Turbo Pudding
In Loudnik, every planet of the Airwaves galaxy is a radio station, and Monotone’s Jammers are switching them off one by one. DJ Volta flies the last pirate station, a little ship that fires music back at them across ten stations. In a game like that, the sounds matter as much as the bullets, so we gave them a room of their own.
At the very bottom of the Settings screen sits a small button called Sound test. Behind it is every sound in the game, one button each. This Friday, let’s press a few. The picture at the top of this post shows one of them at work: the Overseer Console, the mid-boss of the Disco Rings, in its very last second.
Sixty-four buttons
The list is numbered from 01 to 64. The songs come first, all 16 of them. There’s the title song, “Turn the Galaxy Back Up,” and “Garage Studio,” which plays in the Garage and on the map of the Airwaves. Then come ten station songs, each named after its station, from Pirate Cove to the Anechoic Chamber. After those are three songs for bosses and one more for the very end. Button 17 is just Stop.
Next are the three jingles: “Start,” “Station on air” and “Off the air.” Everything after that is an effect, 44 in all. Press any button, and its name shows up at the top of the screen with a little note in front, like “♪ Pirate Cove.”
Effects by their work names
The songs have proper titles. The effects don’t. The list shows them under the names they go by in the code: “Sound · boom_huge,” “Sound · deny,” “Sound · rewind.”
One effect is left off: the shot of SOLO, the tape that fires a beam. A beam doesn’t go “pew” once. It hums for as long as it’s on, and a single button can’t play that.
The names that look swapped
Each station has two bosses. A mid-boss turns up about halfway, under a banner that says “JAMMER!” The big boss waits at the end, under “INTERFERENCE!” Now open the Sound test. The mid-boss song is called “Interference,” and the big boss song is called “Jammers.” Yes, they look swapped. The last boss of all gets a song of its own, called “Monotone.”
Both kinds of boss come in with the same warning: three wails, half a second apart, each one sliding from an A up to the E above it, while the boss song starts underneath.
Two ways to go boom
A mid-boss goes out fast. A big boom, then a chain of smaller ones for less than a second, then “boom_huge”: two blasts, a big one and a slightly smaller one 0.15 seconds later, under three falling notes, an E, a B and the low E below them. Picks and a capsule spill out, and that’s the moment at the top of this post.
A big boss takes longer to go. Its chain runs for two seconds, and it starts with six booms, 0.14 seconds apart, over a long falling buzz that sinks from 300 hertz to 40 in 1.6 seconds. Only then does the same “boom_huge” finish it off.
Sparkles and whooshes
Some of the effects are tiny tunes. A big pick, worth 25 or more, plays a quick sparkle of four notes: B, E, G-sharp and B again, each one higher. In the Disco Rings, shoot down a mirror ball, and it answers with a glint, three bright notes: A, E and A. For the next three seconds, your ship throws out a fan of four extra shots, more than seven times a second.
In Bell Garden, the wind gusts, but it never sneaks up on you. A whoosh plays one second before each gust, and six white arrows pulse along the edge the wind is coming from. A gust comes every 8 to 12 seconds. It pushes your ship, though you can fly against it, and it pushes enemy bullets too. It never touches your own shots.
The menu has a tune, too
Even the buttons play notes. OK is an E, then the B above it, going up. Back is the same two notes going down. When something won’t open, like a locked station or a Garage item you can’t afford yet, you hear “deny”: a C dropping to the F-sharp below it, an uneasy interval musicians call a tritone. Every move from one menu screen to another plays “rewind,” a tape spinning back, while the new screen winds in with cyan streaks.
And when a station is back on the air and you earn new gold discs, each one rings its own note as it lands, 0.4 seconds apart: E, G-sharp, B. Win all three at once, and you hear an E major chord, one note at a time.
The first three stations are free to play in your browser at loudnik.com. The full game, all ten stations and every boss, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Loudnik page.
