i reaaaaaally like that music
you should definitely upload a full, un-ingame version
have you thought of selling/distributing the soundtrack as an extra/bonus for extra dosh/separately? maybe with some exclusive songs only on there?

What you just described is exactly the plan. I'll probably sell the soundtrack for $5 or something (no more than the game itself for sure), and it'll come with some bonus tracks too.

that boomerang weapon looks like fun

They're probably one of the trickier weapons to use, since the amount of damage it does relies on you keeping the weapon pointed straight at the enemy. I'm interested to see what people think of them during testing.

I really like the boomerang weapon. Makes me want to have a ship with five of them and just spin around shooting.


(Are the graphics going to be moddable? I feel like messing around with them.)

Unfortunately, Flash compiles all of the content into one file, so it's not very moddable.

FLASH?
A-AAAAAAAAAAAAA!
savior of the universe

Can we have the music from world 5 please? Pretty pretty please? Pleeeease?

Yeah, I probably won't be using Flash again. It has a lot of issues. It will make it pretty easy to distribute a demo, and if selling the game as a download falls through, I could also sell a license to a Flash portal. So, at least there's that.

Anyway, I was planning to save this one for the soundtrack, but since you asked so nicely, here you go:

maybe if i make it bigger

also thank you very kind man

How do you compose all these great tracks?

do you use tlb

Haha, glad to hear you guys like them.

I'm using REAPER to put all the music together. It's a great program, and its interface is really nice (other than the occasional minor thing).

As for synths, there are a few different things I'm using.

Most of the instruments are VOPM synths. It's a VST that emulates the YM2151 sound chip, which was used pretty heavily in 80s arcade games. Given the option, I probably would have gone for something emulating the YM2612 (the Mega Drive chip), but I think this one comes close enough. Anyway, I grabbed this huge library of sound configurations from Mega Drive games for VOPM, and used them as reference to set up some basic bass and guitar synths. As you can see, there are a lot of settings:



So, I've just been playing around with my existing instruments and tweaking them until they sound nice. At this point, I've made 15 different bass variants and 11 different guitar variants, as well as a cheesy synth horn.

The other synth I use is the Synth1 VST. Mostly, I use it for square waves, since VOPM can't really synthesize them. It also shows up in two other places, both of which you can hear in Error Rave. One is the laser sound, which you can hear at 0:10 and the other is that robotic voice you can faintly hear at 0:56.

Lastly, there's the percussion, which took me until about a month ago to get right. I think Resolute is the only track I've uploaded that currently has them in a state I'm happy with. The rest have all had their drum tracks reworked, but I haven't uploaded them yet since it's a somewhat minor change. I made a post about that back here. The samples themselves are largely from DrumSamples.org, a few drum samples from the PXTone Manual, and an orchestra hit from beatproduction.net.

As for actually composing the music... I have absolutely no idea. I don't have any formal training in music, nor can even play any instruments, so this soundtrack really is just the culmination of several years' worth of screwing around with a bunch of music software. So it's pretty cool that people like it, because going in, I had no idea if I was actually going to be able to pull off an entire soundtrack. I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from FantomenK, Earthworm Jim, the Mega Drive Sonic games, and Danny Baranowsky, but that's pretty much the only part of the process I could actually clearly describe, aside from "put some notes on the screen, listen, and throw them out if they sound bad," haha.

So, I'm (slowly) working on the final boss. It's been a busy couple of weeks, and the boss is also going to be somewhat complicated, so it might be a while.

In the meantime, though, I also put together a new theme for the first world. Electroargentum is already going to show up as the title theme, and there are going to be remixes/pieces of it for the level complete theme, the game over theme, and maybe an invincibility theme or something? So, for the sake of not making everybody completely sick of it, it seemed like a good plan to have something different as world 1's background music.

Without further ado, here it is:

Y'know, I've had this thread bookmarked, and every time I typed in the url to get to drl this was the thread I came to.
So after a few months of seeing this thread dead, I'm wondering, where's the game at right now?

Sorry your landing page for DRL has been so dead!

I wish I could tell you I've made a lot of progress, but I don't have much to show for it. Unfortunately, I had way less time over the summer than I had planned, and now I'm in the thick of coursework, so this has inevitably fallen by the wayside. That isn't to say that I've given up on it — I still add stuff to it once in a while, and I have no intentions of quitting. Progress is admittedly pretty slow, though, and probably will be for a while.

As it stands, the final boss has a single attack of the several that I have planned for it. Probably the biggest thing I've accomplished has been to finish up most of the music for the game. There are still a few jingles here and there, but the meat of it is done. I think I'm going to keep that under wraps for now, though.