Curious Games: Musical Adventures

adventures in gaming, curious games, indie, Process Writing

After finding out about Wolfram Tones, I was adamant that I wanted to use it to make music for the game – specifically, during the “euphoria” and “fear” parts of the game, I wanted to have appropriate music. Well, it turns out that Mac no longer supports the QuickTime plugin in-browser. Wolfram uses QuickTime, so I couldn’t play anything on my Mac as I composed it. That made using Tones pretty much impossible, so I went over to my desktop, made some awesome music, then sent the midis to my email and tried to open them on my Mac. On to the next adventure: the midis can’t be played in Audacity, which is the audio editing software that I’m using. So, at first I tried to find a midi to mp3 converter, but couldn’t find a free one and am too cheap to pay 30+ dollars for something that I likely won’t get much use out of. Instead, I updated QuickTime to QuickTime 7, opened the midis there, and recorded them with the computer’s microphone directly into Audacity. Since I don’t have a recording studio, I had to restart several times as my fiance chatted to me, not realizing what I was up to, as people passed by our open window, and as my future in-laws moved about their house. But, at last, victory is mine!

I now have “Happy Music” and “Sad Music”! I’ll try to eventually get them up here for you to listen to. Meanwhile: Wolfram Tones is awesome, but much easier to use on a PC. Give it a shot!

Thinking about how to implement some of the randomness: I’m thinking that the easiest thing might be to set timers and have the scene change for some of the more complicated of my “special effects” – like the euphoria/fear effects. It would also fix my fish problem (that the character needs to be created in the scene to be able to follow a character in the scene). I’d just have to find a way to keep the score for the tic-tac-toe games consistent across the scenes. That’s probably more trouble than it’s worth, but this is not actually a game about playing tic-tac-toe (did anyone think it was? okay, maybe it is). If I can keep the game board and score consistent across the scenes, then this is the perfect solution (if a bit complex. I’ll of course be looking into other solutions).