ABAgames’ “Good Old Game Sound Generator”

Kenta Cho is a brilliant game maker, and he’s come up with a couple of generators that can generatively make short stretches of music, suitable for classic-inspired arcade games.

Short VGM Generator is on itch.io, and works by taking a pre-existing piece of music and attempting to make another piece of a similar style.

The Good Old Game Sound Generator is on GitHub, but for playing around you might be more interested in its Demo page. It takes a bit more effort to make something with it, but it’s a much more flexible tool. I must leave you to your own devices to make something of value, or at least of interest, using it.

The process that let him to create these tools is up on a page he made on dev.to. If you’re interested in generative music you should take a look!

Devlog of Cross Breeder X

A short devlog from RujiK the Comatose about a monster breeding sim they’ve been working on. Dismayed as a kid by the fact that breeding in video games tends to be done according to tables rather than truly from combining the attributes of the parents, they set out to create a procedural version that matched what they expected when they were young. The results seem to be satisfactorily freaky, although, possibly to the dismay of some, we get no renditions of monster mating.

A quick digression. They’re basically redoing what was done in Spore some 14 years ago now. Why is this interesting, while Spore is old hat? My guess it’s that the tech is being put in service of a Pokemon-like game instead of Will Wright’s extremely generic simulationist gameplay.