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AngryOctopus

On unhappily trying to do 8 things at once.

Decided to go with a basic (single oscillator) synth to try and get blep synthesis sorted. I am quite impressed by the array of sounds the Korg PolySix / Roland Juno6 can produce so decided to model it around those.

Every one of these I do is getting better, both graphically and audibly. Obviously still a long way to go before I get to the level of some of the commercial synths out there but I’m on my way.

Did it bit of a long-overdue clean-up. Remove a bunch of dead-end and crappy projects. Created a separate section for music related stuff.

An MS-20 / StarWars inspired semi-modular synthesizer. It sounds ok, but still not great. It is really quite hard to get something that is simple and sounds fantastic. I was quite happy with the look and spent quite a while agonizing over a minimalistic set of controls.

I was quite happy with the idea but the implementation felt a bit unfinished so I spent a bit of time polishing. The sound is now effects laden and half decent. I actually hooked this up to my Wii Guitar Hero controller and had a great time. 5 buttons = 32 combinations (chords) so as long as you are just strumming away you can play a bunch of songs without having to re-assign chords.

More game-distractions. I play guitar a bit in my spare-spare time (about 1min/day) so a guitar synth was always on the cards. It sounds ok but is more useful as a chord reference rather than an instrument. Click to play:

I have been playing with synthesizers quite a bit lately and have been getting a lot better at it since my first few attempts. Here are some of the ones I have been playing with:

And a more complicated one:

Some time I’ll get round to packaging this all up into a nice neat integrated music package for use in games.

Frankly the prospect of spending 10 minutes a day keeping the 3 people who visit my site each day (one of which appears to be a spam bot) up to date on my rather uninteresting life is soul destroying to say the least. However that said I really should post periodic updates whenever the site changes. So without further ado I present to you (well two of you anyway, the spam bot can go to hell):

Update 1

• Added a few games that were rather more fun in my head than on screen. Bouncy Ball, SwitchTrack, Rally2D. Actually I’m quite pleased with Rally2D and it’s possibly the most playable game I have ever made. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all motivation to continue development on it.
• Added new Tools section. I have written the first of what I hope will be at least a few tools that someone will find usefull.

So finally got round to installing WordPress and we now have the beginnings of a proper website for broadcasting my thoughts and progress on the all consuming hobby of game development. Next update likely some time in the year 2014 but we’ll see how we get on.