LuciTracker is a homebrew microtonal NES/Famicom-style chiptune music player which can also play music videos. It was made to play the song Ultrajoy, as part of a personal project to make a song using an entire custom program.
- Watch the music video
- Listen on Bandcamp, download the score
- Download LuciTracker and play Ultrajoy for yourself
- Read the LuciTracker manual: look no further than
manual.md - Build LuciTracker for yourself: read on!
LuciTracker was made using LÖVE (version 11), a framework for making games using Lua. I know, I know, using a game engine for this is quite the overkill, but I'm a baby programmer who writes code for fun and not for a living. LÖVE is released under the zlib license, which means an acknowledgement is appreciated but not required. These guys deserve one, though.
To build LuciTracker directly from the source code, follow these instructions.
LuciTracker's source code is released under the Unlicense, which means it's in the public domain. That means you can do whatever you want with it: read it, learn from it, mod it, reverse engineer it, or feed it as input to your Markov chain generator.
I made LuciTracker in less than two months. Because of this, LuciTracker's file format isn't particularly feature-rich; it actually has the bare minimum set of features required for Ultrajoy. So if you think it lacks something obvious, such as sustain and release envelopes, an arpeggio effect, fine pitch, non-octave tunings, rotating or flipping images, drawing rectangles or lines, or custom waveforms, that's because it does.
LuciTracker was never intended to be like a fantasy console, this new amazing kind of player that's capable of everything its real-life predecessors could do and then some. Heck, it doesn't even have a good architecture for it. It's made by an amateur programmer who just happens to have enough music theory knowledge to pull something like this off. No, LuciTracker was made specifically to play one song, as part of a project where the specific purpose was to code an entire program just for one song.
If you still think LuciTracker is interesting despite all that, that's awesome. If so, then you're the reason I'm releasing its source code into the public domain. The last thing I want is for someone who happens to like what I wrote to be stopped in their path by a copyright boulder.
So feel as free as you can to play Ultrajoy for yourself. To make your own LuciTracker song. To read the source code. To learn from it, perhaps, if you're a programming beginner. To mod it. Any of these would make me exceedingly happy. They would mean that this little project has done more than it had ever set out to.
I mean this as sincerely as possible: Thank you, for engaging with the work of a fellow human.
-- Lucilla