This little manual was written by someone experienced with chiptune trackers like Furnace, but inexperienced with Pyxel. I thought about making this because after a quick Google search there wasn’t much documentation on how to make music in Pyxel. If there’s any incorrect information here, feel free to correct me.
For those who aren’t familiar, Pyxel is a game engine designed to imitate retro consoles. It was developed by Takashi Kitao, lead developer of the Zone of the Enders series. You can run Pyxel in Python or you can use Pyxel Studio, which lets you use Pyxel in your browser. (It seems that the Pyxel Studio website is primarily in French, but you should be able to use it if you only speak English.)
The music and sound effects limitations of Pyxel appear to be inspired from the NES and Game Boy. There are 4 channels. As per usual with NES and Game Boy chiptune music, it is recommended the sound effects be used in the least musically important channel, which is often the channel used for harmony.
Be sure the Speed is set to the same number for all parts of the song. Otherwise, the sections will be out of tempo with each other when played back.
The piano roll allows notes from C1 to B5. The lowest pegs are blue. Blue pegs indicate a rest.
You have 5 wave shapes for timbre: triangle, pulse, square, sawtooth, and noise. From what I can hear, I think the triangle wave is an NES-like, stepped triangle wave instead of a perfect triangle shape. (A stepped triangle has more character to it; normal triangle waves sound very similar to sine waves otherwise.)
A Sound is a small section of the Editor where you can place notes on a piano roll sequencer. There are 6 measures per Sound. You can fit 8 pegs into one measure. You can fill a Sound with a max of 48 pegs.
There are 8 volume levels to assign each peg, labeled 0 through 7, with 0 being mute.
The Music Section is a section of the Editor where you arrange your Sounds into a complete song. There are 8 songs, labeled 0 through 7. There are 32 spots per channel to place your Sounds.
You can create 64 Sounds, labeled 00 through 63. This means that ultimately you are limited to a max of 384 measures (or 3,072 pegs) for both music and sound effects in a game.
It is clear that this is not a composing tool, but a tool you use to arrange the music to Pyxel chiptune format. I recommend composing your music on an instrument or DAW separately and then manually convert the song in Pyxel.
Apparently, it is possible for games to play audio files in Pyxel—and not only audio files but also play them in 5.1 surround sound—as shown by GRASLAY by Ontake44…but I don’t know how to do this lol
Question for game developers and people who rely on trigger warnings!
Is there a way to make the shock factor of a piece of media a surprise while also adding accurate trigger warnings at the beginning?
I remember showing my friend (who has no problem with suicidal themes) Doki Doki Literature Club and the surprise was ruined by the trigger warnings. "Is this a horror game??" The point of DDLC is that you don't know the happy, cute visual novel is actually a horror game in disguise because the trigger warnings practically give it away at the very start.
That being said, I understand the importance of trigger warnings. I wish there were more of them in more media because sometimes I'll be watching a movie, for example, and suddenly it hits me with something that makes me feel absolutely terrible and full of dread. The rating isn't specific enough for me to make an informed decision based on what triggers me rather than someone else.
Giving it some thought, I came up with the idea to put the trigger warnings in a submenu accessible from the main menu. That way, players who know they have issues with certain things in media can opt to view the trigger warning and players who don't mind either way can just not check.
To bring more attention to it, I also thought about replacing the trigger warning on the splash screen with something along the lines of "If you have a history of triggers, please look at the trigger warning on the main menu." That way, the triggers could be anything, so it doesn't necessarily spoil the game and it still lets people with triggers to take care of themselves.
I invite talk about it! If anyone has more ideas about how to accomplish this goal, feel free to tell me!
