only when the clouds break

This month I was watching a video of someone constructing an ambient piece out of some synths and one of these Boss loopers and thinking, "ooh, that looks fun, I'd love a looper like that". Before realising that: 1.) I don't have enough audio hardware to do the kind of things I would want to do with it, and 2.) I could just code a looper myself and not spend a ton of money on a fancy hardware gadget.

So that's what this month's piece is: an audiovisual looper. 4 synths (2 pads, 1 bass, 1 lead), each connected to 2 loopers (i.e. 4 synths, 8 loopers total). Hit record, play some notes, hit record again to stop recording and start looping, and that's the whole thing. It's conceptually really simple, but I find it a really nice workflow for quickly piecing together ambient pieces. I'm not so happy with the visuals, but I guess they'll do.

I recorded a short performance with it here.

crashing and clanging

This month I finally turned my cymbal synthesizer code into a VST plugin. It was a bit of an ordeal; there was a lot of UI coding involved, but I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.

The plugin contains 6 instances of the cymbal synthesizer, each of which can be freely assigned to specific MIDI notes. I've included 7 presets to give an idea of how to program it. The basic architecture is an implementation of the approach outlined at the end of this old Sound on Sound article by Gordon Reid (see also the previous article in the series).

Borrowing from the approach Tsugi take with their DSP series of procedural sound generators, I coded a custom slider widget for this one. Basically, all of the main parameters are randomisable. Dragging a slider horizontally sets its value, but dragging it vertically sets its randomisation range. If a parameter is set to randomise, the synthesizer will pick a random value for that parameter whenever it is triggered.

your fearless accelerating future

I did not have much time this month, so I exhumed an old unfinished project and updated it slightly. It's a simple arcade game where you have 1 minute to collect as many diamonds as possible, which you then feed into your train to see more of the world.

There's some (not particularly compelling) generative music with a tempo that increases over the course of the minute, but I think this is a case where the visuals are the key attraction. The rest of the game doesn't really live up to their promise.

(the visuals are also why I abandoned the project, because the art pipeline was a nightmare of hand-inking 2 copies of the same image, scanning them, then creating an outline image and manually creating a fill image so the half-tone shader could do its job. It looks great, but it was way too involved)

tremble and warp

Another VST plugin version of an effect I developed ages ago for my game engine. This time it's a pitch modulation effect. I usually use this to add a subtle pitch warble to a mix, similar to a worn out tape, but it can be used in more extreme fashion.

I'll include an update about my previous moaning about UI implementation. This month I did discover a way to make UI implementation in JUCE a lot less painful. Previously I was individually resizing and laying out components in a very convoluted fashion, because that was what the JUCE tutorials seemed to suggest was the best way to do things.

It turns out there is a far simpler way of implementing resizable interfaces, it's just hidden away in this tutorial about Android screen sizes, of all places.

what is left at the end

Another fairly idiosyncratic VST plugin this month. I've been making music more lately, and have found myself missing a lot of the synthesizers and effects that I've coded for my game engine, so I thought I might start converting some of them to VSTs.

This month I converted my vinyl-esque noise generator to VST format, and added a few more parameters. Tbh, I find UI programming so painful though that I don't know how many of these I'm going to do.

Download what is left at the end

This month's piece is super niche, and probably only remotely useful to me personally. It's a MIDI performance tool, to make it easier for me to use my Akai LPD8 controller with PotenzaDSP's Amigo sampler.

It does 2 things:

• Lets you remap up to 8 MIDI notes to different notes (super useful for the specific way I use Amigo)
• And (when your DAW's transport is running) quantises all MIDI input to a specific step size (so I don't have to worry about my timing drifting and can make music by button mashing)

I recorded a short video of the plugin in action here.

open window

Didn't have much time for here and then gone this month (preparing for my talk on Monday), so this is quite a simple audiovisual musical instrument, with no real bells and whistles.

Left click/drag triggers the pad synth, right click triggers the melody synth.

Download open window

regimented wondering

I got ill and ran out of time this month, so I'm afraid this one's unfinished, though it is playable.

