From GarageBand Dreams to OpenGameArt Reality

While working on my cozy stacking game this week, I finally reached the point where I needed to add some nice ambient music. So, like any aspiring solo indie game dev, I decided to make my own. I did six years of classical guitar and sang in choirs, so this should be a piece of cake, right? I opened GarageBand and got to work.

That’s when the music stopped. Turns out there’s a big difference between composing music and just performing it. And don’t get me started on all the new terminology I had to learn, plus a whole new app and UI to figure out. It was a bit much. But I decided to push forward anyway. People don’t get into making games because it’s easy, right?

After two nights of work, I had something I’d consider decent. I had a nice chord progression on strings and was laying down some sick tunes on the grand piano. But the notes on the piano weren’t lingering as long as I wanted. So I tried adding sustain through automation. This worked for one track but not at all for the other. What gives?

I tried Googling around and even asked my new best friend, ChatGPT. All the answers confirmed that what I was doing was correct, but in the app, it just wasn’t working. After about an hour of debugging, I opened a fresh project out of frustration just to test sustain—and it worked… first try. Still didn’t work in my old project, though. When I clicked on the automation panel, I couldn’t even change the automation I was trying to add.

So, after two nights, I gave up and decided to give OpenGameArt.org a shot. And lo and behold, after about 30 minutes of fiddling with tag searches, I had not one, not two, but three tracks that fit perfectly into my game. And all I had to do was give credit to the artists. Piece of cake! I would have done that anyway.

So yeah, moral of the story: learning any new discipline is hard as hell. Game dev even more so, with all the hats you have to wear. I encourage anyone—mostly myself—to take as many shortcuts as you can. I only have so much time to work on this anyway.

Till next time.