Plan for Paul "nervous_testpilot" Taylor

Greetings from the East Wing of Mode 7 Towers where, for the last few weeks, myself and the musical dwarves (there are no musical dwarves) have been wearing out our little violins working very hard on the menu music, closing credits theme and one more level track. It has been stressful and rewarding yadayadayada.


I have two radios in my bathroom. You know why? So I can listen in stereo. HA HA HA HA what?

The menu music has a kind of Ulrich Schnauss-y breakbeat feel, whist the theme is a kind of bumptious 80's cop show gone wrong for some reason. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I'm overjoyed with Threshold, the latest level track. Ian tells me it'll be paired with a very cool-looking level which we've just received. We're trying to pursue the aggressive, melodic thing further, and this last track was one of the most difficult to finish so far. Working to a scheme is kind of hard once you've done it about 11 times; you start struggling for variation. Anyway, I think we did it.

I wish I could show you some of this stuff but it's all a bit NDA. If Ian wants to jump in and slip you all an MP3 then he's more than welcome but that's up to him.

In my last blog, about fifteen years ago, I praised the little socks off Ableton Live 3. I have now upgraded to 5 and I am incredibly excited about its potential efficacy. However, and it's a big dangling qualifier of a however, the giant chronic evil kind of moth/fly/sabre-toothed-tiger hybrid spectre of bugginess has reared its fearsome mandibles and literally nibbled away at my tattered sanity. Ableton, for the love of all that we hold dear, please release a patch SOON or I will personally fly over to Germany and hax0r the next version so it can only play funk.

That's all that needs to be said about that, so (and I mean you, Ableton forum fanboys) you can all shut up about it now. It's still usable in most cases. Sure you have to copy a few files around to stop Live arbitrarily deleting them, but stop whining like kittens and make some music.

Speaking of kittens, here is a short video of a cat knocking over The Dame Was Loaded which expresses my feelings over the last three weeks:



...which would have actually worked if our star wasn't more interested in just continually rolling over and over like a total moron. Yeah, way to go. The whole GarageGames community was waiting for you to knock over that game and you missed your shot. I had to fill out the whole thing with stupid music, pictures from last time, and a screenshot. I'm not going to draw a development metaphor, because that would be crass. Oh, whoops.

I've just finished my article for Music4Games.net. Thanks to Manuel Marino and the inimitable Mr. Matt Sayre for their much-valued contributions, and sorry to everyone whose work I wasn't able to include. I hope I've written something representative of the way people on GarageGames feel about music.

The Music4Games guys are doing some worthy stuff, and I've been told I might have some journalistic input into a kind of round-robin-style article featuring people like Jesper Kyd, and some guy called Hubbard at some point in the future, which is a huge slice of cool.

And finally, I played our game properly for the first time last night. Exciting times. It's weird when you've been doing this thing you don't really understand for ages, then you sit down at a computer and realise that you've actually made something which is part of something fun. Hmm.