A simple score attack game set on a 9x9 grid. You cannot return to any cell you have already occupied, and you score points and replenish your limited number of moves by collecting the pulsing dots. If you are unable to move to any adjacent cell and you still have moves left, the grid will regenerate.

Download regimented wondering

one at a time

This month's here and then gone is a co-operative local multiplayer button-pressing game, a bit like a co-op B.U.T.T.O.N. maybe?

The way it works is: everyone stands around a keyboard, decides which player they are (P1, P2, etc.), and are then tasked with pressing the keys that the game displays, in the order they are displayed. This repeats over multiple key sequences, with the allotted time for each sequence getting shorter as more sequences are completed.

a single moment

A clock made out of flowers, with a drone that shifts with the minute, hour, day.

Download a single moment

Controls: escape: quit

no longer in shadow

This month I was listening to some breakcore (bandcamp) and decided to try and make something that might partially replicate those kind of dense, intricate breakbeats. So this month's piece is a 'controlled randomness breakbeat sequencer'.

It's a 16-step sequencer, where each step can have multiple different samples associated with it. At the start of each loop the sequencer will randomise the samples for N steps, where N is set by the Randomness parameter (the dice). If Randomness is set to 3 the sequencer will pick 3 steps at random, and pick one sample from each step's available selection.

Clicking a step lets you set its available samples. The bottom sample is the default; if that step is not being randomised this is the sample that will play. Samples can also be set to hold or repeat across multiple steps. If a hold or repeat sample is triggered it will override the subsequent steps for the duration of the hold/repeat.

choisich a'chailleach thaisir na mara

I didn't really have enough time to do this month's piece justice, so it's really only the tiniest vignette of a game (< 1min) with some janky animations that I couldn't get working the way I'd intended.

I wanted to make something about the Cailleach, so I picked the story of her creating Scotland and the islands around it from the stones that fell from her skirt as she strode across the North Sea from Norway.

I'm indebted to my Abertay colleague Kaye MacLeod for the gaelic title (trans: The Cailleach walked across the sea).

in the moment

More tile-based pixel art, this time with a little guy walking left to right across a glitchy tile landscape, periodically making choices that affect which tiles are added to the landscape, and adding or removing layers to the music.

This one didn't turn out quite how I was hoping, but I am enjoying working with tiles. I suspect next month's piece will continue the theme.

Download in the moment

everything again

An idiosyncratic drawing tool which gives you 3 mins to create art with a limited selection of tiles and colour palettes, each of which is chosen for you by the tool itself. I made this in a very short period of time, so the limitations might be annoying more than fun, but I like the visual aesthetic of lightly textured, tile-based pixel art.

This one was heavily inspired by my discovery of Mrmo Tarius' work, particularly images like this, where there's a light overlay on top of beautiful, crisp pixel art. There's something really appealing about lightly-textured pixel art; I wish more people would experiment with that kind of style.

if you can find it

This month's piece is an audiovisual musical instrument, where each letter on the keyboard is assigned a specific note, synthesizer and visual glyph. When playing chords the instrument will cycle through each note, emphasizing one at a time and tweening between the associated glyphs.

There's a short video of it in action here.

Download if you can find it

the world lingers

Back to making digital things again. This month it's a VST3 audio plugin; a fairly straightforward granulator effect.

I made this one because I wanted a decent granulator that I could use for making music, and I just couldn't find one that 1.) did what I needed, and 2.) was not covered in hundreds of unnecessary knobs and sliders.

If you're not familiar with granulator effects, they basically work by recording their input into a buffer, and then playing back small chunks of that buffer as individual grains. Most granulators (including this one) make heavy use of randomness; grains are triggered at random based on a density parameter, and individual grains have their own parameters that can be randomised whenever a new grain is generated.

17 stone trees

Another postcard gamepoem. I played a storytelling game with friends recently, and came to the conclusion that I am bad at making up narratives on the spot that actually go somewhere, and feel coherent. Every time I tried to come up with a short story for the game I would get as far as creating a striking image (or at least, striking to me), but struggle to come up with any real narrative impetus for it.

