I made this song about the game GLtron, a light-cycles game that came in my distro repository. I like it better than Armegatron Advanced because it’s more user-friendly and the AI bikes don’t just go around in circles.

This song was made with LMMS. I went for a chiptuney kind of feel. The bike sounds actually came from the game. (I have contacted the author of the game, who gave me his permission to use them.)

I started with the first non-bike sound you hear in the song, the pizzicato chords with LP filter going up and down. I started to improvise parts on top of that, and the song basically wrote itself. The bike sounds came around the middle of the project, as I realized that a song about lightcycles definitely needed to have lightcycle sounds in it.

The cover image was made in Blender using edited versions of the bike models and arena textures from the game. These bike models are the kind that were used in the original TRON movie, but I went for a hybrid style between that and TRON: Legacy, by adding glowing lines on the bikes and reflections and motion blur. I rendered it with Cycles render, naturally. After it rendered, I added the glow effects in GIMP. The whole process of making this picture taught me a lot about working with Blender, how to make glow effects in GIMP, and about computer graphics in general. I was surprised by how ridiculously easy it is to make TRON-themed stuff, and how awesome it looks.

Thank you to Andreas Umbach for letting me post this, and thanks to all the crew and cast of TRON and TRON: Legacy. Without you, the world would be a much less interesting place.