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Mindless retro action :)

About a week ago a friend of mine released his very first indie game – for the iPhone of all platforms. Sounds like a bit of a pain and probably it actually was. The game is basically a bigger and better version of one of his old games. The old one was written in C++ for Win32 (the source is also available over there). Later on he also ported it over to the GBA.

The new version looks and sounds pretty cool. If you're interested check out the video over at the official site. By the way, all models were done with everyone's favorite box modeler Wings3D. And the final audio cutting was done in Audacity. Both tools are mind-boggling awesome for these tasks. Check them out if you haven't yet.

Well, about a week has passed and he only sold a dozen copies so far. In the meantime it was pirated a few thousand times. Ouch. So, if you got $2.99 to burn (and an iPhone to boot) you can make one poor student very happy.

Loops are commonly used for BGM in video games. There are more interesting solutions such as tracker modules or dynamic stuff, but for most games loops are just fine. They are simple to use and generally work everywhere.

Typical BGM loop usage in games:

• simple loop: The most basic thing to do, just loop it and eventually fade it out at the very end.
• intro+loop: The intro is played once and after that it enters the loop. Quake3 did that with some of the tracks the rest were simple loops.
• 2 crossfaded loops: Both loops are started simultaneously. Both have the same tempo and length, but one sounds more fiercely. The volume is crossfaded accordingly to the amount of action. Silent Hill (サイレントヒル) for example used this technique.

Now that you roughly know what loops can be used for, I'll explain how to make your piece of music loop perfectly. I'll use Audacity for this, because it's open source software, cross platform (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux), and perfectly suited for this task.