Atomic Super Lander Update #13

Hello boys and girls,

Today we are going to reveal some of the in game music that has been added to Atomic Super Lander.
There will be around 20 unique tunes, randomly played in the game.
Here are a few samples (I threw in some gameplay footage, but don't look at it, just listen to the music :)

Agent Trooper (Tutorial music)


Eastern Skies


Space Action Hero


The Lander




These tunes are made with free software, on my old MacBook, mostly recorded in my basement.

The plan was to compress songs to mp3-files and keep the shorter sound effects as wav-files.
Well, pretty soon we noticed that mp3-files get HUGE really fast. Fortunately Unity supports Vorbis Ogg files, which are a lot smaller in size, without compromising sound quality too much, so we converted all songs into Ogg-files.
All you musicians out there might also notice that the tempo in these songs is always the same, actually they are all 120 bpm (beats per minute).
Why, you might wonder. Well, it all stems from the fact that the songs need to be pretty short, and then they will be looping through the level. The tricky part is to crop the song precisely where it needs to loop back to the beginning. Even a millisecond askew will result in stuttering, or a slight 'jump' when played.
So, the easiest way to find the right position to crop, is to have songs that end exactly at a whole second. This is easily accomplished with a tempo of 60 bpm or 120 bpm. I chose the latter for this game, since it is an action packed upbeat game :)
Come to think of it, this allows me to merge them all into one long seamless medley for our next company rave party...