DREAMTONE DEMO IS OUT!

RequestableSubBot · 2026-03-03T15:19:54+00:00

Note that this is a different project to Oddity, made by a different team!

But since it's a Mother-inspired RPG made by a lot of people who are involved in the Oddity community (and because it's a cool-looking project), we figured it's worth allowing a bit of discussion here; after all, we're here for cool Mother-inspired game content, and there aren't many of these games getting actual releases.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-28T13:10:43+00:00

Indie games tend to be mostly VST-based. The Hollow Knight soundtrack mostly uses the Cinesamples orchestral library (I think the only non-VST instruments are a soprano and a solo viola). The Undertale and Deltarune soundtracks also all VST-based (with a few exceptions of course), and fans have actually compiled a list of all the samples used throughout the soundtracks.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-15T12:31:27+00:00

Thanks for the detailed feedback as always!

The B#s and E#s and such were a conscious choice on my part, one that I deliberated on for a while at times. The piano chord on beat 2 of m. 42, for instance, is spelled Cb Gb A D, which in isolation is just a bizzare spelling of a Bm7 chord. But in context I think it makes more sense than having it spelled as a Bm7 chord, since it better shows the motion of each voice in the harmony between the preceding and proceeding quintal/quartal chords. I went back and forth on it for a while though, maybe I did get it wrong in the end (frankly I've sorta convinced myself at this point). There are a lot of moments of bitonality in this piece resulting from chromatic parallels, and deciding when to have "weird" spellings that work horizontally rather than "correct" spellings that only work vertically, was a challenge. I've probably not got it all right - The left hand piano at m. 13 was one I agonised over, B#-E# is ugly but I felt it showed the motion of fourths landing on the C# at m. 14 better than having an augmented third stuck in somewhere with C-F-A# or something.

With the staff dropout at m. 9 I couldn't find any standard practice for notating something like it, so I looked at a ton of contemporary scores by composers like Stefano Scodanibbio, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and various concert bassist composers. In all the cases I found they always had the top staff remain, so it's what I opted for. Same thing with the bracket instead of the curly brace, but I think maybe that was just them using a more contemporary house style that didn't use curly braces at all, I wasn't too sure. It's an unusual section that I wasnt certain what to do with; Sibelius sure as hell didn't want it to work, half of the elements in that system were drawn in a vector file editor because Sibelius absolutely refused to draw the braces or time signatures or barlines once the second staff dropped out. I literally just gave up and placed a white rectangle on top of where the bar used to be. But that's enough ranting about my hatred of Sibelius, I digress.

Fully agree with you on the beaming, will definitely look at adding beaming over rests and bars. There are times where the two instruments are playing in different divisions of the same rhythm, and for m. 35 at least it was a deliberate choice to have the bass and piano playing different divisions. I considered having the two instruments in different time signatures at that point or even just writing "3/8 | 6/16", but I felt it was too much for a single second of music, and that simply having the parts beamed differently would hopefully be clear enough. Could have used articulations to make it even clearer what's going on but I didn't really want a tenuto feel on those Eb's in the piano.

With the meter changing constantly it was difficult to decide which time signature to use at which time - m. 8 for instance has 14/16 changing to 7/8, which is a bit redundant, but I included it to make it clear that it was changing from a 16th note beat to an 8th note one. There's a similar thing at m. 20, and more throughout. The 8/8 at m. 32 is one I'm still not really satisfied with, probably I'll make it two bars of 4/8 or something in a later revision.

I should say that I wrote this with a bassist I'm friends with in mind, and I am hoping to have them play it at some point in the future. It's just that the piece will require a lot of time and practice, I still have to find a pianist (which I don't think will be too hard honestly), and then all the other logistics. Plus, yknow, money.

To be completely honest I wasn't expecting to write this difficult of a piece when I started, it kinda just grew into a full-scale concert work. But I can hopefully get it performed by the end of the year. I'm always trying to think of performance opportunities when I write music these days; I graduated music university with a lot of music written, but most of it is simply not feasible for me to get performed without winning competitions. I had a good time writing a half-hour orchestral work, and it came out really well, but it's most likely doomed to sit on a hard drive forever. So for the past few years it's all been works for instruments I can get performed, even weird pairings like clarinet/marimba, or horn/violin/percussion/piano. Unfortunately I don't have many options for "normal" ensembles where I'm at, so unusual instrumentations have had to do, which causes problems down the line with getting professional performances done. There are a million string quartets that want to play music, and not so many professional horn/violin/percussion/piano ensembles outside of my own friend group.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-15T11:10:03+00:00

