Update

I've basically settled on music for the game. Music and sound effects have always been a concern for me. I can just about scrape by on sound effects, but there is no way I can fake music. I'm ok with paying for some quality music, I was hoping to avoid it, but it's difficult to find free, quality, loopable music with anything approaching a consistent style.

Music is not an important part of my game, I just don't want to screw it up. Perfect music would get me an extra point or two, but bad music will kill everything else. In the end I settled on some very calm, inoffensive orchestral stuff. It's nothing to write home about, which is exactly what I need. If I was willing to contract out for some music, I'd like to try something a little more exotic. Maybe a few different tracks with some exotic instruments and a little more upbeat. I might try playing with some modern version of 8-bit music ala bit.trip games, but it's just not worth the risk when I don't really have that luxury.

I did decide that I needed multiple tracks for battles. Most of a players time is going to be spent there, and if there's only one track, that could be a problem. I might think my placeholder track is fine, but I know not everyone will agree. I read a review of an an xbox indie game I liked, and one of the negatives was the repetitive music. I don't want that to be me if I can avoid it.

Early on I found some great free music over at incomptech. Unfortunately I couldn't find enough looping music from there, but I did get one track that was perfect for one thing. I did find another great site with musicloops. The site is great for looping music which is exactly what I needed. $30 got me enough music to finish out the game. That's not a bad price when the XNA club membership is $100 a year (I need to get that again at some point to test on the 360 and put it on the marketplace). What's nice is I can use the music on future projects as well, go creative commons liscense go.

Anyway, this week has basically been spent tightening up the graphics on level three, I've just been doing graphics tweaks and finding music mostly. I've got a few more weeks of tweaks before I can really show the game off end to end.

The title screen and the name are still problematic. I really need a final name before I can do the title screen. Unfortunately (or fortunately, since it was going to be a lot of work) I can't do the 90's style title screen with a big piece of pixel art because of the resolution difference between widescreen and standard def, so I'll have to come up with something else.

Here, have a screenshot.