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[Cheezmeister]

First post in DevLogs, think I'm doing it right...

Design-wise, it's your run-of-the-mill Tetris clone, quite minimalist, but technically, it's cool because it doesn't rely on sprites, SFX or music--everything is done procedurally. I've been playing with it off and on, and recently nailed procedurally generated music and thought I'd brag

The music itself, unsurprisingly, is quite rudimentary, sticking to a i-VI-III-VII chord progression, but I feel like getting the soundcard spitting out the right waveforms was the biggest hump. From here it should be all fun and tweaks, experimenting to get some different sounds and tying it more tightly to the gameplay.

If anyone can point me to some good reading on sound production and synthesis, that would be cool, too. I'm having trouble getting anything beyond sine waves and sawtooths to sound like anything decent.

More exultation
Git Repo
Download Page

[Cheezmeister]

Set up a Git repo, now that this is a somewhat serious project.

git://github.com/Cheezmeister/Nextris.git

[Cheezmeister]

Been looking around at different approaches to the audio synthesis--it's actually *really hard* to find a good explanation of how the quantitative (wave form) maps into the qualitative (timbre, etc.) Most resources I've found don't go much beyond additive vs. subtractive synthesis, or "here's a sawtooth, and here is how you can get one out of an infinite number of sine waves." Cool, but it's not as if I have infinity sine waves in my pocket and want a sawtooth terribly badly. I just want some percussion, dangit!

On that note, does anyone know how to get the pitchless (?) sound of drums and cymbals besides throwing out some white noise? I have noticed a lot of chiptunes using colored noise in place of more convincing percussion, so maybe there's something to it...

Been experimenting with different triggers for different noises such as a ding when you hit the wall or a blip when you shift the tetra left or right (pitched so as to maintain harmony, of course), but I'm not finding anything I really like, mostly due to the low variety in the "instruments" I can use. Considering doing some sort of randomization of the waveform itself, because the impression I'm getting is that any shape will sound like *something*, as long as it's cyclic. I predict I'll be hearing a lot of annoying crap, but it's worth a shot XD

[RichVreeland]

all you need to make percussion is a noise generator and an envelope generator

[Cheezmeister]

Bah, that's all? What kind of envelopes work? Any examples you can point to?

Also, I checked out January--very cool! The interactive note selection really makes it shine.