If you a take a small piezoelectric buzzer and place it on a computer what do you got? Yes - the popular Sinclair ZX-Spectrum 48k. That's what the original Rebelstar contended with... But you know what? - It had a very distinct and characteristic sound, minimalistic in some aspects, and it actually worked...

What could be re-used, repurposed, altered or thrown away would come with time.

But first we had to add Amiga music - that's a must! And like I posted previously for that purpose  I reached JMD (Simone Bernacchia) which at this stage has a lot of experience with retro Amiga game music (both commercial and non-commercial) - Check it out!

Music

Talking with Simone (JMD /Saimon), he agreed on helping, and he quickly realized I had not a real style or essence established. 

There was nothing to adapt or inspire, apart from the Rebelstar games in Gameboy advance - that we both were shocked with excellent audio quality, (I knew it was really good audio chip, but wow...). And it was clear that this GBA title style did not really fit the retro nature of the original (more UFO vibes than the original Rebelstar lore). So, he chose to go with a synthwave style more akin to the Amiga.

From the man himself (Simone Bernacchia):

"When [Hardwired] asked me to contribute to the game, I had to do some research: while I kinda know the original series - which Lazer Squad belongs to - I did not knew this particular game. Rebelstar, as tactical RPG from the 80s, has lot of things that got improved further on, and which more modern games as Shining Force owes to.

Not a big player but this stuff is right down my alley so I happily cooperate! I decided to approach the music from an 80s B-movie atmosphere point of view: synths and steady rythm machines. 

Memory constraints might limit on how much instruments to use but is not necessarily a bad thing: this forces me to be more creative with the effects and make it sound like it could not! I do my job using milkytracker, that I consider superior to the original protracker thanks to xm support, multithreading (can have more than one song open at once) and lately also scripts that help to process sounds."

At first, we established 2 tunes (as it was divided by a main event) for in-game, and one smaller for briefing/debriefing (as well as start-menu and A500/A600/lower mem models in-game). As the game progressed, we then agreed on three major ingame tunes context sensitive (and two very minor ones), along the briefing one, and two lighter ones for Title screen / start menu and another for the Outro.

Sound effects

One thing I planned at first was amiga specific sounds. Initially, I just sampled the original sounds in emulation. Some were scrapped (such as the end turn and the end game sounds) as it seemed repetitive.

I wished to actually make the sound from data/equation functions, so it would save more space on disk, but while I managed some sounds like that, it proved too much fuss. So, for now I'm keeping as it is.

For now the sounds will be like the original

While it would be good to have more variety, and more broad sound situations it would probably require more thought put into it. Amiga specific sounds may or may not happen. It sure won't be me doing that...

Maybe JMD might be inclined to do that, but seems to me that he is happy with current sounds. Besides there's the size of data to consider. We'll check in the end...

Labels: Amiga, Rebelstar