Tutorial: getting started with PxTone

Here at StrandedSoft we have been talking a lot about art, programming, graphics, rendering techniques and the like for the last few months.  That’s great, but there is a very important aspect of gamedev that we have been neglecting a bit as well: music and sound.

Today, we are going to put and end to that. And we are going to do so by taking a quick-start tour on one of the great -yet, considerably obscure- music creation tools that we game developers have at our disposal. And yes, it is absolutely free.

Let’s get to it!

 

pxToneBig

 

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Make some noise!

Ok, so you are making this damn fine game of yours. It has solid gameplay, fun mechanics, an awesome art style and killer looks. You made your way along the design and planning stages, as well as the tedious coding and debugging. You are almost done and ready for release, but there is yet one aspect missing from your game.

It’s mute!

You probably managed to code everything up by yourself and maybe you also made all the graphics for it. A feat which makes you feel proud. But the sound department is a total mystery for you. Neither had you ever designed any sound for anything else and you never played the violin at school. What a disaster.

You feel lost. A game with no sound is just not the same thing and unless you make your game have a competent sound design it will never feel complete.

Lucky you, today we have a few suggestions for those game developers who are a bit lost in this situation of “needing some sweet sounds for my game but I don’t know $%#! about how to pull it off!”.

First of all, I want no make clear that Im no musician. I always loved music and I have always wanted to learn how to play and compose beautiful music. Well ,that hasn’t happened -yet-. But I still want my games to sound great, and I’m completely up for taking the path of learning how to achieve this, so I’m trying to help people out by pointing newbie developers in the right direction by giving some advice on a set of tools that have been useful to me in the past and still are today.

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