868-HACK

Posted in games I like

xMZ0oM2

I’m on Michael Brough’s testflight, so over the past couple of months I’ve gotten to play a lot of his amazing new game 868-HACK. It’s really, really good, just a beautifully designed little thing. It’s easily the iPad game I’ve played the most of ever. It’s an update to his 7DRL 86856527 from earlier this year, only with, like, months and months of careful tweaking and balancing and attention to detail.

I don’t often post other people’s games on this blog, but I think this one is pretty special. Go check it out.

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Bosca Ceoil

UPDATE: This blog post is for an old version of Bosca Ceoil, and is out of date! Bosca Ceoil v2.0 is available from here: boscaceoil.net

bc

I made a thing! It’s a simple music creation tool, called Bosca Ceoil (pronouced “bus-ka kyo-al”, Irish for “Music Box/Accordion”).

I made this because I find other music programs really confusing and distracting. Too many panels, buttons and knobs! I wanted something really simple, something designed to work the way I tend to create stuff – a process that I suppose I could best describe as: make something super simple, and keep tweaking it until it starts to get good.

Bosca Ceoil is all about looping, and designed that way at its heart. Songs are built up from lots of tiny 16 note patterns – the intended workflow is that you loop over these single patterns until you have something you like, then you start making variations. If you approach it this way, you’ll find it’s pretty decent at doing that – but it’s not very good at other things, like say, long melody lines. It is what it is! I made it for myself, and the way I work, but hopefully some of you out there will find it useful too. It’s free, and open source under the FreeBSD licence. If anyone wants to port it/fork it, go for it! It’s on github here.

[Download for Windows (v1.1)]
[Download for Mac (v1.1)]
(for Linux, more info here)

[Download AIR Installer (v1.1)]
[download adobe air]

It’s a pretty simple program, and only takes about five minutes to learn how to use. Here’s a tutorial to get you started!

(if Bosca Ceoil is too much of a mouthful, feel free to just call it Bosca)

70 Comments

Bosca Ceoil #screenshotsaturday

Posted in bosca ceoil

musictool

Sometimes I wonder why I bother making plans, I never seem to stick to them anyway.

I’m on holiday at the moment, but still trying to chip away at Isothingy. I haven’t made a soundtrack yet, but I’ve been working on it – sort of. Decided that I didn’t really like any existing music tools, so I’d have a go at making my own. It’s actually going really well – maybe even well enough to be useful to more than just myself when it’s finished.

9 Comments

Isothingy, 10th August 2013, #screenshotsaturday

Posted in naya's quest

room

Progress report time! I’ve finally finished the “first draft” of my isothingy game. In this particular case, I’ve decided that this means:

– That there are no placeholder lines of text in the story. I’d say quite a lot of the writing will be getting revised before I release it, but the story is all there, intact.

– You can play the game from start to finish. There are lots and lots of incomplete rooms, and some rooms are in the wrong order, etc etc, but the entire game is linked up now.

So how far off finished is it? Still pretty far, really. There are lots of little gaps to fill in everywhere in the game, lots of graphics are missing, and biggest of all, I don’t have a soundtrack yet. (I haven’t really done any music composition in a while, so I’ve been practising.)

It’s hard to work out exactly how long this game has taken, since it’s been so on and off, but I think it’ll be around 5 months, total, when it’s done. Quite a lot for what’s really a very small, simple thing.

5 Comments