RobberDock Games – Robber Wheels (GBJam 2018)

GBJam is an annual game jam where over a week people create games inspired by, or similar to, the games on the Game Boy consoles. In 2018 Iiro Lindell of RobberDock Games and I took part in it, with me creating the music and sound effects and he – well, everything else, really.

Robber Wheels

What I found particularly interesting about the challenge was creating music that fits thematically. For this I chose to use the FamiTracker software – a chiptune tracker that emulates the NES soundchip and allows users to compose music (and SFX) for it. Learning to use it wasn’t exactly trivial, but once I got the hang of it, there was a surprising amount of expressivity to be found.

Famitracker 0CC

Overall the project was fun, and I learned quite a bit about chiptune, and many of the lessons are also applicable in different styles of music. Our submission wasn’t exactly perfectly authentic to Game Boy consoles in particular – NES has one audio channel more (for five total) and I used the NCO expansion chip in Famitracker, bringing my total channel count to 7 – though I chose not to use the DPCM sample channel as it didn’t sound very gameboyish to me.

The game is available on Iiro Lindell’s itch.io page: https://iirolindell.itch.io/robberwheels

RobberDock Games – Sheepwith OST

Sheepwith by Iiro Lindell / RobberDock Games is an arcade-style flying game where you rescue sheep from wolves and other hazards. I had the pleasure of writing music and doing some plane sound design for the project.

It was the first of my larger projects, and one of Iiro’s as well – and as such a fair amount of time was spent learning to communicate with each other – with people of different skillsets and interests. In the end we opted for the bright, upbeat, kind-of-funky style of music that you can hear above. In retrospect the mixing is perhaps a bit too bright, but overall we were (and at least I still am) happy with the general results: the songs are quite catchy, they all fit the theme of the levels, and definitely the overall aesthetic of the game.

The game is available to play on Iiro’s itch.io page (https://iirolindell.itch.io/sheepwith) and on coolmathgames.com.