After more silence on my end, I do have one major project involving my work I can finally announce:

Now that it's been almost exactly a month since my big music project came out, I'll start this post by reflecting.

Brok: The InvestiGator is doing well. In fact, while CowCat Games has repeatedly expressed concerns about it not being viral, I honestly feel it's doing far better than I expected for something I was involved in. Granted, part of the publicity was the result of discovering scammers posing as Steam curators, but even beyond that, I'm honored to be involved with a project that's doing as well as it is.

All this in mind, I received an interesting offer from CowCat the other day that ties into my hobby-level interest in technology in general. As of that day, I'm also doing a chunk of the porting of Brok to the macOS platform. To clarify, however, I'm not touching the code for the most part: we just reached an agreement to use my 2019 Mac Pro, which is apparently newer than the Mac Mini he has, for compiling and deploying it all.

The process has been interesting so far, to say the least. First, until this point, I was used to compiling Mac programs for personal use and thus didn't need to worry too much about Apple's steep validation requirements: all I needed beforehand was a valid Developer account in order to compile, and codesign locally. Now, however, I have multiple certificates on behalf of CowCat Games, plus, the apps need to be submitted to Apple's servers for notarization, an aspect that, unfortunately, the engine used to make Brok (GameMaker Studio) cannot handle automatically.

Second, it was only as of late last night that we finally managed to get the Steamworks API cooperating with the builds. Granted, this phase isn't required for DRM-free stores such as GOG and itch.io, but even so, initial builds saw failure to load the API properly: XCode debugging revealed that it would look for the library in the wrong place. For any other gamedevs hoping to build Steam games on Macs via GameMaker Studio, I only barely found the solution: while a Hardened Runtime is required for notarization, there need to be two runtime exceptions specified:

-"Allow DYLD Environment Variables"
-"Disable Library Validation"

In my experience, only the latter option is required for testing builds, but the other is required for when it's submitted for notarization.

I realize this is a long read over matters that are technical but not musical, and I apologize for that, but in the end, this is related to a project I did compose for, so I feel it is worth a mention. Needless to say, an official Mac build of Brok is also guaranteed in the works.

There also is more on my plate, but I'll save that information for a future entry. In the meantime, Brok is currently available for Windows via Steam, GOG, and itch.

I realize it's been a few months since my last post here. Truth be told, a major player in the reason is that I've been a bit low on ideas, combined with the pandemic everyone's concerned about making me impatient for things to get back to normal.

This is not to say absolutely nothing has happened, however. In regards to my prior post about the Kickstarter for Brok, I'm happy to say it was a successful campaign within a mere 21 or so hours of its launch! Also received my own share of related merchandise a few weeks ago, so that also has me pretty excited for promoting the game as its composer.

As for other things going on, I've become well acquainted with cartoonist Brandon Zalar, who's proven himself a good friend and source of motivation and inspiration, in addition to an eager client. So far I've made the music for a Christmas-themed animation of his made late last year, and while he polishes up a longer animation coming within the next week or so, he's been sharing my music occassionally while he's been streaming his own creative process on Twitch. More information about him and his work can be found on his own website:

https://www.zalarstudios.com/

I've also admittedly been a bit caught up with some game-music-related communities with the niche interest of finding synthesizer sounds used in certain soundtracks. Some words exchanged in them have been responsible for some of my activity as of late, whether it's my finally succeeding in extracting a Fairlight Series III hard drive, or, more recently, ripping a demonstration vinyl record of the Emulator II.

Some inner epiphanies as of late have made me grow to realize that, while things do seem to be improving for everyone, there's still a lot of work to be done, and my productivity is proving no different. I do hope to get more on top of actually making music, though, especially as I realize I've slipped up recently, and as further consolation, I will try to do better to update this blog when anything noteworthy happens.

After nearly two years of my own involvement (and consequently some silence), I'm happy to say I can now share details of one of my projects.

BROK: The InvestiGator is a unique hybrid of a video game: classic Sierra-style adventure meets Mortal-Kombat-esque beat-em-up. Made by CowCatGames, you play as a crocodilian detective in an animated world, with cyberpunk themes throughout as you begin to uncover a very deep story.

Musically, in light of the nostalgic factor to the gameplay, I was given creative license to use lots of orchestra mockups and other dated synthesizer sounds that defined the computer games of the 90s and early 2000s, which was definitely fun for me to do. I've been making music for nearly two years for this project, and I'm happy to see it begin to come to fruition!

The prologue/demo is now available for trying out on Steam, and an additional Kickstarter will be published in the next few days to help with finishing up the full game.

Hope everyone enjoys this project and stay tuned for more updates!