How to make really cool songs for your NESM games!

rimoJO

Member
When I first got NESMaker, I was like, "Wow, I get to be a real indie developer now!" and started making a game. There were no animations, there was horrible collision, etc. Once I found out that I could use Famitracker, I started importing MIDIs of my favorite songs right out of the box, but it didn't work with NESM. So, despite never having any experience with FT, I decided to make a song- and it did not go well. It played on every screen, though I made it the title theme (in FT, have the most frequent song first, then extras next. It'll save you a lot of time!). Now, I know the rules of NESM's FT support, unlike before. And for those of you who do not, here you go. Let me know if I should change anything!
1 - You can only ue 2A03 instruments. Other EX chips, like VRC 6 and 7 would be good for the songs, as they introduce a lot of variety in instruments, but remember- NES music is just 2A03.
2 - If you've never made an FT song, use the lines and speed that FT gives you.You can make longer songs by increasing the amount of rows the song uses.
3 - After you've made your 8-bit musical masterpiece, don't judge it by NESM's default sound engine. Export and test, THEN listen to it.
4 - Don't even THINK about using the PCM channel.
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Very important for if you want to make good songs, if you do, pay close attention!
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For the longest time, I believed that I was limited to the 256 rows of music when I would make songs. This caused me to only make repetitive songs that aren't even catchy and just makes the whole game really terrible! But this is not what all music made with FT has to be like.
1 - You can make multiple patterns, but they have to be in order. For example, you can do 01-02-03, 01-02-02-03 and so on, but NESM will not tolerate songs that have a pattern order of something like 01-03-02 as far as I know.
2 - Another rule of having multiple patterns in a song is that the tempo has to be 150 or lower. If you want to make a fast song, like a boss theme, decrease the speed.
3 - Not really a rule, but if you are better with other digital music program like FL Studio or Synthesia, older versions of FT support MIDIs, which MIDI software, like FL Studio or Synthesia, can export to. Make sure Channel 1 is Pulse/Square 1, Channel 2 is Pulse/Square 2, and so on. Make sure to also change the instruments!
4 - Similarly, FT has MIDI keyboard support. Pretty self-explanatory here. Actually, I'll note now that FT does NOT have ASIO support. Sorry.
5 - I already said this in 3, but change the instruments because ft uses VRC6 placeholders.
Hope that helps! If anything's wrong with the post above, please let me know and I'll change it! Oh, and also, here's an example of a song that I made for my game using FT (Below)! Have a nice day!
 

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Logana

Well-known member
Wait what do you mean weird hit detection you litterly make it yourself with a bounding box, animations can be added easily you just need to follow the videos of instructions on how everything works and for animated tiles just use monsters seriously I’m 13 and understood this
 

Dirk

Member
Well, he is probably referring to first versions of NESmaker.
If you've never encountered problems with NESmaker's hit detection that's great for you, but I can assure you there are several bugs like ghost blocks, falling through solid blocks if you fall too far, collision of one way tiles not working if they are placed directly on top of each other, one way tiles not working in the first place if you don't copy code from a previous version of NESmaker.
 
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