Sorry for the lack of posts recently. It’s been a really rough few months.
In any case, I wanted to let everyone know that the soundtrack for Another Star is finally available. And you can get it for free, even if you don’t already own the game! The soundtrack contains all 31 music tracks from the game, plus it also includes five bonus tracks that were not used in the game’s final release version.
You can download the soundtrack directly from this page on the Another Star website.
After completing Another Star, I thought about expanding my fake “emulator” engine that the game ran on, and doing another project. I’d like to add some of the features that Another Star is missing, such as actual palette swapping for example.
Another thing I thought about adding was real-time sound. In Another Star, all the music and sound effects are prerendered and then played back, but this past week I toyed around with programming a six-channel FM synthesizer from scratch. Thus, not only graphics, but audio would also be emulated. Behold!
(The screenshot is a test mockup, although it belongs to the same game idea/project.)
The programming is not particularly efficient at the moment. If you listen closely, you can hear the tempo wobble from time to time as my computer struggles to render just five of the six audio channels. Still, I thought it was quite an accomplishment, reading countless articles online about how sound and FM synthesis works, and then applying it to an actual, working program over the course of a week. I honestly didn’t understand much about sound waves work until now.
That said, I’m not sure if there’s much use for it. The only real appeal is that it’s rendering audio in real time. There’s not really any reason not to use audio files for music and sound effects in games. So, in the end, this week was probably nothing more than a waste of time.
