Our pal Gabe Swarr (Animation Producer/Game Dev/Cartoonist) created a great game called “Bub-O Burst”, an arcade style puzzle game coming to steam.
Together, we came up with the idea of creating the first 100% Rogue-like or randomized video game soundtrack. We scoured the internet to find an example of a video game soundtrack that was 100% random. However every video game out there has some element that is set in stone, the title, the ending, special sequences to empower the story, etc, no game was 100% random. Some games like “No Man’s Sky” with randomly generated music, also have preset music sequences tucked into them. Even Capture the Flag for the Old Atari 400 had randomly generated music, however the first 6 notes were the same every time you played.
Every piece of music in Bub-O Burst is randomized. We created randomised music for every portion of the game: the intro, the levels, and even the ending is randomised. Every time a player launches a new game of Bub-O Burst, the soundtrack takes musically interchangeable drum, bass, & lead loops I created from scratch and arranges them into songs with verses, chorus’, and bridges that make the soundtrack.
Songs in the game are formatted as such: verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/loop to start
In the golden age of video games, space was an issue on disks and carts, so code for music data had to be budgeted. Even when we were able to use pre-recorded music in games, space on discs and hard drives were still limited. Today, sound files are not as hard to find space for, so we built a digital loop library for our game to randomly arrange songs with.
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2968880/BubO_Burst/
We hope you find this innovation as exciting as we do!
Take care!
Seth & Michelle xoxo
8 Bit Weapon 