Music

I’ve made music that could be described as ‘hauntiki’ – the Barbara Island albums in particular. But having moved on from musical form I’m now having a hard time re-entering. It’s just … forced. Maybe naming a thing is a curse upon it. One initial idea was to sample and re-assemble music of the tiki period – the “Caretaker” technique. That’s not yet created anything notable – at best it’s akin to the music of Bioshock (which is of course is a hauntiki game).

I’ll treat it like a commission. That is, decide on the story arc and do what I’d do for a paid movie soundtrack. Kind of works… there’s been much deletion. Maybe it’s PLAN A – compose whichever way the brain intuits and then get out the scissors. PLAN B really go to town and Caretaker it to hell. Uncare it.

But there comes a time when you’re drained of inspiration in one realm, when fired up for work in another. Music is having a backseat. Sure – Paul McCartney has made about 27 solo albums. Can you remember all of them? I bet he can’t.

Game play

Game design is like diamonds, forever. You can work on it and work on it and work on it … it will never be finished. I must finish this ‘sketch’ I was supposed to make before the ‘real thing’… God help me.

I assembled a version for OSX and ran it on an M1 chip. It was awful – I’d heard so much praise for Apple’s new chips but this was piss weak. Going to get a hold of an M5 machine but they are sold out everywhere. I also ran the game on a large screen TV and Unity decided on a 4K render size which was not terrible but a little sad. Decided to lock it to 720p – that’s small for a AAA game. This is not a AAA game, it’s a music album – and a sketch of one at that.

Tedious but necessary I’ve set up switches that moves scenery in and out of existence. If you can’t see an object then it’s not needed. I thought that setting a short camera distance cut off would take care of this but sadly not the case.

I also added a level with a roller coaster but a few hours later I still couldn’t get the motion right and decided to kill it for now – leave that for Luna. The play area is now locked – no more areas.

Future Past

So I will soon jump back to 1939 in the actual, real, game. I’ve learned a lot in this fantasy version, which has offered much freedom to go wrong. I’ve re-visited so many trials and errors that were in the old games – such as just getting the cursor to appear when wanted. Stupid things.

Each time I start a new game Unity has jumped a few versions. I’m on 2012. It’s now 6.5 in their new (was old) numbering system. Snakes will always be 2012 and Luna will be 6.x So when Snakes is ‘finished’ that’s it. It’s all Luna.