Music, Publicity and Superstar Developers

Have you seen Link Attack on XB Indie games yet? No? That's because it hasn't been approved yet. It's really close now though, honest.

It's quite a good thing that it hasn't gone live yet because I still haven't got a new trailer completed for the game, I was capturing the video last night and hopefully this night I'll be putting it together. The new trailer will contain all the gameplay modes including footage of the two player mode and the background music will be the title music, which was written and recorded by me. I'm actually quite proud of the music really, so I'll talk about it a bit more.

Yeah, the Music. When I started the project I wanted to do EVERYTHING myself. John Abbott, the guy who worked with me on The Towers of Cedrick did the music last time, and it was really wierd, but awesome at the same time. I wanted to have something a bit more grounded, but still edgy. I decided to ut my recently bought Mac Mini to use and fired up Garage Band. GB is an excellent piece of software, easy to use but with loads of features, I started throwing random samples in and created an absolute mess, I did this with a few projects and ditched them all. I did it again bit this time it worked, after I got one done I managed to get three more done in a row that I was happy with. And then I got writers block. Two weeks later I went back to the 4 tracks I had and in usual tradition, hated them. I didn't ditch them straight off, instead I tweaked them, removed some samples, added more in etc. I then decided to do something truly insane, I picked up my guitar, I picked it up, plugged it directly into the Mac and then I rocked! After about 34 takes where the timing was out, I had a good take and with all the other noises I had something that sounded passable... I had created MUSIC!

This process of recording something, ditching it, re recording it, messing with the virtual amp settings, moving it around, deleting it again before giving up and cracking a can went on for quite a while until I had six tracks. One for each day of the week. I then needed a title track. I handled this one a bit differently, instead of dragging a load of samples onto the track and maybe recording some guitar over it I started with one drum beat, then I put some guitar over the top, then more guitar, then a lead line, then a few picks for effect. As I didn't have a Bass guitar I cranked up the bass and picked away to get a very poor bass effect. After a while I was happy, happy and tired, and maybe a bit drunk. Overall I loved making the music for the game, some people are going to love it, some are going to hate it. Infact during peer review two people have said those two things, including one guy who said one track sounded very Seattle Grunge, which made me very happy. If music be the food of love, then Link Attack will give you a gippy tummy.

But anyway, after the trailer is up I've got to post round a press release, not sure how much interest this will drum up but it's worth a shot, I'll be advertising free review copies so maybe that might interest a few parties into a bit of free publicity but as that's all I've budgeted for it'll have to do.

The other option is to make the game responsible for some horrific crime and hope the media outcry will boost Link Attack to a state of media frenzied hype, and I can't really be bothered with all that, I'm here to make a game damnit, not to become a superstar! Although, an amusing thought. What if games developers were like rockstars with people crowding into huge areans to see them "do their stuff", and after the gig these scantily clad 18 year old girls were like "sign our xbox live points cards Mr Super Developer!!" that would be awful... awfully wierd... awfully wierdly awesome!!

Anyway, things to do....