Music at school was a waste of time!

"Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't." — Johnny Depp

While finishing off the weapon algorithms in my test tool I started researching other aspects of the project. (I can now graph my weapon profiles and damage inflicted to make game balancing easier.) I've done a bit of 3D modelling in the past, so with a few textures from Midjourney I've built a few test models I can animate and then pixelate which is far easier than creating pixel art from scratch. Suddenly I have lots of animated planets which with a bit of clever lighting look really good. I'll use the lighting to indicate where the sun and hence system warp gate will be. A little graphical cue to help the player on their journey. The biggest challenge for me by far is music. My little bro got the musical talent in our family. As I grew up I watched him learn many instruments. He would listen to a song and play it back on the guitar which was impressive. Music lessons for me at school were a terrible experience so I approached the problem of game music with trepidation. I started with sound effects which is the easy bit and found some really interesting instrument packs on loopmasters. I remembered back in the Amiga days there was a program called Soundtracker. You stuck samples in what was a very simple early DAW. I prroduced some tracks I was happy with. So I looked for the latest equivalent. Obviously DAWs are now vastly more complex but I needed something I could use and FL Studio had that Soundtracker look. As it happens a few simple tutorials you can create a track. The biggest revelation is music theory which we never touched upon back in school. While researching the tool I fell upon chord progressions and then how to put melodies over the top. These concepts make music for some one like me almost simple. All of a sudden with music theory tutorials and esoteric sample packs I think I can produce reasonable game music. I've been caning my Amazon Prime account and I have some reading to do but I think I can achieve what I need. This week on to the fun part, enemy AI, which I've also been reading up on. I'll be using a controller object to coordinate enemy AI. Based on feedback from the enemy objects the controller will switch tactics. What I have realised as I'm using a viewport the player won't see all the enemies on the level so the controller can employ tactics the player is unaware of. Hopefully I can create interesting opponents.