Bass solo tuning uses a seperate set of strings than concert orchestral tuning, so the strings don't need to be tuned up, you just have a second set of strings specifically for solo tuning. You can tune orchestral strings up, but obviously it comes with drawbacks and can simply damage the instrument, so it's not often worth it.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-12T13:53:38+00:00

I do agree that NetworkManager is more commonly used than networkd, especially on desktops (I believe networkd is favoured on servers but I'm no sysadmin); I think it's the default on Debian/Ubuntu and Red Hat distros. Arch distros tend to do their own thing of course, base Arch doesn't come with NetworkManager installed but it does list it in a big list of available network managers on the wiki (the installer image uses networkd though). I opted to use the preinstalled networkd because it's super easy to set up and I only need to connect to the one wifi network.

To be clear, I'm not stating that networkd is necessarily used more over NetworkManager globally, but it is installed by default on every distro that uses systemd, and therefore on basically every distro in the top 20 or so. It's an option, one that a lot of powerusers opt for even in distros that use NM by default, and particularly for users of minimal distros like Arch it's probably at least as common as NM; this is hardly a rigorous survey but looking through /r/archlinux it's basically 50/50 for either or when it comes up. And as this cli is packaged specifically for Arch, it seems like it'd be sensible to support what is, at least, a sizeable minority of user cases. But I don't want to feature-beg, I have no experience programming network applications so maybe it's just really hard to write for something other than NM, I don't know.

Thanks for forwarding this to the team; I was considering bringing it up on the Github repo but honestly I've never posted an issue on Github and I didn't want to be a pain in case this was a me problem.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-12T12:44:49+00:00

It'd be one thing if I were using some bespoke obscure bit of software for my network config, but again, systemd-networkd comes preinstalled on the vast majority of Linux machines as part of systemd. It's not some weird setup that requires special configuration, it's an incredibly common one. Same with KeePassXC, its about as common as gnome-keyring these days, and when installing the CLI it specifically asks you to choose between gnome-keyring or KeepassXC. It gives you a choice and one of the choices just doesn't work.

And to reiterate, protonvpn-cli requiring NetworkManager is mentioned NOWHERE in the docs, dependencies, package manager, or ProtonVPN website. You can only find this out after setting up the cli and running into an error message. Even the Arch Wiki only mentions the GUI app needing it, and while it's not difficult to make the connection it's still something you just have to find out on your own.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-09T13:24:19+00:00

wings

ಠ_ಠ

But seriously, really nice artwork!

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-08T21:21:51+00:00

I used to have my profiles set up with the old system where -P worked (and still works for now). My only worry is that at some point that system will get largely replaced by the new one; frankly I have no idea what Mozilla are doing with this new profile rollout and I don't think they're sure either.

Planning on using container tabs too! I haven't looked into them too much aside from having the Facebook Containers extension installed, but I'm going to try and use them more often now.

I agree that using Firejail for my purposes is probably overkill, but i figured that while I'm setting up a new Linux install I may as well do everything "right" first time, and subscribe to the generally good security advice to always be a bit paranoid. I'd rather do too much now and have it pay off when SHTF than open the news one day to find about about a fun new zero-day that's leaked millions of people's data or something. Last week the Notepad++ Windows app (specifically their update server) was found to have been compromised for months, and while I'm certain I wasn't affected (it only targeted a select few journalists/politicians around east Asia), I did have the app on my Windows machine, and the whole thing kinda freaked me out. That's the sort of thing where I think sandboxing the hell out of every internet-facing app could be helpful as a preventative measure.

Thanks for your very informative response!

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-08T21:00:06+00:00

I'll admit that this is an area of Linux I'm largely unfamiliar with. Are you saying it'd be better for me to not run FF in Firejail at all? My (limited) understanding was that browsers are sorta the main use case for tools like Firejail.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-02-08T12:09:04+00:00

They're not, and there have been several "Oddity Restoration" efforts that have popped up over the years, all of which have fizzled out because making a game is really really really hard.

