded in such a way that it could technically work with any music track). So I'd been thinking - as per a plan from a few weeks ago - that each area could have its own musical track, so I'd need to compose one for Collie's Psychepelago for these battles.

I thought it'd be simple, since I had a lot of motifs to work with... but composition inspiration is annoyingly elusive, and I couldn't come up with anything that I liked! Much of the week was spent struggling with that.

I planned to give each area its own battle music because I underestimated the difficulty of the task... like with so many of the parts of this project. But I should really try to avoid something so feature bloaty.

So I'm thinking that instead, I could just make a 'normal battle' track that'd play in most areas, a separate, dreamy/aethereal one for the psychepelago areas (each character has one, so the track would be used in them all), and some unique ones for bosses. That should be more manageable.

It doesn't exactly make my current struggle disappear though, since I still need to compose the 'Psychepelago Battle' track and one for a battle against The Beast before the intro can be called complete. I'll be able to use them both for later sections, though, so the work I do now will speed things up later.



It's been almost exactly two years since I started work on what was initially just called the 'MARDEK Remake', then Divine Dreams, then that transformed into Atonal Dreams. Since it's the end of the year, I want to write a post looking back on the entirety of the development journey so far, summarising my progress each month and giving some overall context to the decisions and revisions that I've made along the way that I hope will inspire other people to see them as improvements in the way that I do! Or maybe I'll come to some realisations myself about what I should have done - or should do - differently.

That'll likely take some time to write - I'll need to sift through a lot of old blog posts - but hopefully I'll have it done in the coming days, before the end of the year. I'm also intending to write another post looking at other stuff I've made over the course of the year, as I do every year, and one with some plans for what I want to achieve next year. I'm hoping for some big changes!



Also, both ∞ MARDEK ∞ and ∞ Memody: Sindrel Song ∞ are on sale over the Christmas period!