So this is maybe the game equivalent of that, a striking image divorced of narrative context (though it hopefully at least suggests a wider world). I'm getting the itch to work with code again though, so this will probably be the last postcard game for a wee while.

Download 17 stone trees

everything changes when you cross the threshold

This is without a doubt the most minimal here and then gone to date. I was wondering what it would look like if you tried to make a game that is a single sentence, and this is the result.

My other big ongoing project is an attempt to flatten the typical hierarchy between game designer and player, and I think this is maybe leaning on my work there. I think a game that is a single sentence probably requires its players to bring something of themselves to the table, to flesh out the game and make it complete and real.

the quiet in the garden

Another postcard game this month, this time a wee solo boardgame. Hopefully the rules on the postcard cover everything you need to know, but if anything's unclear just go with whatever makes the most sense to you.

Download the quiet in the garden

The Rules:

looking for a world

As I wrote last month, I had less time to spend on here and then gone, so instead of something digital, I made a tiny postcard game.

I don't know where it came from, but I had this phrase "I am looking for a world" stuck in my head, so I spun a game out of it. I guess it's a kind of solo journalling game, designed to fit on a postcard. An attempt at writing a gamepoem, or game design as poetry.

Download looking for a world

the best of wishes

This month I finally got round to replacing the clunky sprite-based text rendering system I'd been using in my game engine with a more modern SDF solution. If you're not familiar with Signed Distance Fields, this basically means I can render text without worrying about blurry or jagged glyphs.

This month's piece is just an excuse for me to put the new system through its paces. It's a procedural game rules generator, with each rule animated onto the screen in sequence. The rules are just a Tracery grammar in the poem.json file if you want to take a look or edit them.

Download the best of wishes

this luminous shoal

This month I wanted to see what would happen if I overlaid 3 games on top of each other. I didn't have as much time to work on it as I wanted, so it's really just a disjointed, disconnected mess of a thing. Enjoy!

Also, I spent some time this month refactoring my game engine. I paid off some of the long-standing technical debt and moved the libraries I rely on into a 'third-party' directory. This means that, in the unlikely event that you want to take one of these here and then gone projects and mod it, that should be a lot easier now. Everything you need will be in the zip file; just open the solution in Visual Studio (it does mean that the downloads will be bigger than before, as I'm including all the necessary libraries).

falling into the world

An audiovisual musical instrument inspired by the hurdy-gurdy and the LED rings we've been using for a current Biome Collective project. Keep the mouse moving to keep the drone going, and touch the points at the side to trigger notes.

Download falling into the world

Controls: escape: quit; mouse: play the instrument; -: minor key; +:major key; zsxdcvgbhnjm,: set root note

the weight of stars

This month's piece is a bit different; rather than the usual Windows executable, I've returned to my roots and created a VST audio plugin.

To use it you will need a Windows VST3 plugin host, but that includes basically any modern DAW (I use Reaper myself).

There are a handful of presets to demonstrate how to use it, but if you'd like the low level/technical explanation, here goes:

ghost waters sing

An interactive poem. Click any letter and it will randomise the word around it, while keeping the selected letter the same.

I created the initial text by starting with a word and then coming up with a word that felt like it fit after it (and repeating that process), giving no thought to meaning. The only constraints I gave myself were no words longer than 6 letters, and each line had to be the same length in a monospace font. The final thing ended up significantly darker than I was expecting, but it's interactive, so you can change that.

Download ghost waters sing

the light rushes in

I mentioned droqen’s awake last month; this month’s piece is a direct riff on that game. I also drew a wee bit on sylvie’s approach to platformer mechanics.

