For this year's Hackathon, I wanted to do something other than programming, so I decided to join a team where I could focus on making music.
Our team created a Game Boy game using GB Studio. The game is short and funny. You get to walk around in our office space, and you need to fix some bugs before you can go home.
Making music for the game was a blast, but aslo quite challenging. Since the Game Boy only accepts .mod files, and only four different channels with limited funcitonality, we had to find a tool that could help us with that. MilkyTracker was a perfect fit. With only four channels to work with, we have to use different instruments in the same channel. This meant keeping the different drums on the same track, which in turns mean that we can't hit more than one drum at a time. Only a few effects were available, and we couldn't use any attack, sustain, decay or release on the instruments. With all these restrictions comes the classic 8-bit sound. That's also why all music on game boy has the same feel or music style to it. We immediately hear the chip tune, and the nostalgia kicks in.
I created two tunes for the game:
That's one tune per day. The songs are roughly 20 seconds, and they loop in the game. Despite the short tunes, I'm happy with the result considering all the restrictions we had.