Hello all, retro game musician here to try some stuff out!

Sukotto42

Member
Hi there, nice to meet you all! I've been stalking the forums but figure it's about time to start posting. My name is Scott I'm a (pre-COVID, and hopefully post-COVID) touring musician based in upstate NY, I have played for several bands over the last decade and a half across the country. I've led video game cover bands. I've toured as a keyboardist with Ike Willis of Frank Zappa's band, I've played percussion onstage with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall, I've opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd, and sat in with over 100 bands of varying status in my lifetime. Most recently, I figured out how to zero out the soundtracks in NES games and live-recorded the entire soundtrack while I then played the game to completion, on Twitch. Also developing this for an actual live show.

But anyway, what I have always wanted to do is make NES games. Holy crap, it's so exciting to me to have a platform I can comprehend to be able to do this. I've been a nerd my whole life. Back in high school, in addition to transcribing the entire soundtracks from Mega Man 1 - 3, Contra, Zelda, SMB, and more, I also learned how to program for the TI-83 with no instruction aside from the manual it came with. I used to build levels for Duke Nukem 3D but never really posted anything, I was really starting to get some effective sector-over-sector stuff working well before a hard drive crash killed the mood, almost permanently. I've dabbled in so many things I can't even begin to describe it.

One of the things that got me a real start in the music scene was taking my love for 8bit music, and combining it with the band Umphrey's McGee, which at that time had some tunes that were sounding a lot like something out of Mega Man. I made several 8-bit remakes of their songs in a DAW adhering to NES limitations. At least, what I used to think were NES limitations, I had a good handle on the amount of stuff it could process, because I had a MIDINES cartridge, but know so much more now about actual memory storage, lol. This project landed me onstage with the band a couple of times, which easily could be referenced as the actual start of my music career.

Over the years, I made several of these remakes for other bands in the jamband circuit, forging great friendships along the way. I am currently trying to build a sort of Music Festival overhead adventure game to honor all these dope bands and unique friendships I've gotten to enrich my life with through video games! I don't really have my ideas for it fully fleshed out yet because I don't really fully know what I may be capable of putting together, but I've managed to do a couple things I have found myself impressed with so far, anyway. Hitting some huge roadblocks in unexpected places, such as monster death animations, and a garbage starting playerobject. Searching the forums has been a big help for most other things!

Here's what I've got so far, pretty bare-bones as is. It's ultimately going to be pretty silly. I will also eventually plan to include day/night mechanics and such, where the attendees go wild (become monsters) at night. It is a festival, after all! Using 4.5.9.


Again, nice to meet you in advance, hope to get to the bottom of some of my issues!
 

5kids2feed

Well-known member
Welcome to the group! Sounds incredible! Sweet little game too! Can't wait to see more of what you come up with
 

Logana

Well-known member
Nice to meet you, Nice to see more music people like me, although im still a teen, and you have a ton more experience for me since ive only been making music for a year and playing it for 4, I play clarinet at gulf coast, And am definitely thinking to get private lessons for piano like i did in my second year of playing clarinet, I know this is probably just basic stuff for you but i have a sound cloud with some of my music and would love to get critique from someone who has been into music for way longer than I have, will send you a private message with a link, Real nice game btw, I love your use of arps in the title theme, although in my opinion the tent theme should have a bit of reverb or just something more to add to it, pretty exited to see where you go with this. also this will help with the player glitch at the beginning https://www.nesmakers.com/index.php?threads/mega-metro-vania-title-screen-issues.6401/#post-31780
 

Sukotto42

Member
Thanks for the warm welcome, and the assist with the garbage starting playerobject, I hadn’t thought of hiding the HUD with the palette! That may be the route I take with that.

I didn’t include any reverb type things in that tune because it’s a song called Dangus Khan by lespecial - it literally sounds just like that in the beginning, deadened with no verb!

I also added these songs from memory since I have already transcribed them before in the past.
umphreys mcgee - Blue Echo (festival grounds)
twiddle - brick of Barley (title)

These bands are all friends of mine who would certainly give permissions for this, some already have. The keyboardist from twiddle actually asked me to do one yesterday, so I threw that together quick yesterday afternoon after our chat!
 

Sukotto42

Member
@Logana I ended up fixing my garbage sprite with the suggestion from @PasseGaming in that thread - a buffer screen! Just warp in and immediately out. It's practically un-noticeable. Never glitches my player object. YAS. Thank you!
 
Top Bottom