Jungoroll

My first attempt to write music for games was induced by the fact that I had some friends who wanted to do a game together and we were all mostly programmers except one who was a game designer. Since no one was knowledgeable in music (I wouldn't say I was too because my music theory isn't too good; i knew abit on chords and notes as i play the guitar), i decided to do the art (which i'll document another time) and music for the game.

The game was called Rollo and it is a flash game and it was mostly developed under 15hrs but is still currently in development and is about to be completed very soon. Its about an armadillo trying to find tasty but awfully cute bugs to eat while avoid obstacles. Here's a screenshot but no link yet because we have some agreements with our client to let them host it on their site exclusively for the first three months so we'll have to finish the game, put it up on their site and then i can link to there.

title	credits
in-game 1 rollo in walk mode can eat bugs	in-game 2 rollo in roll-mode can jump but can't eat bugs

So anyway this post isn't meant to be completely on the game but its music. So here's the music i wrote. Give me comments if you like. I'm especially interested to hear what is the closest song it sounds like to you. i'm putting up the mp3 because it sounds a bit better than the midi i wrote.



As you are listening to it maybe I'd share about how I came about the piece. Well I first thought of the constraints for the music such as the feel of it (happy), the style (jungly) and so on.. I then picked up my guitar to try out some tunes. Somehow it occured to me (because of the happiness factor) that it would be nice to have a kinda of tune which uses most of the notes in a key (musical jargon i know but i won't explain it now). So i kinda played Do Re Mi Fa So La from the A note on the guitar (last string, 5th fret) and was playing around with it from there. Then it kinda evolved from there.

After writing the main tune, I worked on the chorus which was actually a sort of random rehash of the main tune. After that, I felt the song was too short because I needed it to loop infinitely and didn't want the tune to be irritating so I needed to write an additonaly section at which I kinda got abit stuck. So i kinda stalled on that for a few days before getting to come up with something.

Also to create the bass track you hear in the background, I was playing around with the notes on Anvil Studio. I would play the main tune and try to think of some kind of tune that would fit it as it was playing and quickly click the notes in the studio. As you can tell it was kinda a semi-random thing as well (semi because I doubt anyone's brain is random, its some patterm recognition neural stuff or something like that). I did that because I didn't quite want the bass tune to be repetitive so I decided to go for a tune as well.

Oh as for the percussions, it was kinda a random thing. I picked some percussion instruments (whichever i thought could be jungly) in Anvil Studio and started to lay them out like according to some pattern. However, the pattern for each instrument was different and did not have to follow the "beat" of the other instruments.i put "beat" because its like say the drum could go 3 times in a bar but the hat could go 4 times. After doing that, i just adjusted whatever i found was not nice by ear and changed some instruments to perhaps suit others if they were too constrasting. Therefore the outcome as you hear now..

after-blog note: As i was trying to upload the above player and the mp3, I happened to find out that flash media player (i.e. the component i used as you see above) actually doesn't support all types of mp3s! I originally used Audacity to produce my mp3 file in 48kbps bitrate but it ended up playing really fast (like 2x the original speed, some call it the chipmunk effect). So i had to play around and i found that the lowest i can go for the bit rate to play like normal is 64kbps. i'm not sure if Adobe fixed this is Flash CS3 because my current version of Flash is Flash 8 but i'm just complaining about it here haha.

So if you're wondering how to embed the above flash mp3 player into your blog or webpage, i'll share it with you in another post another day. its actually very easy because you can use a pre-built one that comes with flash as i have done but this post is really getting too long =P

after-blog note 2: I originally had a flash music player there to play the file but since I lost my hosting space, I decided to put the files on Youtube and that meant I could not have the flash player anymore.