#I don't want to look for a chiptune specific one because I don't want to limit what kinds of sounds I can make unless I NEED to

[tentajack]

Does anyone have a good rec for music synth software? Out of every aspect of game dev, digital music creation is the one thing I have zero skill or experience in, so I'm really out at sea on planning how to do it.

[insane-behavior]

Hi, Noah, how are you? After the little chat on the poll, I was wondering if you could recommend artists that you listen to?

Ohh! Hey, I would love too!

I listen to a wiiiiiide mix of genres so this might get a little long, but I'll sort them by genre (specifically just a few of my faves) in case you have any specific preferences- the differentiation between genres will be fuzzy at best because my stuff tends to be individual songs rather than artists but I'll try to categorize them well

Punk

- TX2

- The Taxpayers

- Cheap Perfume (!!)

- NOAHFINNCE (pop punk/pop rock)

Some specific punk songs I recommend!

- Call ACab (Sam Stone)

- Anything from the Nimona soundtrack, fully unironically. Not all of it is quite as punk, but it falls within the vibes I would say. Because I'm Awesome (The Dollyrots) is a banger

- Nazi Punks Fuck Off (Dead Kennedys)

- Cops/Dogs (Destructo Disk)

- Point/Counterpoint (Streetlight Manifesto)

- Werewolf of Bedburg (The Other) (this one is based on a true story about a supposed 'werewolf'!)

Folk

- Yaelokre

- Vinny Marchi

- SJ Tucker

- Small Fools

- Three Weird Sisters (specifically Least of my Kind!)

- Heather Dale

- Heather Alexander

- Sparkbird

- The Longest Johns

- Cosmo Sheldrake

- Eivør (nordic!)

- The Fisherman's Friends

- Lily Furfaro

Rock

- I Fight Dragons (chiptune rock, very very good music)

- Waterparks (pop rock)

- Good Kid

- Set it Off (not really an active listener, but I've enjoyed some of their songs)

- Green Day (punk rock, but I don't think I need to clarify that LMAO)

Musicals/soundtracks (and similar)

- Paul Shapera. Any of his works. Though I'd recommend looking them up first, some of them have content warnings or are just really weird and specific /pos (but seriously. It's def weird)

- Melina KB

- Epic: The Musical

- The Percy Jackson Musical (not great compared to the books, but some of the songs are fun tbh)

- Ride The Cyclone

- Repo! The Genetic Opera

- American Murder Story

- Kaden MacKay

- Jekyll and Hyde (the one with Anthony Warlow)

- Spence Hood

.

.

This is really only a very small sample of my absolute INSANE and varied music taste. I'm like the opposite of pretentious about music. If it's good it's good. Fuck it, put it In My Brain. Maybe I'll make a playlist of my favourites or something. If you have a specific genre that's not here, lmk bc I can probably recommend stuff for that too, I just didn't want this to get too long LMAO

[samplepsychadelic]

3 A. pantherinoide edibles (2g each) + 10mg THC edible (report started on 7/26)

decided I was going to try last time's dose again. I wanted to get one more trip in before I move. intentions are the same as last time, as well as preparation. the dose was taken at 4:40pm. the only differences are that I did take my medicine this morning and, of course, the time.

6:18: all the effects came on at once surprisingly. it's a lot harder to understand what words mean, both with definition and sound. no visual effects that I can notice, but with my eyes closed I see simple geometry. I also find it harder to keep my eyes open and stay awake (effect of the delta-9)

6:56: starting to have difficulty typing. hallucinating that my hands have textures. an overlayed tranaparent mosiac eff3ct on top of swirls, in fact, the whole room is covered in swirls. having both open eye and closed eye geometry, albeit open eye is much weaker. my arms have a trail effect and I've been hearing a few seconds of rising tones once and awhile. this definitely all caught me off guard since I've never hallucinated this much before. none of it looks especially realistic, though. most of it is easily picked out. (post-trip note: all of the hallucinations I saw with my eyes open were faint or transparent)

7:06: my body feels like it's melting sway extremely slowly. the fact that I had to remind myself that I'm not actually melting because I felt anxious after thinking it is a little funny. the rest of this report will be written from the post-trip perspective. (post-trip note: the melting feeling felt like I was made of wax, with an empty outline of my body and my bones being the only thing left behind. I'm honestly not sure if this was an ego death, it might've been. this trip definitely didn't take place in the physical world and my body just felt like a border between what I was experiencing and this plane of reality. hard to explain.)

