Cardboard RPG Sound
Cardboard RPG now has sound along with corresponding configuration parameters for volume and music. At the moment the sound system is more of a proof of concept, hence there are only two sounds: One is the looping background music, the other a simple positional sound for the beetles.
A downloadable executable of the change is available on Patreon for those interested.
Because there wasn’t a satisfactory mixer with a compatible license - I heavily favor CC0 and other forms of Public Domain for libraries - I had to make my own called atomix. This along with related research and other Slope Games considerations (might make another post regarding those soon) slowed things down considerably, hence the two month delay between posts instead of the usual one month.
Part of my vision for Cardboard RPG has always been for it to be small in terms of its file size. Even with the sounds it’s still under half a MB. Unfortunately audio files don’t compress that well even with lossy compression formats like vorbis. The kind of sprites used by Cardboard RPG on the other hand compress extremely well because of their low resolution style. Interestingly enough, the biggest increase in size in the new version isn’t from the sound assets, but the rather bulky audio backend libraries used, which goes to show just how complex audio can be at a technical level.
All versions of Cardboard RPG released on Patreon thus far have included an undocumented texture replacement feature drawing replacement textures from a “tex” folder on the same level as the executable. This has now been changed to “rep” as it no longer deals with just textures but also includes sounds. In the future this will allow for the creation of user-made resource packs, along with an official high-res texture pack. All but the logo textures can be replaced.