I mentioned last month that I completely misinterpreted the point of awake: I thought the point was to get to the lightswitch and just experience the cool ambient swell that plays when you turn the lights off. When actually the point is to make your way back up to the start in the dark.

the light rushes in is an attempt to make the game that I thought awake was. There’s no way to get back to the start once the lights are out; in fact, there’s no jump mechanic at all.

behind the screen

Experimental procedure:

Subject is to be observed once a day. Camera may be activated for 4 seconds only; while active a single frame may be captured and saved to disk. Daily observations must be recorded in the observation log.

drawn in the gaps

I had very little time for fun things this month, so this month’s piece is a very simple colour-tracking webcam toy. You can select a pixel from your webcam and the shader will then fill in all pixels of a similar colour with a colour of your choice. And you can play with some of the parameters for different effects.

I had plans to implement fancy fire effects in the shader, but I ran out of time, so it’s just a very simple toy that you can play with.

Download drawn in the gaps

something in the distance

A deterministic exploration game. There are 4 gems and 1 exit. To leave collect all 4 gems then walk through the exit.

Rooms are connected deterministically, but not in the usual way. A room may have different exits determined by how you enter it. In order to reach the exit you'll need to figure out the specific logic by which rooms are connected.

Download something in the distance

every long-awaited pause

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of feather-collaging photos together. This month’s piece is fairly simple: draw with the mouse to blend photos and field recordings together. You can swap out or add your own photos/sounds to the photos and sounds folders if that’s a thing that is interesting to you.

Download every long-awaited pause

Controls: escape: quit; mouse drag: blend photos/field recordings

while starlings wait

A very simple Autumn sketch, inspired by the background of this Sloane Leong piece. Move the mouse to drop some leaves, left and right mouse buttons move the leaves. All accompanied by some sounds I recorded in my back garden.

Download while starlings wait

Controls: escape: quit; mouse move: drop leaves; left mouse: spin leaves; right mouse: push leaves

strange harvest

I didn’t have much time this month, so I got some markers, drew something, and built a light treasure hunt around it. Find all the diamonds to reveal the whole picture.

Download strange harvest

Controls: escape: quit; cursor keys: move focus

make sure you’re back for dinner

I like walking simulators, but the term ‘walking simulator’ is a pretty poor description of the games in that genre. Which is understandable, given that it was originally coined as a derogatory term by people who have clearly never gone walking in their lives.

This month I thought I’d have a go at making a game that takes the term at face value, and simulates a specific element of real world walking: the game of deciding when to turn back in order to catch the last bus home.

something unseen

I didn't have much time this month, so this is a very simple one. A series of 1-bit images, with some basic physics applied to each black pixel so that you can drag your mouse across the image, collecting pixels as you go. When you let go of the mouse the pixels morph into a new, randomly-selected image.

I would have recorded a video, but the colours and the nature of the pixel motion means it gets absolutely destroyed by video compression. If you're not on Windows, or you're reading this at some point in the future, you'll just have to imagine what it looks like.

this is not a story of escape

This month I made something filled with all my despair about the future present, together with the strange wonder of watching the plants in my garden and greenhouse scrambling over each other, flowering and fruiting. To be honest I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to spend part of the month listing all my fears and sourcing images of all the worst people on the planet for it, but, well, here we are.

There is more than enough despair going round at the moment and you definitely don’t need me adding to it, so feel free to skip this one. If you do decide to play it, I will say that it’s very short, oblique, and there are flashing images.

Download this is not a story of escape

in hungry palaces

This month's piece is a simple high score game. There are 10 targets; score points by stopping as close to their centre as possible.

I really just wanted to make something that would let you draw a mix of satisfying looping curves, and right-angle curves. There's not much to it beyond that to be honest.

Download in hungry palaces

bright embers

This month, a game that’s all about bouncing balls off things. It maybe shares a lineage with arpeggiate the world in that it’s a single-screen arcade game without the scoring, timers and leaderboards so often associated with arcade games. Has anyone coined the term ‘post-arcade game’ yet? Can I claim it for these games?

