Hi everyone.
Firstly, Here's the song:
https://soundcloud.com/arcticlight/cyube-world1-level1
I've been thinking about/wanting to make an original Rhythm style videogame for a while. The game's not ready, but some of the tracks are, and I thought I'd share one of them for feedback. I've been trying to learn the finer details of FL Studio and get better at handling the overall mix.
Any comments would be greatly appreciated of course
Author's Commentary (For anyone who cares to read it, feel free to ignore it):
0:00 -: This piece is a videogame song, and specifically for a rhythm game I'm putting together. It's going to be repetitive. Sorry, heads up. It was also designed so that the individual phrases could be looped arbitrarily, as well. Just imagine as you listen that you were to hear each phrase repeated a few more times, before the next section kicks in. The idea is to layer everything together in successive parts the further along the level you are, sort of how Bit.Trip does.
0:10 -: The introduction here on Level 1 is designed to be extremely repetitive. Here, we want to get the player acclimated to the controls in about 30s. I couldn't decide whether to use something more straightforward for the baseline or whether that would be annoying to listen to for the full length of the introduction.
0:30 -: 30 seconds in, we begin dropping the drums. These phrases are eventually going to be repeated until you get the hang of the basic controls, after we've explained the game from the introduction. The beats are unobtrusive, and range from straightforward to a little bit of variety to make sure that the player can stay on the beat when something more complex starts up.
0:52 -: The level proper starts in! This is actually the first part of the song that was written, the intro came later.
1:06 -: The arpeggiator in the background here is my favorite part of the piece, I wish I could have spent more time expanding on that theme and maybe thrown it into the second part of the level as well. I might expand this section out some more both because I like it and for gameplay reasons.
1:21 -: Just a little bridge. Honestly, I couldn't figure out a good way to join the "second half" to the "first half" I didn't want to break stride, and didn't want to introduce a new phrase just for the bridge since that's what the second half is about. I settled on dropping the strings drone sound for the first time in the piece, which calls attention to the section a little bit but not too much.
1:28 -: Second half of the level! The phrases here are twice as long, and I removed some of the arcing regularity of the melody. The drums also have a couple of different variations now, I tried to switch it up some, including the lovely rhythm game trick of omitting one or two important beats to see if I can trip the player up a little.