bright embers

This month, a game that’s all about bouncing balls off things. It maybe shares a lineage with arpeggiate the world in that it’s a single-screen arcade game without the scoring, timers and leaderboards so often associated with arcade games. Has anyone coined the term ‘post-arcade game’ yet? Can I claim it for these games?

I wanted all the audio to revolve around the (super-minimal, admittedly) music, so the SFX are actually generated by a custom granulator effect that takes the main synth chords as its input. For every collision or ball death, I trigger a single grain from the granulator, pitched up by octaves or fifths (as an aside, I think this is my first game using just intonation). To avoid triggering a silent or very quiet grain, there’s a threshold parameter so that we only write into the granulator’s buffer if the input’s loud enough. I’ve not come across a granulator like this before; I was pretty happy with how well it worked.

The nice thing about all this is that the soundscape scales really nicely, all the way from distinct individual collisions when the game’s quite calm, to the classic granular full-on wash of sound when it’s all kicking off. Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my background as an audio programmer shapes the way I design games in specific ways. This feels like a good example of that. i.e. the SFX are connected to both the mechanical action on screen and the music, which is itself tied to the visuals with that chord-synced wipe effect. I don’t know if you’d get these kind of specific close couplings from a designer who isn’t also an audio programmer?

cymbal island

For last month’s arpeggiate the world, I wanted all the audio to be procedural (no samples), but I realised I didn’t have any code for a decent-sounding cymbal. So I took a bit of a detour from the main game and coded a cymbal synthesizer for it, following these old Sound On Sound articles. Having coded it though, there wasn’t much time to actually explore it before I had to upload the game.

So this month’s piece is a more thorough exploration of that cymbal synthesizer. It’s a pixel art island which you can populate with robots and arrows. Robots will travel in one direction until they either hit an arrow or fall into the sea. Any time a robot hits an arrow or falls into the sea, it will trigger one of 5 cymbal synthesizers.

Content warning: This one has a lot of flashing colours!

So I was thinking about arcade games, and how they’re almost always focused on numbers, whether that’s high scores or timers. And I was wondering what an arcade game would look like where the goal wasn’t to get the high score, or set the fastest time.

So arpeggiate the world is an avoid-em-up arcade game where the goal is just to keep the music going. With an arpeggiating synth as the main instrument, you collect pickups which each add an element to the music (an extra octave for the arpeggiator, percussion, effects, etc.), and orbit around you when collected. If an orbiting pickup collides with one of the enemies, you lose it (and that music element). If you lose all your orbiters the music stops and the game is over.

I’m not religious, but if I were, my religion would be Bed. The core tenets of my faith would be:

• Bed is sacred

• Sleep is worship

• We have no need of cathedrals, synagogues, or mosques; our Beds are our cathedrals

• Winter is hibernation time, the most sacred time of year; the most devout of us spend all Winter in Bed

• Waking up, disturbing, or harming someone who is in Bed is an unforgivable sin, punishment for which is permanent exile to The Sleepless Lands (mine would be an unforgiving god)

Anyway, this month I made a card game about trying to get a good night’s sleep.

Download sleep well

a tangled land

Via this tweet by @webbedspace, this month I found myself watching a couple of streamers play through this absolutely wild Mario 64 romhack (streamed in 3 parts by spaghoner and videochess: part 1, part 2, part 3). If you take a look at this incomplete (and not entirely correct?) map of the game that they were trying to navigate by, you can maybe get a sense for why I was so taken by it. The way the hack turns the game inside out and duplicates rooms and hubs and has the player continually stumbling across new spaces that loop back to old spaces is just… It feels like someone binged Mario 64 over a couple of days, had intense, nonsensical dreams about it as a result, then turned those dreams into a romhack. I love it.

So there’s no way I was going to create a vast, elaborate 3D platformer in the space of a week or so, but I thought I could maybe lean on that confusing, tangled map to create something with a similar sense of discovery and interconnection, hence a tangled land. It’s far from the prettiest thing I’ve made, but if you play it it’ll quickly become clear that the bulk of my time was spent on other parts of the game.

