Smoothing out the levels

Just addressing one more bit of player feedback: folks justifiably seem to love the music, but we’ve had some complaints about the volume of certain tracks being much louder than others. This is totally my fault for not giving clearer target-level guidance to the amazing musicians.

One lamentable shortcoming of PICO-8’s audio API is that there’s no way (as far as I know!) to adjust the volume of an entire audio channel; you can only set the volume per-note, per-SFX. This makes mixing music and sound effects a bit of a challenge; if you discover late in development that your music is too loud relative to your sound effects, there’s no better way to fix that then to go tweak the volume of literally every note in every song.

So, that’s what I did! Things should be much smoother now. Here’s a recording of an “Endless Hike” run where I cycled through every track before:

and after:

I also swapped the order of a couple events to be a bit more faithful to the source material, but that’s not a huge deal.

Ta!