Welcome to the Aboutzone!

I like vocal synths! The first one I ever used was SynthV's free version, when I wanted to make music with vocals but wasn't confident enough in my singing. Since then, I've grown attached to the sounds of vocal synthesizers and the producers that use them. (Miku Miku beam and such, you know how it is.) Recently, I've been particularly interested in more stylized, less human-sounding voicebanks. I've been experimenting with Miku v4 English, Teto's UTAU voicebank(s), and I might even try Gumi v3 if I want to channel my inner mid-2010s english Vocaloid producer.

I also enjoy my fair share of games. I usually have ~2 week-long phases where I get REALLY into one before suddenly switching to something else, but I always enjoy precision platformers, unconventional puzzle games, games that tell unique stories, or anything with good movement. Some of my favorites of all time are Celeste, Outer Wilds, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, and Team Fortress 2.

I made the original version of this site because I had seen a lot of really interesting Neocities sites and I had already been putting off making a place for my portfolio for a month or two. I bought the gloop.zone domain because I thought it sounded funny and took it as an opportunity to learn the basics of 11ty, a static site generator that leads to a bit less copy/pasting between pages. So here we are! Just you, me, the HTML/CSS on this page, and probably some formatting issue I missed.

It'll just be my Mastodon feed until I get telepathy to HTML working.

:cat_grin: is supposed to show up as but I think is simply too powerful to be displayed in an iframe embed.

If you've ever wanted to make music or games but felt intimidated, there's never been a better time to start!

Music

For getting into music, Reaper is a very customizable DAW Digital Audio Workstation; music software known for being a jack of all trades. It offers a fairly standard workflow by default, but with the many extensions and themes available for it, you can make it look and feel however you'd like! It runs better than its peers on lower-end or higher-end computers, supports Windows, Mac, and Linux, and offers a Winrar-like trial that never actually expires! (Still, if you use it a lot, please buy it; The license is $60 for individuals and lasts forever.) It doesn't have many built-in instrument plugins, though.

I personally use Studio One by PreSonus, which I found easy to learn. Comparing it to Reaper, they both provide fairly traditional workflows, but Studio One is a little simpler to learn and includes more built-in plugins, but it's less customizable and more expensive. It also charges for major updates. FL Studio and Ableton Live are some other popular examples. FL Studio utilizes short patterns of notes that are meant to be reused throughout a song, while Ableton Live caters to electronic producers and anyone who wants to easily perform their music live in concerts, DJ sets, and the like. Apple's Logic Pro is similar to Studio One and is reminiscent of a souped-up GarageBand; it's very serviceable out-of-the-box, though it's only supported on Mac systems.

Note that if you're also interested in Vocaloid/vocalsynths, keep in mind that some voicebanks come with bundled software. For example, some Crypton voicebanks Crypton Future Media owns Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Len/Rin, Megurine Luka, Meiko, and Kaito purchased on Sonicwire come with Piapro Studio or VOCALOID6 and Cubase LE, which are more than enough to get started with making Vocaloid music.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter which DAW you pick. They'll all let you make music, so don't worry too much.

Gamedev

Meanwhile, for gamedev, there are plenty of great free engines! My recommendation and personal favorite is Godot, a free and open source game engine that can be used for 2D or 3D games. (It also does a good job of teaching you a lot of programming principles in an intuitive way.)

Regardless of which engine you choose, there's a trove of tutorials on YouTube and plenty of information in other places.

Resources