It’s basically a map for you to uncover. You can travel between places using the number keys (usually; there are occasional exceptions to that rule). If you hit a number key that connects to another place, both the connection and that place will be revealed. And there are secrets.

This month’s piece was born out of me reading Sean Costello’s reverb design posts over at Valhalla DSP (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I’ve been coding audio effects for 20(!?) years, and I’ve always avoided coding reverbs because I’d read that they’re complicated and require a lot of fiddly tuning. And when I had tried to look into reverb design it was always presented in a way that seemed to confirm that impression.

But Sean’s posts (in addition to the explanation on this dated-looking semiconductor site, which Sean links to in Part 3) explained things in a way that makes it clear that reverb design doesn’t need to be complicated. It really just revolves around 2 basic building blocks: an all-pass filter and a delay. Turns out, creating a nice reverb is just about connecting a bunch of all-passes and delays together, and modulating the delay times to avoid that nasty metallic sound you get with bad reverbs. Here’s a scrawled diagram of the design I came up with (the various numbers are pretty arbitrary; you can easily create a different-sounding reverb by choosing different numbers)

(this was also the first time I saw someone explain what an all-pass filter actually is in non-maths terms. It’s literally just a delay that has a feedforward signal as well as a feedback signal)

Anyway, I made this thing. You can either play it as an instrument (see the readme for the full controls), or just leave it running as a super minimal, hypnotic generative piece.

the words notwithstanding

I think we’re back!?

Telemaphoneroo

I’m still not back to regular here and then gone times yet, but I do have something cool to share. Telemaphoneroo is an online telephone game inspired by: playing with Biome folk and my colleagues at Abertay, and my tendency to narrate what I’m doing when I’m cooking, adding in random extra syllables to the words (so fork becomes forkalork; spoon, spoonaloon).

We're not back to normal yet for this newsletter, but I did make a game this month, for the launch jam of candle's bitsy clone . bipsi appealed because - among other additions to the bitsy formula - it lets you plug in your own javascript code in the editor. Which let me plug in some webaudio text-to-speech and synthesis code.

still on hiatus, sorry!

I moved house last week, so here and then gone is very much still on hiatus. Here’s some links though:

Further Reading

A tale of death and grief and a by G.V. Anderson.

…on hiatus…

Well, I’ve finally hit a month where I just have no time to make something for here and then gone. There’s too much happening right now, and I’m writing this a week in advance because I’ll have no time to write it next week.

I said last month that the next few here and then gones were probably going to be quite pared-back, and true to my word this is probably the most pared-back thing I’ve made for this project to date. It’s not even a piece of software! Just a wee 4 page pdf.

I was struggling a bit to come up with feasible ideas this month, so I decided to just write down some observations about my dreams. I don’t know if this is true for other people, but I’m pretty sure all my dreams take place in the same landscape. That is, I have travelled to locations in one dream that I previously visited in another.

This month is a fairly simple one; each (real world) day you run it will give you a different image, with a procedurally generated title, all accompanied by a generative drone. For the titles I went back through all the names I’ve given previous here and then gone pieces and created a tracery grammar that tries to replicate some of the patterns in the way that I’ve been naming these.

In which I narrate a daydream of an alternative highlands, drawing on a BBC adaptation of one of Alan Garner’s lesser works from my childhood, the , , and strange concrete structures emerging out of the rainforest.

Hi folks.

I think with videogames it's sometimes easy to forget that the game is not just what's happening on screen, or in the code. The game is also what's happening in the player's head, in their body, in the physical space they are inhabiting.

Hi folks.

Since this is the first [issue? letter? missive?] I should try and explain what you’ve signed up to.

I’ve been struggling for a now trying to figure out what to do with the things I make. When I first started making things on the internet I would upload them to my website, post a link on whatever forum I was currently frequenting, and maybe email some games or software sites that I knew would be interested.