Another week has passed and we have been hard at work…

While giving the last touch-ups to dialogue and balance, we also think a lot about the soundscape we want to realize after the upcoming release of our first beta. So we saw it fitting to make this week’s topic:

The Sound of TotS

In the beginning, we thought a lot about the way we wanted to realize the game’s sound, both in SFX and music. Since we mostly dabbled in retro games before it appeared reasonable to make the soundtrack chiptune, and in turn reached the question which retro system the soundtrack should actually target.

For authentic chiptune, there are quite a lot of systems to choose from. One big inspiration at this time was actually Jake Kaufman’s fantastic work on the Shovel Knight OST, and pretty much Tim Follin’s entire catalogue of crazy good NES soundtracks (look them up, you won’t regret it). Both create rich soundscapes in their NES compositions, and since most of our past experiences with chiptune were for the NES anyway, our decision was soon made.

The audio processing unit for the NES, the Ricoh 2A03 in NTSC and 2A07 in PAL regions, is quite a peculiar thing. While not as powerful as its rivals at the time (namely the C64 SID and the Amiga), it has such a distinct and unique sound, which is also owed to its more than memorable game and soundtrack library. It offers 4 different channels (5 with DPCM, which we don’t use in TotS) which are each relatively limited but are absolutely capable of creating a full sounding song together. After choosing the 0CC-Famitracker as our emulator, the work on the game’s soundtrack began.

We soon laid out a plan for what and how many songs we wanted in the game. They take quite some time to compose, code and tweak afterwards, and chiptune in itself can be pretty fickle to work with. But for the upcoming version we got WIP versions of all songs for the current content, and they will also be up on Groovy Goblin’s sites around the time we publish the beta.

The SFX aren’t completely implemented yet, but will be worked on some time after our upcoming beta release. However, there’s one specific thing we already decided on: The sounds will be generated to be authentic to the NES, but it won’t share audio channels with the music. That’s the one thing were we decided to break with the authenticity :P

One more interesting thing to mention is the way we implemented the songs. For the most time we simply planned to export the songs as ogg-files and play them directly. This was suddenly thrown out of the window when Geeky Goblin decided to casually integrate a complete NES APU emulator into our project. Now we don’t have to handle any rendered audio files, and can instead use the nsf-files containing direct sound data for the NES.
Yes, Geeky Goblin is crazy. But it makes the game’s file size absolutely tiny, so nobody complains.

Anyway, the music for the game is quite a journey for us, and we’re glad to publish it together with the first beta. While the songs are still being worked on, this should already give an idea on how we want the soundscape of TotS to feel. We hope you enjoy it and look forward to the coming release!

See you in next week’s Devlog.

Cheers

GG