the peak of the trip was about an hour with the comedown and after effects lasting until I went to bed around 10pm. I decided to just close my eyes and let the trip play out rather than interrupt it every few minutes to type (which was already difficult). when I did open my eyes a few times I saw after images of my curtains and windows (curtains were red/blue, window was blue/yellow.) and tropical flowers growing on the ceiling, the inner petals were orange and the outer petals were purple. they were growing on a vine and grew and wilted extremely quickly, with them only lasting a few seconds. the longer I struggled with keeping my eyes open, the more the ceiling shifted and became the same square of patterning reflecting and changing. I closed my eyes again and watched the fractals and symmetrical patterns for awhile. I have a common theme of meeting "angels" (not by standard definition. it's complicated). I started by asking them if I could see what the afterlife is like and promised that I would only remember things they were okay with me remembering. before going to their realm we passed through a library, which I recognized as the place where the akashic records were kept (i.e the place where the records of everything to ever happen in the universe was kept). I asked if I could read the records during my short visit, but they told me I couldn't while I was visiting, which was fine. I kind of understood why I couldn't, seeing as I was merely paying a visit and not staying. plus, there were still some aspects of the human mind's limitations that stuck with me during my visit, so I don't think it would have been decipherable if I had been able to read any records. the first angel I met after passing through the library was one named "weatherboy". I don't remember much about him, other than his gold outlines and friendliness. everyone I met was so unique and all had their own personalities and appearances, some even had a specific way of communicating. one communicated with chiptune-esque chirps and beeps, while also saying both parts of the conversation. another communicated through sounds, one through taste and one of them even talked through time, specifically talking in the past. it's very hard to describe but it was all understandable to me. there were a few that especially stuck out to me, the angel of fun, the angel of art/music, and one named fiona. I also met a cherub who had 1 husy head in the middle, a wolf head to the left and a goat head to the right. their appearance was very cartoonish, their voices even more so, the dog in the middle had a brooklyn accent and sounded familiar, but I couldn't make out why. the cherub was probably the one I talked to most since we spent so long trying to figure out what character they sounded like. at some point I had asked someone if god exists, and they said something along the lines of "nah, god isn't real. but we are! even though each of us has their own personality, we all exist as one,". I was happy to hear it. I can't rememeber any specifics after that. towards the end of my visit, I let them know thay I was ready to go back. everyone told me they loved me and to take care of this life, apaprently this is my first incarnation. I very specifically remember all the angels I met saying "goodbye! we love you calvin!". at first this struck me as odd since "calvin" was only my name in this life, but thinking about it more afterward, it was a very sweet gesture of love and acceptance. after returning to my body, I found my head clearing and focus returning, which marked the comedown.

this trip really sticks out to me, since it was my first time having actual visuals, experiencing an ego death and possibly breaking through and talking to entities all in one trip. it makes me wonder what trips will be like once my p. cubensis start fruiting :] here's some doodles I did of both my avatar and some angels I met

[doorbloggr]

Friday 1/10/21 - Media Recommendations #20

Contents: Deltarune

I'd been meaning to get to this one for ages, so once again, I think to make it easier on myself, and my readers, today I am only recommending the latest videogame creation of Toby Fox. This ended up being quite an extensive article, so I split it into sections:

MY CONTEXT

OVERVIEW/PREMISE

GAMEPLAY

PRESENTATION

CONCLUSION

Deltarune (Chapter 1+2)

Toby Fox

1. MY CONTEXT

So context for my own gaming experience going into Deltarune, I have never actually played Undertale. Back when Undertale was getting big, it was only a PC game I think, and I just don't play games on PC. I probably should but yeah nah. Soon after it got popular however, I watched a comprehensive Lets Play of Undertale by Rubber Ross and Barry Kramer, and their voices for Sans and Papyrus are still to this day how I imagine those characters. Through that Lets Play, I experienced both the Pacifist and Genocide runs, and got intimately well acquainted with the characters and world Toby Fox had created, and how the actions of the player can shape how we save or ruin that world.

As a general context, I have always been a person who likes the idea of turn-based, random encounter fantasy RPGs, but the deepest I really got was Pokémon. I've been trying to change that recently, and after beating Monster Hunter Stories 2 a while back, I wanted to try more of the genre. Turn based battles are a lot more my speed than pure skill, like fighting games I've become sick of, and RPGs seem to be big on story, so when I heard the Deltarune demo had an update, I thought this is finally the time to jump into that world.

Going forward in this review, I'm gonna try and stay broad and unspecific with my descriptions, so as to not spoil. I may discuss some gameplay themes and characters, but I'm avoiding giving specifics away. I really think you need to experience all parts of the game yourself first.

Minor Spoilers for Undertale and Deltarune Ahead

2. OVERVIEW/PREMISE

Deltarune is a project of love. Pure charm and personality ooze from every aspect of the game. Dialogue is clever and snarky, and that charm even leaks into item and location flavour text. The setting and themes are fun, but with a bloodstained silver lining that is best appreciated by mature audiences. I guess I should just explain the premise?