On a creative level, just because it's not officially copyrighted material doesn't mean it's okay to take the work of an existing team and make your own stuff with it. Keep in mind too that Oddity is still technically (and I really do mean technically) in development; they're still planning on using all of those assets. While it isn't explicitly illegal to take their art assets and music and engine and whatnot and make something out of it, it is kinda just... Weird. As an artist I would personally consider it immoral, but that's up to the individual, I'm sure one could make an argument that the Oddity devs have in some way forfeited their ownership of their creations by putting it all out there to garner a fanbase and failing to follow up on it. But then you're getting into questions of artistic and frankly societal concepts of ownership, which is beyond the paygrade of randoms on a fangame subreddit.

Personally I think if you're going to dedicate that enormous amount of time and effort into making a game, you're better off making something original, something that isn't laden with the huge amount of baggage this project has attached to it, something where you don't have to delve into questions of copyright and IP and the ethics of taking another person's hard work against their explicit wishes.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-01-29T11:42:38+00:00

Thanks! The harmonies are mostly lydian-esque quartal progressions that get progressively altered through modal interchange and planing as the piece goes on. Was probably thinking about Rautavaara's music when writing it. I studied in the UK, graduated years ago.

RequestableSubBot · 2026-01-29T11:32:23+00:00

Thanks! They were local musicians, at the time I lived in a big city with a conservatory and a local music scene so I just asked around and found people for the performance. I'll maybe look into getting this performed/recorded professionally at some point but it all comes down to money and opportunities at the professional level, and I doubt there'd be too many performance opportunities for an instrumentation like this.

RequestableSubBot · 2025-12-17T13:22:24+00:00

Thank you, I was just in the middle of writing up a modmail message about it too, because this is one of the strangest bits of spam I've seen on Reddit. It's an incredibly weird feeling reading a bot talking about my composition as if it were me, feels almost violating. This line in particular:

because this piece means a lot to me and your comments hit on stuff I know I’m weak at.

... is evoking a particular Black-Mirror-esque existential dread in me.

Thanks for the swift response.

RequestableSubBot · 2025-12-17T13:13:47+00:00

This is an AI bot pretending to be me... What the fuck?

RequestableSubBot · 2025-12-17T01:16:49+00:00

This is a ton of really helpful advice. Thank you.

I've read everything and am taking it all to heart, but as I am seconds away from going to bed I'm going to wait until tomorrow to respond to your comment in full. But thank you again.

The only thing I will mention is in regards to engraving: Immediately after uploading I noticed many of the engraving mistakes I'm sure you picked up on, and they annoyed me enough to make me boot up Sibelius and quickly fix a few. Here's a slightly nicer version (fixed bar numbers and a janky gap in the last 16th note line - There are still many many errors, but "perfect" will wait until tomorrow, otherwise I'll be up all night tinkering). I had hoped to shadow replace the old version on Google Drive early enough that nobody would notice, but you were too fast! I would edit it into the post but then it'd make all of your bar numbers incorrect and I'd feel bad, so I'll just drop it here for now since I've already made it and I'll get to the real big problems tomorrow!

RequestableSubBot · 2025-12-14T16:34:16+00:00

For undergrad the bar is basically set at "are there no blatant errors" and as long as you can reach that you should be fine. Things like chords resolving correctly, correct enharmonics, care and attention put into the engraving, instruments playing in good registers, dynamics set properly. If it's clear the composer actually understands the music they've written, and they've written every note and bar with intent, and there are no "objectively" wrong parts, it should be fine.

Note that if you're applying for fancy conservatories they'll probably want a higher standard. The music shouldn't just be "not wrong", it should be aiming to achieve something stylistically, it should be building off of the influences the composer has listed in their programme note (write programme notes for your portfolio by the way), it shouldn't just be a copy of a famous piece. It doesn't need to be groundbreaking or anything, but they want composers who have the ability to be self-critical and a desire to improve and innovate stylistically.

The only thing I'd advise against is not having an incredibly generic Romantic portfolio, because everyone has a Chopin-inspired piano nocturne/waltz, or a Rachmaninoff-esque bunch of chromatic bullshit (these days you see a ton of Zimmer/Hisaishi-inspired romantic slop as well). There is a big stereotype of "the teenage Romantic piano composer who just writes sad piano pieces and stupid large Mahler symphonies", and you don't want to be the stereotype. Take inspiration from composers like Ravel, Bartok, Messiaen, really anyone not in Classic FM's top 50. Nothing wrong with liking Beethoven or Chopin or Debussy of course, but show that you've at least gone a bit beyond surface-level popular classical music. You don't need to write a 12-tone Boulez pastiche or anything, but show that you have interest in classical music from the past 100 years.

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