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Programming Musical Tastes. What do you listen to while you Code?

Written on May 3rd, 2009

cat-retroMost of the people reading this blog will probably agree that programming is one of the most mentally engrossing tasks out there. I believe this certainly has an effect on the variety of music listened to by people who write code.

Michal Marcinkowski, the creator of the infamous popular online action shooter called Soldat, is a huge fan of programming to heavy metal music. Michal listens to metal bands such as Manowar, Amon Amarth and Moonspell. He compares listening to metal as absorbing pure energy, using that energy in his programming efforts.

On the other hand, Dan “Data” Tabar, the main guy behind Data Realms, tends to listen to softer music such as chiptunes (including demo scene music) and retro video game music while programming his game, Cortex Command.

Personally, and surprisingly enough, I am partial to silence when programming. I’ve done some of my best programming and deepest thinking with a pair of earplugs. Although I do admit, some music is great to keep the thought process flowing; and in this case, my musical choice varies depending on what I’m working on. If the ideas I am translating into code are fairly complex, I will listen to something non-lyrical. This includes classical music such as Beethoven or Mozart, electronica, or similar to Dan, even tunes from retro video games.

Here are some sites that stream music I enjoy programming to:

http://www.kohina.com/ – Old school game and demo scene music.
http://www.di.fm/ – Electronica, classical and much more.
http://www.micromusic.net/ – Low tech music for high tech people!
http://www.scenemusic.eu/ – Demo scene music.
http://www.shoutcast.com/ – Good for everything else you can think of.

What do you listen to while you code? Feel free to share your musical recommendations and add your thoughts below!

Posted in Game Development, Programming

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A Suggestion from Michael’s Blog

Written on September 16th, 2008

I was reading some of the comments posted about the Berserker Reset over at Michal Marcinkowski’s blog. The following comment perked my interest enough to share it here:

#  Anon-O-Mus  Says:
April 5th, 2008 at 7:15 pm

You should make an entirely open-source game.

Where you make a basic shell, and the community has X weeks to do whatever the hell they want to it before it gets shutdown and released as a final game. Not only would it be fun, but the end product would probably be hilarious.

I know i’m not the only one out there who would like to see this attempted.

Posted in Game Development, Open Source

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