---
title: "A Programmer Makes Music"
date: 2020-10-01
description: ""
---

A few years ago, I found the lovely [Godot Engine](https://godotengine.org"),
and decided to make a game. It's called Fronter and it's not much of an
improvement over the Flash game I made by copying a tutorial in 2009.  Though I
wrote it myself this time instead of just swapping out assets (I was 13, okay).
It's sorta fun, but very incomplete and _terribly_ balanced.  It does, however,
have exquisitely-crafted graphics:

<a href="../assets/fronter_full.jpg">
<img src="../assets/fronter.jpg"
    alt="The main "character" of Fronter: a very simple, significantly sloppy
    black and white drawing of what some might call a spaceship."></a>
<small>Yee-haw</small>

I love programming. I love solving problems with clever solutions. I think it
can be hard in certain types of creative project, though. I've had tons of fun
working on my little LISP implementation because, there, programming is the
journey _and_ the destination. Those problems are fun to solve, and have a
clearly-defined scope. With a game, it's way easier for me to glom on a bunch
of nonsense, and barely get anywhere with the actual gameplay.

So, somewhere in there, I got tired of scratching my head, "Make enemy strong?
But no make _too_ strong." and just worked on the music. I'm no musical
genius-man, but sometimes programming is stupid, and you just want to make
drums go bop and synths go bzz.

Most of the music is overtly game-y, with the aforementioned buzzy synthesizer,
but I think it works most of the time. A lot of the songs I've done are also
way too intense for background music, like they'd only make sense at the climax
or the closing credits. Part of the reason I dropped the game was because I
couldn't find anywhere to put the music I worked on!

I've hardly ever _named_ a song, either. Nearly everything still has its
placeholder name. "Organ", "Game Tune", and the especially horrifying "Poppin'
Freestyle", are all in desperate need of a rename. And no, "freestyle" refers to
several minutes of synth noodling. It is not rap. If you ever see a post on
here titled, "Me Rapping is a Good Idea, Actually", please reach out to my
emergency contacts.

This post isn't intended as a plug, but if you're itching to hear some
bleep-bloops, there is technically a [Soundcloud for Fronter](https://soundcloud.com/fronter_game).
I didn't spend much time on a lot of the songs, so they severely lack polish,
but the three I mentioned above are, I think, the best (more or less in the
order given).

I haven't had the power cable for my MIDI keyboard (a rather cheap-o Yamaha
YPT-240), so it's been a long while since I attempted a tune. Finally bit the
bullet on ordering a new one yesterday, so maybe I'll work on more stuff in the
near future.

Also annoying FOSS-lover that I am, [LMMS](https://lmms.io/) is the
music-making software I've used. So, if you have a melody kicking around in
your head, I highly recommend that you try and play it out. It's very fun.