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General Discussion => Off-Topic Discussions => Topic started by: DaVince on March 09, 2016, 05:02:03 pm

Title: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on March 09, 2016, 05:02:03 pm
So there's this game:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/394310/

Basically, the game is a boxing sim/strategy game with some RPG elements. You gain stats and skill points which you use to get new skills, then go into boxing matches, then carefully mix and match your skills to win the match. It's a very cleverly designed game if you ask me.

Anyway, it's actually been out since January, and I made most of the music for it. (Anything that doesn't sound FM synthy.) It never actually dawned on me to post here about it, but in the end, it is an indie game I've been involved with in one way or another, and I'm actually very proud of what the creators made out of it and very happy what role I played in it (and that people like the music!), so why the hell not post it here, y'know? :)
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Fat Cerberus on March 09, 2016, 05:09:58 pm
You do music, DaVince?  Maybe you could help me with music for Spectacles?  I've been using random midis I found on some obscure RPG Maker website years ago but it would be nice to have actual tailored tracks for it. :)
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on March 09, 2016, 05:27:11 pm
I do music, yeah! For a long time, actually. (I also wasn't very good for a long time.) Guess I never really advertised it much here in recent years...

Anyway, nowadays I charge for commissions. Since it's you I can definitely do one or two free tunes, but in my current position I definitely wouldn't be able to dedicate my time to a full soundtrack without charging for it (sooner or later, anyway). I hope you don't mind.

Oh, but you can always use the free downloadable tracks I made in the past. Like any of these with a Download button (https://soundcloud.com/davince-1/tracks) or the music packs on the repo (https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-5bW82jK5Z5M0g4RlFBNFdBTEU&usp=sharing&tid=0B-5bW82jK5Z5UGZaS0c1OFJZZDA#list). :)
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Radnen on March 09, 2016, 10:37:37 pm
Oh man, I suddenly feel awful for asking one or two free tunes out of you DaVince. :|

I am using some of your free music in Blockman, but someday whenever I get around to working on it I'll may even pay you to do music for it. I do have cash on me these days.

BTW, despite being silent I have been, lately, poking around my own games, seeing what I can do to them, seeing where I left off. Seeing Punch Club gets me really excited about making games again. (Oh and stardew valley, love, love, love that game).
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on March 09, 2016, 11:56:19 pm

Oh man, I suddenly feel awful for asking one or two free tunes out of you DaVince. :|

Don't! That's a good while ago, and I wasn't in need of the money back then. I also didn't think I was good enough to do it commercially at the time. :P

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I am using some of your free music in Blockman, but someday whenever I get around to working on it I'll may even pay you to do music for it. I do have cash on me these days.

I'm really flattered that you're using my music! And I'd gladly help. :)

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BTW, despite being silent I have been, lately, poking around my own games, seeing what I can do to them, seeing where I left off. Seeing Punch Club gets me really excited about making games again. (Oh and stardew valley, love, love, love that game).

Stardew Valley! That game looks great, I definitely want to play it. And I definitely want to see more games from you too! (Although I think you're the one person who has released the most games on Spherical!)
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Radnen on March 10, 2016, 03:47:34 pm
I must say though, I have really been a fan of your music. I think Pokemon has definitely been an influence on you.
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on March 10, 2016, 04:12:30 pm
Well, thank you very much! That means a lot, coming from you. :)

And maybe! But I'm personally much more of a fan of the complex kind of music you hear in classic Square and Enix RPGs, some music in Game Boy games (some of my faves are Mario Land and Wario Land, so...) and I tend to like the really unique stuff like EarthBound, or the C64 sound. And the MOD/Amiga era of music in general. I'm always fighting against personal limits I'm aware of though...

Not sure what would make my tunes specifically Pokémon-inspired, since I sometimes like them and sometimes don't like them that much. Maybe just because it was another much-played childhood game. :P
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Radnen on March 10, 2016, 04:17:35 pm

And maybe! But I'm personally much more of a fan of the complex kind of music you hear in classic Square and Enix RPGs, some music in Game Boy games (some of my faves are Mario Land and Wario Land, so...) and I tend to like the really unique stuff like EarthBound, or the C64 sound. And the MOD/Amiga era of music in general. I'm always fighting against personal limits I'm aware of though...


