20 Feb 2012 Jahr - BeepBox Beta

Beschreibung:

"I'm retroactively calling this a beta version of BeepBox. It is the first version that I published on the BeepBox website. I published it on February 20, 2012 alongside an announcement on the TIGSource forums.

I'm also including several older versions that were never published on the BeepBox website to show the development process.

BeepBox evolved out of a different project called "Magic Toaster". I had the idea to create an "emulator" (or virtual machine) for a fictional game console, similar to PICO-8. However, this imaginary game platform would have allowed you to insert two games at once, and it would automatically recombine their elements to generate a new game.

Magic Toaster would need to be able to display graphics and play sound effects and music, like any other game emulator, so I decided to address those before moving on to other features. In particular, I had little experience working with audio engines at the time, so I decided to focus on making sure I could support that first. I never actually stopped working on audio, though, because my ideas for it kept growing.

BeepBox started out emphasizing chiptune features, but I never was trying to be authentic to any real console, because I was designing my own fictional console instead. I like chiptunes, but the biggest reasons I chose that style were because it was relatively simple to implement and because I felt the constraints of the chiptune style would encourage creative compositions.

I was also motivated to develop a music composition tool because music was one of the elements of game design that intimidated me the most, and I wanted to overcome that. I had recently discovered other audio tools that were easy to use called SFXR and ToneMatrix, and I figured that if I had a tool that was easy enough to use, even I would be able to compose music. I set out to make that tool.

A community of enthusiastic BeepBox users has grown over the years and I am proud to be a part of it."

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