I think that’s what’s called procedural audio/graphics. For audio, it’s like building synthesizers into the game, to then be able to play the music/fx as a program (sort of like sheet music) instead of an audio file.
The music doesn’t have to be completely synthesized… Most early computers would simply reuse the audio snippets as “samples”, and program the pitch and timing in a “tracker”
Listening to the Flappy Birds music, which I admit that I did, then all of the music could be done in a tracker, even if it might not have been originally.
It’s a bit of a lost art form, but there are several kilobytes to save!
Personally, I have been considering making a HTML5 game, including the sunvox DLL, to make it really easy to put tiny yet advanced music files into a cross platform browsable game. Haven’t gotten around to it though…
I think that’s what’s called procedural audio/graphics. For audio, it’s like building synthesizers into the game, to then be able to play the music/fx as a program (sort of like sheet music) instead of an audio file.
The music doesn’t have to be completely synthesized… Most early computers would simply reuse the audio snippets as “samples”, and program the pitch and timing in a “tracker”
Listening to the Flappy Birds music, which I admit that I did, then all of the music could be done in a tracker, even if it might not have been originally. It’s a bit of a lost art form, but there are several kilobytes to save!
Personally, I have been considering making a HTML5 game, including the sunvox DLL, to make it really easy to put tiny yet advanced music files into a cross platform browsable game. Haven’t gotten around to it though…