Yep. I can hear that too. I think the funny thing is, that music also influenced Pokemon, so you got that going for you. But Blockman is definitely trying to be like a square/enix type game I'm trying to model it off of the likes of Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana and even LoZ: AlttP.
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Fat Cerberus on March 10, 2016, 04:23:32 pm
For me personally, I tend to love almost anything done by Yoko Shimomura.  So Kingdom Hearts, several non-FF Square games, the Mario & Luigi series (!), and probably some other games I'm not thinking of.  I also love the majority of the FFX soundtrack, the entire Chrono Trigger soundtrack, and most FF battle and boss themes.

There is something about Game Boy soundtracks though... When I was a kid I used to play Super Mario Land up to World 2, just to listen to the awesome level music (the level timer was a nuisance here!).  Many other GB games had tracks like that too (DKL and Kirby 2 come to mind).
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on March 10, 2016, 05:00:16 pm
Kingdom Hearts has amazingly accurate music that is very close to the original Disney tunes, considering it still relies on a synth/soundfont. I always found that amazingly impressive. The original tunes are very good too. I had no clue she also did the M&L games, those have great music! :)

What I just love about Game Boy music is how they are so limited in what they can do, yet they manage to eak out these fantastic little melodies that don't bore quickly even if you hear them fifty times in a row. There really is an art to doing that.
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Radnen on March 10, 2016, 05:21:27 pm

What I just love about Game Boy music is how they are so limited in what they can do, yet they manage to eak out these fantastic little melodies that don't bore quickly even if you hear them fifty times in a row. There really is an art to doing that.


Yes, I'm thinking of the Dragon Quest theme. I grew up listening to that soundtrack on my GameBoy and hearing it now on the latest game (Dragon Quest Heroes) it's amazing how great it still sounds.
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Fat Cerberus on March 10, 2016, 06:27:51 pm
Yoko also did the music for Super Mario RPG (but not the Paper Mario series).  Almost any game she does the music for ends up being about 50% of the reason I love the game, it always fits so well.  For KH it's about 50/50 music and battle.  Beating up stuff with a giant skeleton key is way more fun than it has any right to be. :P

A lot of people (myself included, up until I heard the final boss music in BiS and KNEW) don't realize she did the music for the M&L games.  If you find almost any late-game track, especially final battle themes, from those games on YouTube about half the comment chains will be "This sounds like KH!" or <insert Xemnas joke here> and a reply of "Same composer!"  It's pretty amusing. :D
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Radnen on March 22, 2016, 01:18:42 am
I just saw this in the news: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/pc-boxing-rpg-sells-300k-pirated-copies-top-16-mil/1100-6435874/
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on March 23, 2016, 10:06:56 pm
Yep. They actually have their own blog article about it (http://tinybuild.com/punch-club-has-been-pirated-over-1-million-times), too. The comments in there are actually pretty insightful too!
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Mooch on July 23, 2016, 03:21:38 pm
This is super-late but congrats, DaVince! Sucks about the piracy but hey, at least it didn't affect your commission, lol.

Didn't you make music for another game? It was like an Atari-style Star Trek-esque game IIRC. I remember seeing the Kickstarter some time ago.

Do you have a website for yourself as a music maker?
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on July 24, 2016, 01:56:25 pm

This is super-late but congrats, DaVince! Sucks about the piracy but hey, at least it didn't affect your commission, lol.

Didn't you make music for another game? It was like an Atari-style Star Trek-esque game IIRC. I remember seeing the Kickstarter some time ago.

Thanks! And yeah - that game was called Tiny Trek but had been renamed to Bit Odyssey. Unfortunately, I haven't heard or seen much progress from the developer, so I think it's pretty much dead...

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Do you have a website for yourself as a music maker?

Well, I have a portfolio site where I put a lot of my work - professional, non-professional, music-related, web design related, game related, et cetera. I need to work on it more though. :P It's all categorized so this is the music I'm showcasing on my site (http://vincent.tengudev.com/portfoliosite-v3/category/music). (I also need to find a way to display Punch Club and Bit Odyssey at the top.)
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Mooch on July 24, 2016, 06:55:12 pm

Thanks! And yeah - that game was called Tiny Trek but had been renamed to Bit Odyssey. Unfortunately, I haven't heard or seen much progress from the developer, so I think it's pretty much dead...