I wanted all the audio to revolve around the (super-minimal, admittedly) music, so the SFX are actually generated by a custom granulator effect that takes the main synth chords as its input. For every collision or ball death, I trigger a single grain from the granulator, pitched up by octaves or fifths (as an aside, I think this is my first game using just intonation). To avoid triggering a silent or very quiet grain, there’s a threshold parameter so that we only write into the granulator’s buffer if the input’s loud enough. I’ve not come across a granulator like this before; I was pretty happy with how well it worked.

The nice thing about all this is that the soundscape scales really nicely, all the way from distinct individual collisions when the game’s quite calm, to the classic granular full-on wash of sound when it’s all kicking off. Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my background as an audio programmer shapes the way I design games in specific ways. This feels like a good example of that. i.e. the SFX are connected to both the mechanical action on screen and the music, which is itself tied to the visuals with that chord-synced wipe effect. I don’t know if you’d get these kind of specific close couplings from a designer who isn’t also an audio programmer?

cymbal island

For last month's arpeggiate the world, I wanted all the audio to be procedural (no samples), but I realised I didn't have any code for a decent-sounding cymbal. So I took a bit of a detour from the main game and coded a cymbal synthesizer for it, following these old Sound On Sound articles. Having coded it though, there wasn't much time to actually explore it before I had to upload the game.

So this month's piece is a more thorough exploration of that cymbal synthesizer. It's a pixel art island which you can populate with robots and arrows. Robots will travel in one direction until they either hit an arrow or fall into the sea. Any time a robot hits an arrow or falls into the sea, it will trigger one of 5 cymbal synthesizers.

Content warning: This one has a lot of flashing colours!

So I was thinking about arcade games, and how they're almost always focused on numbers, whether that's high scores or timers. And I was wondering what an arcade game would look like where the goal wasn't to get the high score, or set the fastest time.

So arpeggiate the world is an avoid-em-up arcade game where the goal is just to keep the music going. With an arpeggiating synth as the main instrument, you collect pickups which each add an element to the music (an extra octave for the arpeggiator, percussion, effects, etc.), and orbit around you when collected. If an orbiting pickup collides with one of the enemies, you lose it (and that music element). If you lose all your orbiters the music stops and the game is over.

I'm not religious, but if I were, my religion would be Bed. The core tenets of my faith would be:

• Bed is sacred

• Sleep is worship

• We have no need of cathedrals, synagogues, or mosques; our Beds are our cathedrals

a tangled land

Via this tweet by @webbedspace, this month I found myself watching a couple of streamers play through this absolutely wild Mario 64 romhack (streamed in 3 parts by spaghoner and videochess: part 1, part 2, part 3). If you take a look at this incomplete (and not entirely correct?) map of the game that they were trying to navigate by, you can maybe get a sense for why I was so taken by it. The way the hack turns the game inside out and duplicates rooms and hubs and has the player continually stumbling across new spaces that loop back to old spaces is just... It feels like someone binged Mario 64 over a couple of days, had intense, nonsensical dreams about it as a result, then turned those dreams into a romhack. I love it.

So there's no way I was going to create a vast, elaborate 3D platformer in the space of a week or so, but I thought I could maybe lean on that confusing, tangled map to create something with a similar sense of discovery and interconnection, hence a tangled land. It's far from the prettiest thing I've made, but if you play it it'll quickly become clear that the bulk of my time was spent on other parts of the game.

It's basically a map for you to uncover. You can travel between places using the number keys (usually; there are occasional exceptions to that rule). If you hit a number key that connects to another place, both the connection and that place will be revealed. And there are secrets.

This month's piece was born out of me reading Sean Costello's reverb design posts over at Valhalla DSP (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I've been coding audio effects for 20(!?) years, and I've always avoided coding reverbs because I'd read that they're complicated and require a lot of fiddly tuning. And when I had tried to look into reverb design it was always presented in a way that seemed to confirm that impression.

