CHIPTUNES OR BUST

And so begins the long slog through the music and sound effect stage of the demo's development. I have plenty of experience with SFX, using both traditional wave-based as well as FM synth approaches, so I'm not concerned with that. I'm rather looking forward to it.

For now I'm putting FamiStudio through its paces once more, and despite having stepped away from it for a good six months or so, I'm happy to report I've lost little of ye olde muscle memory in running through the GUI and hammering notes into shape. The GUI is certainly a little... different? Like most things, one grows accustomed to it. I don't hate it, but I do find it curiously stiff at times. And when things grow beyond a certain level of complexity, learning arcade keyboard commands ascends beyond the realm of convenience, and straight into necessity. Such is FamiStudio, sadly. I suppose there is a GUI analog for each action, but I'll be damned if it's not more convenient to do the keyboard-alt controls from time to time. Pattern copying in particular.

I still feel like selecting and moving notes could be more elegant, but I'm at a loss as to how I'd rather approach it. For all the weirdness, I have to say it gets a lot of things right, and the GUI is so much less cluttered than many DAWs and trackers. I suppose this falls more in the tracker category.

The upshot is I'm having an easier time composing tunes, and they seem to have better cohesion and pacing. There's still something missing... a final piece that draws everything together, but I haven't quite stumbled on that yet. I'm sure I'll have the answer by the end.