Musician Arman Bohn on teaching himself to code, and what he hopes from debut RPG Arranger

Arman Bohn is best known for his music, but he's also something of a renaissance man - dappling in writing, film making and now game development too.

Indeed, so committed is he to games, he's taught himself how to code, and is now working on his first proper game, a musical adventure RPG called Arranger for iOS and Android.

We caught up to talk games, music and everything inbetween.

(Thanks to Jonah Sutherland for the photo.)

Arman Bohn: I've picked up a few jobs doing audio/music on commercial games over the past couple years, and then last summer, I came up with an idea for a game, so I decided to teach myself how to code.

I quickly realised that I couldn't make the game I wanted to make, so I made a Pong-like called Gravitoids. I loved programming so I decided to dive into something more in-depth for my second attempt and that quickly became Arranger. Originally, I thought the game would have 20-30 screens. Ha ha.

As a young kid, I thought I was going to be a writer. I wrote a bunch of stories about this Indiana Jones type person called Uncle Bob.

As an adult, I've been a songwriter and a filmmaker, so I suppose storytelling is something I enjoy doing. I get to synthesise everything I enjoy when making games ... so maybe this is the perfect outlet for me.

Most people want to make something cool and fun right from the start. This just isn't going to happen.

Your first programming attempts are going to suck and look terrible. As you get better, these magic moments happen as you make programming breakthroughs. It felt great to make a little yellow box that responded to keyboard inputs and moved around the screen.

I try to learn new something everyday. At first it was 'how do I use variables?' and 'how do I change the colour of that?'. Now, as I'm finishing up Arranger, it's more like 'I want to make a game where the user has to move a bucket and catch falling letters to spell words'.

I set out to see if I can do it, and usually I can. Sometimes I die trying and come back to it later.

Noobs - I'm still very much a noob - need to break things into really small pieces. I mean reeeeeeaaally small. If you feel like you accomplished something in a day, you will come back the next day and try again. If you try and make your dream game right off the bat, you'll sink.

TLDR? Don't start off trying to make your dream game. Make that game number 3 or 5. It sounds boring to make Pong for your first game, but trust me ... when it starts to work, you feel really good.

I'm old school. I grew up with my cousin's Atari, an Intellivision, an ancient PC, and a 128k Mac.

One of the first RPG games I played was Adventure on the Atari 2600. You were literally a square, fighting dragons that looked like seahorses while running through a maze and trying to find a chalice.

Arranger is a spiritual successor to Adventure without the dragon-slaying and with slightly improved graphics. This is going to iOS/Android and big, blocky graphics tend to look really nice on such small screens.

Oh, and you need to find eight chalices in Arranger.

1980s: Adventure (2600), AD&D: Cloudy Mountain (Intellivision), Rescue on Fractalus! (Atari 800), Contra (NES), Space Quest 3 (PC)

1990s: Battletoads (NES), Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (N64), Hexen (PC), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64), PaRappa the Rapper (PS)

2000s: Silent Hill 2 (PC), WarioWare, Inc: Mega Microgame$! (Gamecube), Fallout 3 (PS3), Scribblenauts (DS), Front Mission (DS)

2010s: Dragon Quest IX (DS) ... uh ... I had a kid in 2010 so my game time has been severely reduced.

That is a fair label, although it doesn't do the musical aspect of the game much justice. How about a musical RPG adventure?

I'll probably price it at 99c/69p.

At this point I'd be happy with 1,000+ downloads. I've seen some devs pour their time into a game and sell less than 500 copies. Scary.

I've been working on an album for my 16 month old daughter. It isn't really children's music, it's more like a time capsule that I hope she can keep with her throughout her life.

After I release Arranger, I'll try and lock down some of the arrangements and find the right group of people to track the album.

Retro games usually had very limited music resources. Music was almost an afterthought on most games back then.

Game songs really had to drive home a melody without layers of accompaniment. My favorite game music is the stuff that gets stuck in my head for days. The Zelda games are great at this. I think I was humming A link to the Past for like six months.

In terms of non game music, I really enjoy the stereophonic lounge scene from the early 1960s and some Krautrock like Neu! and Can. Some of my favourite new music is from Telekinesis, Copy, and Talkdemonic.

Chiptune music is great. It is really fun to code to. I'm not an idealist, so chiptune music to me is more of an aesthetic than a set of technical limitations. Some purists seem to limit the scope of chiptune music to songs created with retro hardware.

I think it has come to describe a spirit or vibe to a certain piece of music. I'm happy it has transcended the technical definition and is becoming a more and more accepted as a legitimate style.

The pallet that composers have at their disposal has only gotten better over the years.

Game audio/music has a multiplier effect on the gameplay. Good sound, whether it be the two repeating tones of Space Invaders or that scratchy stuff on the radio in Fallout 3 should enhance the gameplay.

I usually start to add audio into my own game after I have the basic mechanics working. If the game gets better, I'm on the right track. If it gets worse, I start over. I don't know if game audio has ever completely ruined a game for me, but it has definitely powered up some games tremendously.

Thanks to Arman for his time.

You can check out Arranger via Arman's website or the trailer below.

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