dev diary: music, but on itch.io now! (Patreon)

last week i made a pretend radio station filled with my songs!! it uses the same code (and some assets) from Sex Advice Succubus' music player, which i wrote about in a previous dev diary. it took about a day to put together, so now i'm gonna talk about why i decided to make it!

the unfortunate bandcamp news

i want to start with why i personally liked using bandcamp, so that those who don't know much about it have some context for why the recent acquisition/layoff news is so depressing.

bandcamp made it really easy to sell albums, get your music discovered, and actually make decent money on sales since bandcamp would only take a small cut. when the pandemic started, they made an event of waiving their fees one friday of each month (bandcamp fridays!) so all profits could go to the artists in that 24 hour period, in order to help support them during trying times. this model went on to inspire itch.io's creator day, where they do basically the same thing.

bandcamp was EXTREMELY friendly to artists, and gained a lot of good will especially in the past few years. it was just NICE. i've been buying music from artists i like on there for years, so when it came time for me to upload/sell my own soundtracks, bandcamp was the logical choice. youtube, spotify, and soundcloud are the other usual places i would upload my songs to, but all of those are streaming based, and spotify is the only one i actually make any money from. i REALLY prefer the model of selling a cd (even if it's digital-only) because i've always liked having the files myself rather than relying on streaming services.

now for the actual news part: bandcamp was acquired by epic games back in march 2022, which left a lot of its users really uncertain about the future of the platform. people started making tools in reaction to this, to make it easier for musicians to switch platforms (i linked a couple of them that i knew of on my radio page!) just in case everything went to shit. bandcamp employees unionized. it seemed for a while like things might be ok...

but then epic sold bandcamp to songtradr, who proceeded to lay off ~50% of bandcamp's staff. the usual evil corporate shenanigans, i guess. literally half of the employees who built and managed this platform everyone really loved were unceremoniously ousted, and who knows what will happen to bandcamp now... i personally didn't want to continue using it as if nothing had happened, so i felt like it was time for me to jump ship.

making the most of things

the next obvious place for me to sell files to people is the place i already do that: itch.io! it's not set up for music in the same way bandcamp was of course, but since my songs are already related to my games, it made sense for me to host the albums there too. i was checking out some of the aforementioned tools for making bandcamp-style pages on itch.io, as kind of a "well let's just see what my options are" type of thing...

i didn't want to create separate pages for every soundtrack because i already have a long list of projects on my account. so i thought it'd be better to just have ONE central page you can buy all the music from as separate downloads, which means i would have a really long playlist... but the tools i was looking at didn't have a shuffle feature! at which point i was like "ok fuck it, i can make this with ren'py!!!!!!!"

the initial result:

yep that'll work!!

it was really fortunate timing that i had been making web builds of my older games, because i knew i could just upload this like a web player even if it takes a bit longer to load everything. really you could get the same result by going to my soundcloud or making a youtube playlist of my uploads there and putting THAT on shuffle, but it's so cute having a dedicated page where you don't need to take those extra steps on your own... and for people who have only played a few of my games, they get to hear new tracks and go "ooh that sounds cute, maybe i'll play that game next!" (wishful thinking on my part maybe, hehe)

anyway, since everything was functioning well enough i went ahead and made it look cute. i added the buttons from SAS because i didn't feel a need to draw new ones. you can click on the album art to view a larger version, since i had 1400x1400 pngs of all of them that i didn't bother to resize, i just showed them at different zoom levels in ren'py lol... this thing is basically all recycled assets! the only new part is the logo, i guess.

here's the final look:

i've really come to enjoy UI design, and i'm happy i could throw this together so quickly and have it all just magically work...! except... there are a few bugs........

after uploading what i thought would be the release build, the web version froze when it tried to grab the song duration (displayed as a timecode in the top right). in the end, i had to type them all in manually (what a pain!) ...and it doesn't UNpause the song if you hit pause/play, but again, this is only a problem for the web version!!!!!! i submitted a bug report on ren'py's github so maybe it will be fixed in the future, but for now there's nothing i can do about it.

the other thing i really wanted to do was make it so you can toggle songs/albums on and off to make your personal playlist, buuut the MusicRoom isn't really set up for that, so i would've had to redo a bunch of the code from scratch if i wanted it to work the way i had in mind. which might just introduce new bugs, so, definitely not worth it at this point!

maybe i'll go into another coding frenzy and get it all working some other time, but for now, people can buy the albums and make their own playlists... it's a radio station after all!! you don't get to control the playlist hehe.

the bandcamp -> itch.io migration is still in progress

currently, i've deleted a few albums/songs from my bandcamp (mostly the vocal singles). i left up a lot of my older soundtracks for free, because there are still active links to them in various places (i had links in my mobile versions, but i don't think they ever led to sales). once i update my old games and those links have been gone for a while, i will finally delete those albums...

i left up the starry flowers OST since it's the only place to buy "Pretty in Pink", and i decided to leave up BAD END THEATER for now since it's gotten THE MOST sales and i don't want so many people to lose access to their downloads. that one is available on steam too though, so bandcamp isn't the only place to buy it... ahh i left up my two most recent vocal tracks as well since they JUST came out. but i plan on taking them down in a few months or so, and i already took out the links to them from the youtube vids.

i'm kinda just rambling at this point... sorry i didn't mean to make this post so long, i guess i had a lot of things to say about all this!!!

i really do hope bandcamp sticks around in a positive way and doesn't end up like smackjeeves (bought out and made completely defunct by a competitor). it's been really annoying in recent years to have to bounce around different platforms and feel like you're starting over all the time, as i'm sure a lot of people can relate to. i feel really lucky that i'm able to be flexible in times like this and just do something fun with it!

thanks for reading <3