Getting back to work and learning to enjoy making music
Hello! I’m back at work after my vacation and so far I’ve been doing what I do best: trying to make music, immediately spiralling and burning out, then trying to fix the problems. This story has a happy ending and I’m doing fine now, don’t worry!
My vacation
In the previous newsletter issue I said that I “got a bit carried away” working on my game right before I took a week-long vacation. After checking my logs and adding up my working hours I realized I had actually crammed an entire extra week’s worth of work hours into the week before my vacation.
When I reached the end of my vacation I was still tired. Believe it or not, an extra week of work will cancel out the benefits of a vacation week. I decided to extend my vacation for a few more days and I felt much better afterwards but I won’t make that mistake again!
Learning to enjoy making music
I spent this week making music, or at least that’s what I would like to say. In reality, I spent the first 80% of this week trying to make music, failing to make any significant progress and burning myself out. This keeps happening to me when I try to make music for my games, so I decided to take a step back and solve the issue once and for all.
The biggest problems I kept running into while making music were that I was struggling to come up with melodies in my head, and the process of inputting my musical ideas into the music software I was using was tedious and slow.
So I made a few small changes to my music creation process that have added up to make a big difference to how I feel! In short, I fixed my setup’s audio drivers to remove some annoying latency from my MIDI keyboard (thanks Jaelights for the help!), I started fixing my old guitar, and I got into the habit of making crappy first drafts of my musical ideas as quickly as possible.
This means that instead of sitting at my desk, staring at a blank page and trying to imagine the perfect melody, I can just noodle around with a keyboard or guitar until I come up with something I like, record it straight away and continue from there.
I’ve only been working this way for a day so far but it feels great! It’s less stressful, it’s more productive, and most importantly it’s a process that I can imagine myself continuing to enjoy for a long time. Maybe when I’m working on my next game I won’t even dread having to make the music for it!
Unfortunately I haven’t quite finished the track I was working on today, so here is an out-of-context loop without the saxophone part. It almost sounds like the sort of thing that would play during the menus of a 90s arcade game; all that’s missing is an announcer enthusiastically telling you to select a character. Maybe my game could have an announcer too…
Anything else?
I got really into the game Rakshasa from UFO 50 recently, even clearing its hidden hard mode. At that point I’d run out of things to do in that game but I still wanted more, so I moved onto the arcade version of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts and got even more obsessed, eventually clearing it on its hardest difficulty. That game is a fascinating blend of easy static platforming challenges and unpredictable dynamic enemies, so it’s simple to memorize a basic strategy for each area but the enemies will almost always force you to adapt and improvise. I love it, and I really want to make a game like it one day!
That’s about all I’ve done really; just struggling to make music and playing lots of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. I guess I also went to the dentist this week for the first time in way too long, so that’s something. If you haven't been to the dentist for way too long either, give it a try!
I’m ready to dive back into making music tomorrow and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can come up with. Have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!