A Programmer Makes Music

A few years ago, I found the lovely Godot Engine, and decided to make a game. It’s called Fronter and it’s not much of an improvement over the Flash game I made by copying a tutorial in 2009. Though I wrote it myself this time instead of just swapping out assets (I was 13, okay). It’s sorta fun, but very incomplete and terribly balanced. It does, however, have exquisitely-crafted graphics:

I love programming. I love solving problems with clever solutions. I think it can be hard in certain types of creative project, though. I’ve had tons of fun working on my little LISP implementation because, there, programming is the journey and the destination. Those problems are fun to solve, and have a clearly-defined scope. With a game, it’s way easier for me to glom on a bunch of nonsense, and barely get anywhere with the actual gameplay.

So, somewhere in there, I got tired of scratching my head, “Make enemy strong? But no make too strong.” and just worked on the music. I’m no musical genius-man, but sometimes programming is stupid, and you just want to make drums go bop and synths go bzz.

Most of the music is overtly game-y, with the aforementioned buzzy synthesizer, but I think it works most of the time. A lot of the songs I’ve done are also way too intense for background music, like they’d only make sense at the climax or the closing credits. Part of the reason I dropped the game was because I couldn’t find anywhere to put the music I worked on!

I’ve hardly ever named a song, either. Nearly everything still has its placeholder name. “Organ”, “Game Tune”, and the especially horrifying “Poppin' Freestyle”, are all in desperate need of a rename. And no, “freestyle” refers to several minutes of synth noodling. It is not rap. If you ever see a post on here titled, “Me Rapping is a Good Idea, Actually”, please reach out to my emergency contacts.

This post isn’t intended as a plug, but if you’re itching to hear some bleep-bloops, there is technically a Soundcloud for Fronter. I didn’t spend much time on a lot of the songs, so they severely lack polish, but the three I mentioned above are, I think, the best (more or less in the order given).

I haven’t had the power cable for my MIDI keyboard (a rather cheap-o Yamaha YPT-240), so it’s been a long while since I attempted a tune. Finally bit the bullet on ordering a new one yesterday, so maybe I’ll work on more stuff in the near future.

Also annoying FOSS-lover that I am, LMMS is the music-making software I’ve used. So, if you have a melody kicking around in your head, I highly recommend that you try and play it out. It’s very fun.