Handmade Hero»Forums»Game
Roderic Bos
70 posts
Procedurally generated music?
I was thinking to make handmade hero completely procedurally generated the music should also be generated. Not fully generated because that doesn't seem feasable to me, but the various areas of the 'overworld' like (I'm guessing here) dessert, rocky, swamp, forrest could each have a set of baseloops and melodyloops that represent those area's. And maye two types of sets, 1 normal set and 1 agitated set for when you're fighting. And maybe a set of trigger loops to move from normal to agitated and back.

So for an area randomly select 1 or 2 of the base loops and sprinkle this with melody loops over that. This way the sound can be done the same way as the ground swatches and grass tufts are done currently.

Don't know what Casey has planned for music, but it would be nice to have musical variations as well as world and game variations right.

What do you guys think?
Mārtiņš Možeiko
2559 posts / 2 projects
Procedurally generated music?
Are you talking about procedurally/randomly mixing complete sounds to create music, or completely generate sounds from scratch - like sfxr or bfxr does?
Roderic Bos
70 posts
Procedurally generated music?
The former, like Casey did with the ground chunks. He used precreated images, so for the background music you would want something familiar in a specific area, but having a pool of base and melody loops it still differs every playthough.

I think the sfxr and bfxr you linked are great for sound effects but not really for music. One precedureally music generator is this website http://abundant-music.com/ which works but a bit to random maybe.
Casey Muratori
801 posts / 1 project
Casey Muratori is a programmer at Molly Rocket on the game 1935 and is the host of the educational programming series Handmade Hero.
Procedurally generated music?
Because there is so much to cover making a whole game from scratch, I had to keep the scope reasonable, so things like full 3D and fully procedural music aren't going to be in there. We will do a few simple things, though, like fading between different tracks appropriately, but we probably won't go much beyond that.

- Casey
Roderic Bos
70 posts
Procedurally generated music?
Thanks for your answer, luckily I have the code, so when you showed the audio stuff I can run from there and go randomize the music by that time myself (hopefully) :cheer: