Music in games is often relegated to the background, little more than filling the silence, pasted on as an afterthought. Recently I’ve contribute to the open source match-3 puzzle game FreeBlocks, and the surprising quality of the music reminded me of the value of music, that it can not only enhance but elevate the game to new heights.

Good music

But first let me show an example of music done right: the main theme of Enter the Dragon. I love music but there’s so much bad and badly-used music out there, and most people don’t care. I have a depressing anecdote where a jazz musician played a gig for a large dinner party, and received the following feedback from the client:

You guys were perfect! We hardly noticed you were playing.

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Many open source projects are supported by bounties - cash rewards for specific work done. Have you ever wondered about doing so for games? Well I did, and tried it with C-Dogs SDL, and it was awesome.

The Bounty

A month or so ago I looked into open source bounties. I knew that for very popular projects, businesses used bounties to fund the development of features. The sum of self-interested funding improved the overall project, benefiting all users.

But not all projects are in this enviable place. Open source projects, like many things, follow a power law distribution: there are a few that get outsize attention, and a vast majority of mediocre ones languishing in one form or another. C-Dogs SDL is one of them, which gets a few drive-by contributions, but is mostly worked on by me alone. Will bounties help here, by attracting eyeballs, or even contributors who get things done?

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This will be a personal blog of sorts, where I talk about game dev and related stuff, that’s not project specific. When people want to find out about what I’m up to or what I can collaborate on, I can point them here.