Hey Spiderlings!

Last week, we showed off the playable character Beanos! As you could probably tell, this was a bit of an April Fool's prank, but the devlogs weren't! So, to keep the trend going, we're going big this week with a much-requested feature:

CUSTOM MUSIC

That’s right! We added functionality into BTKT that allows you to upload any music you want into the game. Kill your friends and enemies to the beat of your own drum!

Here’s how it works:

When we release the next version we will also release an FMOD project file. This will be an empty project file that is a clone of our original project.

From this clone you can add your own music and export a bank file.

To do this you need to make an event, set the tempo of your event, and then link your event to a bank, preferably one that isn't the master bank. You can put a number of tracks in each bank, or make a bank for each track. Once you export the banks, you can  create a folder for your bank in the "mods/CustomTracks" folder that will come with the game. In this folder you can drop the bank file, an image, and a text file with the metadata needed for your song. If it's all set up correctly your song should now be playable by you and anyone else with the same mod!

A more in depth walk-through with images and a video walk-through will be published along with the mod tool, so don't worry to much about the details yet. 

In order to get to that stage, we had to set up some custom FMOD bank loading. Here’s how we ended up doing it:

FMOD can load files from memory which means if we can specify a folder to look at we can load that file. Once we have it loaded, we can go though the bank and extract each song that is within it. Each song then gets made into a button that can be pressed in the menu, and from there we just need to click the button to play the song.

The reason some songs have titles and others are strings of letters and numbers is we also need to add the metadata to the song, which we can do by having a text file in the folder with the bank file and just matching the data from the text file to the data in the bank.

Now that that’s implemented, we have some plans for making that feature even richer.

• Using midi files for more complex beats
• Adjusting game parameters with audio

Cool, right? Try out uploading your own music in the next version of BEATS TO KILL TO!

Next week, we’re going to be breaking down some NEW STAGES that are being added into the game, so be sure to check back in here for that!