Robot Cousin Soundworks

I’ve been a member of the Something Awful forums for about 4.5 years now. I love it there, and would suggest registering as a member to anyone reading this. It’s $10, but that’s just a one-time fee, not per month, or even per year; once. I have easily gotten my money’s worth and then some. As far as entertainment is concerned, it’s the best investment I’ve ever made.

The reason I bring this up is because recently, in the month of July, I participated in the sixth annual SA Game Dev Challenge. The rules are simple: create a game within the month of July (with June being a general planning month) based on a somewhat-loose theme as suggested by forums mod Shalinor. I don’t know what themes had been for years 1 and 2, but year 3 was ‘Swarms’, year 4 was ‘Dealing with the Devil’ and last year’s theme was ‘You Can’t…’, which obviously allowed the developers/designers to really go nuts with interpreting how they could base a game around such a simple half-premise.

This year’s theme was ‘Death and Taxes‘. The entry I was involved in was titled ‘Psychopomps‘ and is playable here. It was made in Flixel, and only requires that you have Adobe Flash installed, which is, of course, free and compatible with almost every browser out there.

The designer, artist, and myself are VERY pleased with what we were able to put together in just 30 days. Keep in mind, nothing could be coded, drawn, or composed prior to July 1st, and as far as I can tell, we stuck to that (I know I did).

If you’re interested in hearing the music outside of the game, and even a track that wasn’t used, I’ve posted the links to it all below. Enjoy, and tell me what you think!

Psychopomps – Onward

Psychopomps – The New Guy

Psychopomps – Boss Me Around

Psychopomps – Val’s Back

Psychopomps – Your Quest has Ended

Psychopomps – Dirty Little Secret

Finally.

Intro (A Thousand Times Yes)

Locked my Keys in my Car

Ceiling Fan

In Defense of Kittens

Lost in my Own Backyard

Troubadours in Heat

Conjugated Within an Inch of my Life

Prom Dress for Sale

Sally Johansen’s Cerebral Jamboree

Click to download (after it takes you to the song’s own ‘page’), no descriptions, although I might add some later. I figure  I’ll hash it out right here, right now.

This whole album was a gift to a friend. Ben, to be more specific. We’ve been friends since high school, and I started making music with him using MTV’s Music Generator, back in 2000 (I had the PC version that allowed the creation of .wav files, Ben had the PS1 version, that obviously didn’t. So much transcribing…). Before that, any music I thought up was quickly forgotten, but not before it was crudely plunked out on my old Yamaha keyboard. Man, that sampled piano sounded so tinny.

Anyway, Ben’s an incredible artist and has his own webcomic, ZomBen (alternate link here). He also illustrates Gibson Twist’s graphic novel, “Our Time in Eden“. Speaking of Gibson, he has a fantastically, amazing comic titled “Pictures of You” that I cannot recommend highly enough. Anyone reading this right now should just stop and go there. Come back and tell me what you think. Be warned, it’s been going for quite a few years now, so there’s a LOT to catch up on, but it’s very much worth it.

As a side note, I’d be remiss to not mention Pulp Stiktion, the short-lived, unfinished, but very enjoyable toy-comic Ben and I used to work on. Man, those indeed were the days.

Back to the album, a long time ago, when I figured out what was what in making my own 8-bit sounds, I showed some of them to Ben. He enjoyed it enough to request an entire album of new 8-bit tracks. Couple years later, I finally did it. Now, it’s not a very long album, but who really needs more than 28 minutes of Nintendo/Atari/Commodore 64-inspired music? I certainly don’t, but the good people over at 8-bit collective might.

As I mentioned before, I totally and completely ran out of ideas halfway through. That sucked. A lot. There are quite a few aborted pieces of songs still shoved away somewhere, and I cringe when I hear even a few seconds of them. Hey, those scenes are deleted for a reason! There was one that was going to sound like some sort of beach-esque song, another that was drums for the first 90 seconds (no one needs that). All of the others are pretty much all in the “that melodic hook sucks” category. And that’s all this album turned out to be, to me at least… a collection of melodic hooks, structured in the pop song format, but without any words.

Glad I finally  finished it.