Status update!
I would do this, but I’m not sure if there’s any file hosting system that lets you do that easily. If I had the relevant skills, I could make some kind of web app that does that, but I don’t. I think I’ve come up with a way to have things categorised cleanly while still making sure people can find what they’re looking for and discover new stuff easily.
(After I composed this post, I actually changed my mind on categorising things by user vs game. After about a dozen of so different people/games have music on the repository, it’s going to become a huge list of folders quickly and they’ll be more easily navigable by game rather than user.)
It was recommended to me to try Google Drive, so I did. While it seems like a nice way of storing things in folders online that isn’t Dropbox, it’s still a Google service and as such has some dumb/slow Web 3.0 UX stuff weighing it down to the point that I would rather just use Dropbox. I played around with GitHub a bit yesterday and now I’ve got a better idea of how I want to tackle it.
One of the things I love about GitHub is that, by default, it displays the contents of a repository’s readme on its front page. This can be used to great advantage here; in the case of a music repository, the “readme” would be a glossary of songs structured to help people discover suitable music for their game. While I still think the folders themselves make the most sense to be sorted by user (because of the way GitHub works with making branches and merging them into the main repo, it’s a lot cleaner that each person gets their own “portfolio” to play around with rather than making changes to a bunch of different game folders), the songs in the glossary would be primarily sorted by game. Each entry in a category would be formatted [song - user - situation], “situation” being the suggested use for the music. My original idea was to primarily categorise by situation, but what song fits for which situation is arbitrary enough that I no longer think it’s a good idea. For example, I might use Venus Lighthouse as a “victory” cutscene theme, but I’m sure there are other people who envision it as something to be played during the player phase in gameplay instead.
Gameplay situations
player phase
enemy phase
ally/green phase
battle (generic)
battle (with legendary weapon)
boss (separate into tier 1 and tier 2?)
final boss
unit died
game over
staff use (healing)
staff use (hostile)
dancing
prep screen
armory
shop
arena lobby
arena fight
fog of war player phase
fog of war enemy phase
Cutscene situations
setting out on adventure (When the Rush Comes)
pan over to bad guys scheming (Stratagem)
panic (An Unexpected Caller)
victory
the shadow of victory
recruitment
friends (Eliwood and Hector meet up; like Hector’s Theme but not specific to Hector)
“pull yourself together” (A Knight’s Oath)
towns
hive of scum and villainy (The Inn)
laughter; low-stakes happiness (expendable characters bounce off of each other)
high-stakes happiness (main characters are happy, or romance)
confidence; ready to fight
calm area/sit down and think (Silent Ground)
ruined area/aftermath of bad thing (Recollection of a Petal)
sorrow
shocking revelations
dramatic tragedy (Eliwood just killed Ninian)
foreboding (Lost Heart)
quiet place where you find the legendary weapon
old man tells you legends
serious business bad guys talking (Black Fang)
bad guys reveal themselves and/or execute their plan
final chapter quotes
strange/unfamiliar/exotic places (like how Nabata had its own themes in FE7)
royalty; pomp and circumstance (The Kingdom of Bern)
sadness into determination (The Grieving Heart)
bad guy is undone
negative opening theme; adversity (The Cogs of Fate)
world map:
- overture; introducing countries
- setting off; earlygame
- uncertainty, forging into the unknown; midgame
- hardship; late/endgame
So an example glossary entry would be:
Venus Lighthouse - Alusq - cutscene: victory
It would be under a “Golden Sun” category with other Golden Sun songs, so if you’re just looking for Golden Sun music you’ll find it quickly (even if you don’t agree with my calling it a victory theme and just want to use it as a player phase theme), but if you’re looking for victory themes in particular, you can ctrl+F search for “cutscene: victory” and see what turns up. People often already have ideas for what games they want to lift music from for the player/enemy phase bits of the game, but struggle with finding songs for specific situations in cut scenes and have to go around asking “so what’s a good song that would work as a victory theme?”. Having a glossary laid out in this way will help people to find stuff to fill in those musical gaps.
The thing is, cut scenes are where categorization of “situations” get especially arbitrary. After going through the sound rooms of FE7 and FE8 and giving them a good listen, I came up with “only” just over thirty situations that would be broadly applicable to both games’ soundtracks. It would be necessary for the glossary to begin with a list of situations so people would know what to search for, and if someone feels there’s a vital situation missing and adds their own, they would need to take care to add it to the beginning of the glossary so it’s searchable too. For example, “strange/unfamiliar/exotic places” might merit secondary categories of “desert”, “Japanese”, “islands”, etc, or someone might come up with an entirely new category that was thereto completely missing from my list. Finally, there will inevitably be imbalance, with probably at least half the songs labeled as player/enemy phase music, and it may be necessary for others to go through them and offer secondary categorizations for where they would work in other places in the game.
Even with these quibbles in mind, I’m thinking this is the way I’m going to go in setting things up: GitHub repo with folders set up by user game for ease of maintenance with a robust glossary at the forefront to help people find what they’re looking for or discover suitable music for whatever situation they need. This will make a neat system of people uploading their stuff to their own folder and then making note of it in the glossary. The base directory of folders is going to become a huge list very quickly, and to that end it’s worth having people making changes in a bunch of different folders in exchange for easier navigation for people who just want music; clicking on a game’s title to see the game’s music rather than clicking on a string of gibberish to get another list of games just makes more sense. Can I get another round of thoughts? It’s possible there’s a file hosting thing out there that indeed allows dynamic categorization and I’ve just missed it.