W22 - Playdate Plup Song (explore)
By ENC_ on June 2, 2024 2:05 am
For my upcoming birthday, my partner gifted me a Playdate console early to surprise me. Most of week spent tinkering and play with it. Resisted Lil Steps project to check hardware viability. Redesigned some screens. Experimented with Pulp, the Panic's web based developer tool for Playdate. Seems limited. Been consumed with Bloom and Pocket Pet! for game design style. Played Root Bear and White Water Wipeout with partner. Several days of eating out and walking casually around town with AL.
Nice day in park with her, riding bike's across town. Lazybird, record shop, reading, Playdate, and thrift store. Friends visited Texas and lost sense of taste. Went to see DJ set of Crashfaster. Had food with friends discussed resurrecting Delorean Overdrive to play at Magfest again. New songs need to be developed. Remembered using MML to write NES music in mid 2000's because there was no tracker software for apple laptop to do the job. Also using NodeBox with python for last art installation project around summer of 2009. Leaving web 2.0 art experiments in the past. Outdated. Intersted in UX before it was a common household word. Wrote AL poetic text that she liked 
Listened to Clark - Playground In a Lake, Q - Soul, Present, Data Twins - Lets Make It Tonight, and Tesla Boy - The Universe Made of Darkness, Bot1500 - Surreal
Consumed 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Picked up Rise of Planet of the Apes (2011) bluray, Robotech New Generation full collection DVD, Star Trek Discovery Season 1, and watched Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Gear Used:
Panic Playdate
Tascam DR-40
Software Used:
Panic Pulp (game dev tool)
Audacity
Datalife Sausage Fattener
The song is result of experimenting with Pulp. Very limited sound tool. More limiting then actual chiptune. Sound tools seems under cooked. No pitch bends, modulation, multi timber, or even volume control outside of the basic ADSR amp over the simple oscillators and sound. Strange unspecified polyphony per wave (not very chiptune despite claim). Saw, Sine, Square, Triangle, and noise channels with no repeats. Only one sound for the entire song. Had to be creative with the limitations. Used ADSR to help add variation and pretend multiple patches were available. Square only used for percussive blips. Interface is basic piano roll but with strange arrangement view. Could not figure out how to make song longer.
Exported out test game with song and recorded off of Playdate after "sideloading". Rand through compression in audacity and added fade out. Was a challenge to get a full song out with such undeveloped tools but was fun to try. No real mixing or mastering.
Started another song for this week using actual deveopled tools for playdate and pulp mixed with Ableton. Will perhaps revive for next week.
File Name: "Tester 01" Pulp PDX file,
Alt file "W22 - PlayDate" Ableton,
Audio works licensed by author under:
Copyright All rights reserved
I like the main melody as it sounds like time is ticking away but things are slowly and efficiently blossoming. Sounds like a fun week an the playdate looks really cool in yello. Nice work!
It was an interesting challenge at the very least.