This is the first post in the “Tangent” series, wherein I spew a short ramble about an intended (or in progress) feature to help better explain the finer details of numerous intended features of the game.
Quite quickly after the decision to move the game back to an unspecified time in the early 70s came a new idea in how to handle in-game music: vinyl. That is to say, as opposed to a normal ingame soundtrack of randomly played pieces of music, the player can freely pick and choose from a collection of vinyl records, and assemble a “playlist” of sorts via their Legmann 9600 Automatic Multi-Disk Turntable, which will then go through them in the order chosen by the player (and loop back around when it’s done). These records come from a “starter collection” of a variety of genres, but more can be purchased with in-game money via a phone-order system from the local record store.
Internally, this is intended as a very flexible and moddable system. A record, in the file system, is simply: 1. a collection of audio files, divided into two “side” folders, 2. a label image, 3. a sleeve image, and 4. a config file linking all of the previous elements together. This means that any music can be put into the game by the player inclined to do so, as long as it’s in the correct format.
On a side note to this, I also hope to release the game’s soundtrack in lossless format via bandcamp or something, with a means to put those files into the game to replace the inevitably-low-quality ones distributed with the game.