But Sean's posts (in addition to the explanation on this dated-looking semiconductor site, which Sean links to in Part 3) explained things in a way that makes it clear that reverb design doesn't need to be complicated. It really just revolves around 2 basic building blocks: an all-pass filter and a delay. Turns out, creating a nice reverb is just about connecting a bunch of all-passes and delays together, and modulating the delay times to avoid that nasty metallic sound you get with bad reverbs. Here's a scrawled diagram of the design I came up with (the various numbers are pretty arbitrary; you can easily create a different-sounding reverb by choosing different numbers)

(this was also the first time I saw someone explain what an all-pass filter actually is in non-maths terms. It's literally just a delay that has a feedforward signal as well as a feedback signal)

Anyway, I made this thing. You can either play it as an instrument (see the readme for the full controls), or just leave it running as a super minimal, hypnotic generative piece.

the words notwithstanding

I think we're back!?

the words notwithstanding is a text-based drawing tool/musical instrument that writes out the text of Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth as long as the mouse button is held down. It switches colour and pitch for every sentence, which has the neat consequence of visualising the sheer length of Kirk's sentences.

Telemaphoneroo

I'm still not back to regular here and then gone times yet, but I do have something cool to share. Telemaphoneroo is an online telephone game inspired by: 1. playing Gartic Phone with Biome folk and my colleagues at Abertay, and 2. my tendency to narrate what I'm doing when I'm cooking, adding in random extra syllables to the words (so fork becomes forkalork; spoon, spoonaloon).

It starts with everyone entering a two-word phrase, and for each turn you add a syllable to another player's phrase, gradually building up elaborate nonsense phrases. And it's all hooked up to the browser's text-to-speech synthesizer, because part of the fun is listening to the computer trying to pronounce the weird accumulation of syllables you end up with.

I put together a short trailer with the help of some Biome folk to give you an idea of how the game usually plays out.

We're not back to normal yet for this newsletter, but I did make a game this month, for the launch jam of candle's bitsy clone bipsi. bipsi appealed because - among other additions to the bitsy formula - it lets you plug in your own javascript code in the editor. Which let me plug in some webaudio text-to-speech and synthesis code.

forest song is the result. It was very much an experiment in what I could do with bipsi, but if you ever wanted to wander through a bitsy forest that is part musical instrument, part sequencer, this is the game for you.

This is not a here and then gone project, so I won't be deleting it at the end of the month.

still on hiatus, sorry!

I moved house last week, so here and then gone is very much still on hiatus. Here’s some links though:

Further Reading

A tale of death and grief and a by G.V. Anderson.

...on hiatus...

Well, I've finally hit a month where I just have no time to make something for here and then gone. There's too much happening right now, and I'm writing this a week in advance because I'll have no time to write it next week.

here and then gone is such a strange thing. A lot of the time it feels like my here and then gone projects give me energy; I genuinely enjoy working on small, focused projects purely for myself. But then there are months (and quite a few recently) where it feels like a struggle to come up with an idea that I want to work on.

I said last month that the next few here and then gones were probably going to be quite pared-back, and true to my word this is probably the most pared-back thing I've made for this project to date. It's not even a piece of software! Just a wee 4 page pdf.

I was struggling a bit to come up with feasible ideas this month, so I decided to just write down some observations about my dreams. I don't know if this is true for other people, but I'm pretty sure all my dreams take place in the same landscape. That is, I have travelled to locations in one dream that I previously visited in another.

I don't know what other people's dreams are like, but the interconnectedness of my dreams has always seemed weird to me, so I decided to try and document some of the places I've visited when dreaming.

This month is a fairly simple one; each (real world) day you run it will give you a different image, with a procedurally generated title, all accompanied by a generative drone. For the titles I went back through all the names I've given previous here and then gone pieces and created a tracery grammar that tries to replicate some of the patterns in the way that I've been naming these.

Download sound in the margins

Controls: escape: quit; space: reveal picture

In which I narrate a daydream of an alternative highlands, drawing on a BBC adaptation of one of Alan Garner's lesser works from my childhood, the Clearances, rewilding, and strange concrete structures emerging out of the rainforest.

It's very short, just a series of images really, ending with the image that, for whatever reason, has been stuck in my head for the past couple of months, of vast concrete arches towering above a thickly forested glen.

Download the cathedral

Controls: escape: quit; space: advance