After a busy holiday season, I’m finally settling back into the groove of things this past week. My focus this year has largely been on music so far since that’s what I’ve been feeling motivated to work on.
In a previous post I mentioned a new song I was working on. That song is roughly finished now. You can take a listen.
The song definitely has more of a rave vibe than the other songs I’ve created so far, and I’m still undecided on how well it fits with the game. It may or may not make it into the final product.
I’ve also started work on another song. It’s definitely still very much a work in progress, but I’m liking the direction it’s going in. Here’s a clip of that one.
I decided to trying streaming my game development as an experiment to start this year! So far I’ve been streaming to twitch and uploading videos of the streams to youtube afterwards. I’ll likely trying streaming direct to youtube at some point as well. You can check out the process of me working on the song “Red Moon Rising” posted above.
I’ve only done a couple streams so far so I don’t fully have my opinions developed, but I’ve definitely noticed some things about it that hinder my workflow. During development I’m often doing a lot
of learning, so my workflow usually tends to be something like this:
1) Start working
2) Encounter a problem that I don’t know how to solve
3) Read a post/book snippet or watch a video about solving the problem
4) Continue working while referencing the material in step 3
Step 3 ends up posing a problem while streaming due to it most often being copyright material. For example, I wanted to get ideas / learn some sound design for lead synths for the song I’m currently working on.
To do this, I watched several youtube videos of people designing lead synths. Showing these videos on stream would be copyright infringement so I need to avoid that. This leads to the problem where
I can’t actually work like normal on stream. I essentially have to do prep work for what I’m going to do while streaming, and do any learning that needs to happen prior to starting. There definitely are
some small learnings that can happen without issue (e.g a quick google search), but I still see this as a decently large hinderance that slows down development. My thoughts right now are that I might just stream
on the fly when something comes up that is a good fit (I know I don’t need to learn anything to do the work), but I know that’s also not ideal as I would not be able to make a predictable streaming schedule for
people to follow.
Weston