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Weekly Update - Two New Battle Music Tracks, Blog Replacement?

3 years ago1,186 words

I composed two new pieces of battle music this week... which I can't show off due to technical issues with my composing program. I'm also wondering about other ways of talking about my progress that might be more noticed...

I've done a lot again this week - I've been fairly consistent about getting in 4-6 hours of productivity per day - but most of it has been working through the many little, uninteresting but necessary tasks from a big list that I recently made during playtesting. Things like "Victory [music] should play instantly; there's currently a brief overlap", or "Walking over when tamed might be out of sync with the Dynamusic?". Much of development is like this, and I've surely written about it before. I've almost got through the list now, thankfully and excitingly, though the straggler tasks tend to be the ones I put off and find tedious, plus in the process of fixing some I find more to add so the list feels neverending. Still, I'm getting somewhere. Another alpha test feels close.




The most interesting bit of progress this week was composing two new pieces of 'Dynamusic' for battles: one for battles in the drealm, the other for the battle against The Beast, both of which are used in the intro. I'm fairly happy with them, and the solution I've found for incorporating instruments into battle feels more fun and satisfying for me the more I play around with it. I keep getting distracted actually wanting to play the game!

I wanted to post them on Patreon, but I've been having some frustrating issues with Sibelius - my music composition program - for a while. I used to be able to export mp3, wav, and video files without issue, but now it usually - but, weirdly, not always - crashes and closes at the end of a wav export (though thankfully the wav is created), and always crashes before it can export an mp3 or video (so they're not created). It's very annoying!

I wrote a post not too long ago about switching from Sibelius to something else, since Sibelius is old and apparently poorly-supported, and I did get another program, MuseScore, as a result of that (since it's free). All the music I've already composed uses some virtual instruments that are part of Sibelius, though, and I don't know of any way to use them with MuseScore, or anything else; they're literally called 'Sibelius Sounds', so I can see there being restrictions in place that means it's not possible to use them with anything but Sibelius. And while the timbre is less important to me than the arrangement of the notes, these pieces just don't sound right with substitute instruments since that's not the music I originally composed. I never converted my old midi music to 'better' instruments than the default midi soundset for this reason; they no longer sounded like the pieces as originally conceived, and as such were like impostors, imitators, or something.

I should really look into what I can do about it. I've googled it a bit, but the solutions are things like modifying the registry, doing a fresh install, fiddling around with drivers, etc, which I've not had the time or mental energy to get around to yet, ugh. I need to sort out getting a new PC, still, which I've been putting off for similar reasons, and I wondered whether this might motivate me to do that. It hasn't yet, but... I really should try to focus on that!!



Another thing: Do people read or keep blogs anymore? I've been concerned about the views on these for a long time now, and they've only continued to get lower and lower, which is discouraging.




I keep wondering about alternatives. YouTube seems like an obvious one, but videos are many times more effort to make than these already fairly effortful blog posts. Plus social anxiety makes recording even my voice extremely off-putting (I also don't have a microphone or camera). I saw a thing on an indie dev subreddit a while back complaining about how indie devlog videos apparently 'always' cut mid-video to the guy's workout routine or something, which felt like an odd window into a realm I didn't know even existed. Are indie devlog videos an established thing with conventions common enough to be familiarly commented about? Do you watch any?

I suspect a big part of the drop in views - other than the fact I've been toiling away at this for two years, so interest is bound to wane - is because I had to disable the email notification system I used to use, so I should at least look into an alternative. Again; I looked into it before and found something called MailChimp, which a lot of devs apparently have mailing lists with, but it requires you to provide a real, physical, verifiable address which is included at the bottom of every email sent out, which put me off. Maybe I need to ask on Reddit how other indie devs got around that...

I used to be terrified of posting on Reddit at all due to mental scars from running my communities in the past, but I've become more comfortable engaging with it recently, at least on the social anxiety related subreddits. Posting on indie dev ones too feels like something I can almost do - though I'm not quite there yet - and doing that might help, if I post gifs and stuff. I'm not sure exactly what to post though, where, and how often; I've joined a handful of relevant subreddits, and I often see posts that seem to be from the same game - so some devs post often, maybe even every day - but I've also read in the past that that's discouraged? I'll need to look into it more.



I also wrote a mid-week personal post about wanting to revise my life a bit, get a 'normal job', etc... though that elated enthusiasm didn't last very long. Maybe getting a part-time job would be a good first step, at some point.

I'm at a point with Atonal Dreams though where I'm excited to work on it and to play it, and I'm eager to get some other people playing it again. My task now is to clean up what I have so it's ready for another alpha test, which I hope won't take long... though I don't want to predict anything because my attempts to do so in the past have been consistently way off the mark! So let's just see how it goes. I'm working as fast as I'm able!

After that I'll try to do a Kickstarter - after researching how best to approach that - and I'll use that to gauge how feasible doing this for income is.