Deltarune puts you in the shoes of a human named Kris. For unexplained reasons you live in a world of monsters and you are the only human. And by monsters, I mean curious looking critters of a variety of shapes and sizes, since, there is really nothing monstrous about them. One day at school, Kris and classmate Susie end up being transported to a whole different world where dark fountains construct monstrous subworlds, and it is up to the chosen ones, the lightners Susie, Kris and darkner (dark world native) Prince Ralsei, to seal the evils of this dark alternate world.

Deltarune is still a work in progress, and as the subtitle of this article suggests, 2 Chapters of a possible 7(?) have been released, and it is unknown at the time of writing if the rest will come out when the game is done, or as more standalone chapters.

3. GAMEPLAY

Deltarune borrows a lot of theming and game loop premise from its parent game Undertale. The tag line of Undertale was: the RPG where noone has to die. This is because the encounter based battle system is built on two courses of action to take. You may FIGHT enemies and reduce their HP to zero, or you may ACT, and talk the enemy into leaving the battle. Deltarune is built on this same system, but with extra layers. Kris is the stand in for the Undertale MC, who has the options to FIGHT, ACT, ITEM, SPARE, or GUARD. Most of those options were in Undertale too, but Guarding is a new addition where you earn Tension Points, or TP, for not engaging the enemy at all.

This TP is used for extra powerful ACT actions, or for special moves of the other party members. This is the main big difference in gameplay loop. Since the player controls a party now rather than just one person, each party member can specialise in different action types. Kris's ACT can incorporate input from other party members; Susie for toughness and Ralsei for softness, in general. Susie is the powerhouse, and if you chose the violent route, she does more damage. Ralsei is the Mage, and can heal allies, as well as use magic to resolve fights peacefully. Those extra abilities use TP.

In most turn based RPGs, there is a back and forth, where the player chooses actions, and sometimes there is a timing aspect to how well those actions perform, and then there's the enemy's turn, where most of the time you just have to wait and let it happen. Undertale and Deltarune have this truly unique system where the soul of the party members, represented by a heart, is directly controlled on the enemy's turn. It's a mini game unique to every enemy type, where you must move the heart around to dodge their attacks, and how good you dodge will decide whether you take a lot of damage, or even none at all. Deltarune adds an extra layer onto this, where if you make the dodge closer, so that the enemy only JUST misses, you earn TP, and open up more options for your next turn. I found this extra detail really endearing, and I made a lot more riskier moves than if there was no incentive to.

I probably mentioned it above, but just to close out this section, the option to either ACT or FIGHT opens up two types of play. Chapter 1, being a sort of intro part, does not differentiate, but the distinction becomes important later. ACTing to SPARE an enemy earns you money, and in Chapter 2, will lead to befriending monsters. FIGHTing will also earn you EXP in Chapter 2, making your options to hurt enemies more powerful. In Undertale, this difference in playstyle actually changed the ending in real time, and from what we know of Deltarune, it is likely going to be the same case.

4. PRESENTATION

Undertale had this unique visual charm to it that may have been a limitation of its Independent Development, but it was probably also a stylistic choice. Deltarune builds on the same type of artstyle, adorable pixel sprite graphics that bring a lot more colour and depth than its predecessor.

Many, but not all characters have little character portraits in their textboxes, and they change expressions to match the situation, and its so cute.

Character and enemy design are so top-notch. A team of designers have been brought on this time, and every one of them have brought gold to the table. Every random battle encounter is dripping with personality, as you learn how best to sweet talk your way out of battle, or how to best destroy them. Most recurring NPCs are lovable, and those who you hate, you love to hate. Dialogue is witty and hilarious, and the writing is fun.

The chiptune style soundtrack is phenomenal. Although I think Undertale's common enemy battle them was more memorable, that may just be that I have become more familiar with it. All character and boss battle themes are so catchy and energetic. Toby Fox is a master of high energy... fun music. It gets stuck in your head, and your brain bounces around at high velocity.

5. CONCLUSION

Ok so this review is already like 3 times longer than a normal Media Recommendation Article, and like 5 times longer than I planned it to be for this one game, so I should probably wrap it up here. Deltarune is a game experience I put off playing for way too long, and now I can't hold my excitement for when the next part comes out. And important to keep in mind, it is essentially a demo, in that it is just a taste of what's to come, but it is a damn meaty demo that will keep you engaged for many hours.

Chapters 1 and 2 are packaged together as a free game on most game platforms at this point, so there's nothing really stopping you from giving it a try. I don't usually rate my recommendations, but since I wrote this more like a review, I might as well...

Deltarune Chapter 1+2: 9/10

Please play it!