Added a bunch of glitch effects today to help cement the idea of this being a 'broken' videogame.
Basically, I do 3 things in order to make the game seem borked:
- Hold the current frame for 0.25 to 0.5 seconds
- Place random text over the frozen screen buffer at precise 8x8 character positions in a variety of colours and at low opacity. This gives some interesting overlay effects.
- Add one of a range of noise-burst sounds gathered from:
http://madgarden.net/apps/glitch-machine/. I loop these so they can run for any timeframe, and cut them off when the specific glitch has disappeared.
If you've not come across Bytebeat software, it's kind of amazing. It allows you to write small algorithms to a single byte sound buffer, with variables such as 't' for time-step. If you just use t, you get a sawtooth wave as t rises, and then wraps within the byte back to zero again. If you use t + t^2 then you get something else. It kind of works like this:
and
.
Despite the memory and programs being small, explorers in this realm have managed to create weird techno-industrial music with it! I'm just using it for glitches, but I thought I'd share, regardless.