Aww, that sucks. It looked like a really cool game. Also, bleck. Can't call it Tiny Trek 'cause of copyright, even though "trek" is a real, normal word. Stupid. Bit Odyssey sounds cool, though.

Well, I have a portfolio site where I put a lot of my work - professional, non-professional, music-related, web design related, game related, et cetera. I need to work on it more though. :P It's all categorized so this is the music I'm showcasing on my site (http://vincent.tengudev.com/portfoliosite-v3/category/music). (I also need to find a way to display Punch Club and Bit Odyssey at the top.)


Cool. What do you use to make your tracks? 'cause I come up with a lot of little tunes that I wanna draw out into full compositions at some point, and I was basically just thinking of doing the chiptuney-sounding ones in Famitracker, then exporting to whatever external format it'll allow.
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on July 25, 2016, 02:04:20 pm
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Can't call it Tiny Trek 'cause of copyright, even though "trek" is a real, normal word. Stupid. Bit Odyssey sounds cool, though.

He was in his rights to keep calling it Tiny Trek, but I believe he got this polite letter from the Star Trek copyright holders and decided to rename it Just To Be Safe.

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Cool. What do you use to make your tracks? 'cause I come up with a lot of little tunes that I wanna draw out into full compositions at some point, and I was basically just thinking of doing the chiptuney-sounding ones in Famitracker, then exporting to whatever external format it'll allow.

For most stuff (including Punch Club) I use OpenMPT (https://openmpt.org/), with most of these samples (http://davince.tengudev.com/music/others/samples/some-chipsamples.rar) and a few more I generated myself. Punch Club has an interesting mix of samples ripped from NES, Game Boy, C64 and Virtual Boy stuff, and it sometimes uses up to 14 separate sound channels to give it that "full" feeling.

I sometimes mess around with Famitracker too, it was actually pretty easy for me to get into from being used to OpenMPT for years, and the technical limitations of the NES add an interesting challenge to giving your music a certain "sound". It's fun, though. I really admire people who know their way around these limited chips, like the guy who made the Shovel Knight soundtrack in Famitracker.

Oh, also, here's my SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/davince-1/tracks) profile if you're at all interested. I guess that works well as a showcasing for both OpenMPT and Famitracker stuff. :P
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Fat Cerberus on July 25, 2016, 11:43:27 pm
I'm glad you mention the Shovel Knight soundtrack, because that soundtrack was made of awesome.  The whole game honestly felt like a genuine NES experience, which very few retro games have succeeded at.  Even Megaman 9 and 10 got it wrong to some extent (it felt too modern in parts, hard to explain).
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on July 26, 2016, 12:59:24 pm
Yeah, I've been playing the game recently and so much of it is just right. As for that NES look - Shovel Knight actually uses more colors than an NES could display on a single screen, but it doesn't feel out of place - rather, it enriches the experience. In any case, I really respect whoever made the music. :)
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: N E O on July 31, 2016, 07:44:19 pm
For reference, Tiny Trek/Bit Odyssey is on Steam in early access (http://store.steampowered.com/app/328740). :)
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Mooch on September 09, 2016, 01:55:26 pm
Vince, oh my god! I saw Punch Club on the September 1st Nintendo Direct!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpXQtFbRChg (It's exactly at the 13:00 minute mark.)

That's so cool!
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: DaVince on September 09, 2016, 04:06:07 pm
Oooh, neat! Thanks for making me aware. :D It'd been shown at E3 of last year too, that was really a blast for me.

That video actually made me aware that Nintendo makes two different Nintendo Direct versions: one for America, with Reggie and other people, and one for Europe, with NOE Satoru Shibata, who has an incredibly thick Japanese accent. And then the rest of the content is pretty much the same (I might have skipped over the Punch Club bit or maybe that announcement wasn't known yet at the time).
Title: Re: A game I made music for, Punch Club, is somehow doing extremely well
Post by: Mooch on September 11, 2016, 04:52:40 pm
Actually, this recent one was the first North American Nintendo Direct with those other peeps (they're from the Treehouse). From the time they began until his death, Satoru Iwata did the Directs, with occassional Reggie. Since Iwata's death, Reggie's been doing it solo, until this past one which brought out the Treehouse bunch.

It's neat to see, but man, that one guy seemed kinda nervous. The woman and the other guy have been on livestreams and E3 stuff a bunch before, so they seemed a lot more comfortable.