Will Thompson

I composed the music for BGColor 2025 using Strudel. You can take the source code for the music, paste it into a Strudel tab, and play along.

Strudel runs in the browser and does not itself provide any way to capture the audio for use elsewhere. This piece has four instruments (drums, piano, bass, synth) and three sections (A, B, C). There is randomness in each part so I wanted to capture four variations of each section. I also needed to capture each instrument separately so that I could fade each instrument in and out in the game. So ultimately I needed 4 × 3 × 4 = 48 audio files.

In Godot, if you have a script which extends T for some type T, you can attach it not only to nodes of type T, but to nodes of any type that inherits from T. Concretely, suppose you have this script:

Many years ago, my friend aloobyalordant was making a platform game where you can change the colour of background to make matching platforms disappear. I tried to add music that reacted to the changing colours, but went down a dead end of treating the levels themselves as a sequencer grid, where the vertical axis was pitch and the horizontal was time. I often felt bad when I looked back on this because the result did not sound good and I don’t think it’s what they had in mind at all!