Hey friends! After a brief one-week hiatus, we’re back with a short but sweet little edition. Today I’ll update you on how it’s going with Bibidi, share some music I made and some closing thoughts on a new idea and a game I’m playing. Let’s do it.

How Am I Doing?

You might’ve noticed I skipped writing last weeks newsletter. I was quite busy and a bit overwhelmed by work-life balance stuff. Juggling two game projects, staying in touch with friends and family, making sure to exercise and get enough sun is about the limit of what I can handle at the moment. Sometimes it even feels like too much. In addition to that, I just felt like I didn’t have that much to say!

But after some alone time, taking lots of walks and seeing the Notwist live, I’m feeling better equipped to write again. There’s something about going to concerts alone that really revitalizes me. There’s an element of parallel play that I enjoy, I can experience people having a good time around me, but I don’t need to interact with them directly. Not having to socialize allows me to completely submerge into the music and the artistry of the live performance. Good stuff!

What Am I Doing?

My work on Bibidi is a bit of a mess at the moment, but a fun one at least. I’ve working on controller support for almost this entire month, so I really needed a break and jump to some other things. I started implementing the Steam API, which is necessary for things like achievements, cloud save, analytics and some other miscellaneous functionality related to Steam. It gets a bit technical so I lost steam pretty fast, pun intended.

So I did some less technical things instead: a bit of sound design and a bit of visual effects. But more interestingly: music! I’ve been on a big music binge lately. There’s a couple of reasons for that. I’ve got a bunch more concerts planned this summer, I started jamming out a little at home again and I rediscovered some childhood soundtracks that really inspire me.

We played a lot of music in our house growing up, and this was a staple CD my dad had in his collection. There’s some really classic synthesizer hits on there that still give me goosebumps to this day. I also love how they capture the vibe of it on the cover: underwater, spacey, psychedelic, sciency sounds with a hint of wonder.

I’ve been trying to explore this sound using VSTs that simulate these styles of synthesizer. I’m not quite there, and since I was focusing on Bibidi I defaulted back to the dungeon synth sound font I’ve grown comfortable with. Anyway, here’s some sketches I made.

(If you can’t see the embedded sound files, click on the title of this email to go to the web page.) This one I think is good for a game over-type jingle.

This one goes into my collection of spooky ghost ballroom jams.

And then finally this one has a nice melody, but the sound font turned out awful. Will try to resurrect it into something useable later.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

Other than that, a game idea I came up around this time last year bubbled back up to the surface. It’s one of those pie in the sky ideas that I don’t have the time, money or skill for to actually consider, but it’s fun to ruminate on for a bit. Suffice it to say, some locations in the world are just so awe-inspiring that you can’t help but to want to create something that evokes that same feeling.

I also bought and started up The Forgotten City, a pretty well received mystery narrative game I always wanted to try because some people rave about it. I played for about an hour and half and was severely underwhelmed. I’ll give it another try before I trash it completely, but the intro falls into all the storytelling traps an experienced writer would know to avoid. Will get back to you next week to see if it’s worthy of a recommendation in the end!