Dev-log #16: My Merry Musical Months

Hello there once again!

The past few months of my game development journey have had quite the musical theme to them. I’m trying to write more dev-logs, so it seemed like a good topic to discuss. I mention a lot of music today and I’ll be linking/embedding where you can listen to it as we go along, but everything will also be linked at the end for simplicity’s sake.

So let’s rewind back a few months, when I participated in my second game jam. It was a fun experience, and you can read all about that here. When I was looking for Game Jams to add to my calendar during that time, I noticed one that caught my eye, the OST Composing Jam #4 hosted by Lone Rabbit. The basic idea of this jam is that you compose a soundtrack for a hypothetical game that fits the given theme. This game can be whatever you want, and part of the jam is coming up with a story to fit whatever music you make.

It’s quite different from your conventional game jam, but still interesting nonetheless. I marked it on my calendar and promptly shelved it in the back of my mind as it was still quite a ways out. I had nearly forgotten about it until a friend from the Unique Indie RPG Discord server sent a volunteer request for composers for an upcoming game of his. I haven’t really mentioned it before, but I am a musician. I have a lot of experience playing instruments and even composing. In fact, I’ve been slowly composing music for Phases over the past few years which I’m really excited to show off when the time comes! I really do love playing and writing music, so when Majim asked for help I thought it would be a good opportunity to start practicing my music production skills for the upcoming jam and for Phases.

Preparations

While I’ve been composing music in a notation software for years, I have much less experience with music production on a “professional” level. I’ve done it before using Sony (nowadays Magix) ACID, which is pretty primitive by modern standards. And I’ve made a few songs using a bunch of free virtual instruments, so I do understand the basics of music production, but I knew I eventually wanted to do something a bit more professional for Phases. While I know Phases info has been sparse in the recent months, things are moving along and this is something that I did want to start thinking about.

I still needed to get a few things figured out since it had been awhile since I had done any music production. First was the DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation for those who aren’t familiar. This is the application where you create and organize all your sounds. There are a lot of options out there but I wanted to get something non-subscription based and that worked on Windows. So that eliminated popular choices such as Pro Tools and Logic Pro right off the bat. Ableton Live, FL Studio and Reaper were the main three I was looking at after that. I eliminated Ableton Live for its high price for what I would call the “standard” version. I then settled on Reaper over FL Studio due to FL Studio being made more for beat-making, which isn’t the type of music I would be making. For my uses, FL Studio would have worked fine but Reaper is just more flexible. Reaper is also the cheapest out of all the options which made it very appealing. I decided I would try Reaper (using the free trial) and reconsider if I had any problems.

Next, I needed some sounds. If I was just doing things for this one piece and jam, I would have opted for some free instruments and sounds. However, since I was preparing for the soundtrack I eventually want to make for Phases, I decided I would go ahead and purchase some more premium libraries. I’ve been saving for quite awhile to have some extra budget for Phases, so it’s an investment I was willing to make. However, if you are trying to get into music production, I would highly recommend working with some free options and learning the ropes before investing any money. You can get a lot out of free libraries and they are all over the place if you know where to look (Spitfire Audio’s LABS is a great starting point). After lots of research, I decided to purchase Native Instruments’s Kontakt Komplete. This bundle includes their Kontakt software, which is required for many other virtual instruments, along with a wide collection of sounds and instruments. Luckily, they were running their Summer sale at the time, so I was able to get everything for a very reduced price. Having Kontakt also gave me access to the slew of free Kontakt libraries available on the internet. It’s honestly a really good starting point for anyone trying to get into music production of any kind.

Lastly, I looked into getting a basic MIDI controller. This allows you to enter notes with a piano keyboard instead of using your mouse and keyboard. It’s unbelievably useful and is almost essential in my opinion. Inputting notes with a mouse and keyboard gets old quickly. I opted to get a pre-owned keyboard to save money. I was surprised to find the used market for MIDI keyboards is ripe with options. There are plenty of older keyboards available for more than half their original value. I ended up getting one from M-Audio which ended up being in really good condition too, so I was quite happy with the purchase.

Let’s Majimjam

Once I was all prepared, I got to work on making a song for Majim’s game called Meri’s Cafe. It’s a visual novel/coffee shop simulation game that takes place in the universe of Majim main project Hyades. I’ve been following Hyades’ development for a few years now so I’m really happy to have been able to help out!

I was tasked with writing a song that was some chill jazz, suitable for a coffee shop. I got to work writing in my notation software (Musescore 3 for those wondering) and came up with a pretty nice melody. Once I got approval of the rough draft from Majim, I started putting it into Reaper. I took this time to learn the software and its quirks, so it wasn’t a fast process. I experimented with different sounds, effects etc. Not only was I trying to mess around with Reaper, I was also trying to find a good combination of instruments that would fit in well with the rest of the game’s soundtrack. The soundtrack was created by a team of composers, so I wanted to make sure that whatever I made would mesh well with what the other members of the team had made and didn’t stick out too much. I landed on using some of the sampled instruments from Kontakt Komplete along with a free saxophone plugin with some effects thrown in.

After a few weeks of on and off work, I finished my track for Meri’s Cafe with a lot of things learned. It’s not perfect, but I’m proud of it and it was a good experience to adapt myself to the software. Take a listen!

The jam was just a few days away now and with this new experience on hand, I prepared for the 10 day jam ahead of me.

Let’s Jam (the music kind)

Day one of the composing jam started with discovering the theme. The jam had both a word theme and a picture theme. They are both correlated, but you can use either one/both as your theme. I never really thought about it, but having some sort of visual of a hypothetical game does help tremendously. The theme was Runaway and the accompanying image is below.

With the theme in mind, I opened up Reaper and stared at it for 20 minutes. I usually write my music in a notation software before moving over to a DAW, but I decided for efficiency I would try to write everything in a DAW to begin with. I noodled around for a bit trying to find something I like but I didn’t know where to start. I realized I needed more direction if I was going to get anywhere, so I decided I would start by writing a literal song for running away. I imagined you were getting chased by some sort of evil doers and were running to safety. After a while, I started getting into the groove of things and after a few hours I had a decent rough draft of a song. It was far from finished, but at least it was a start.

If my game jam experience has taught me anything, it’s that you should make a plan and try your best to stick to it. I thought employing a similar strategy would be wise before I got too far into the jam. So instead of working more on my track, I decided I would plan out what I wanted to work towards, how many songs, how long etc. I thought of ways I could make the most of what I was given but still be efficient. The jam was 10 days long, though I knew I would not be available all day everyday, I maybe only had an average of 2-4 hours a day at most to work so I had to make my limited time count. Then I had an idea inspired by Bravely Default 2, which has an interesting approach to its overworld music. In that game, there is only one overworld theme, but depending on the area it completely changes styles. Here are some examples. Listen to each one for about 10 seconds and you’ll understand what I mean. I would have preferred YouTube embeds, but every video I found was copyright claimed and didn’t work, so please excuse the Spotify links.

I realized this idea could work perfectly for this jam. The story I came up with is that you are running away from home from some evil entity, and each area you encounter would have its own spin on the “running” theme. This would allow me to not have to make several compositions so I can focus more on the production aspect, which is what I need to practice more anyway. I tried to aim for three running songs for three distinct areas, an opening song and a closing song, for a total of five tracks for the album. It seemed like a good plan, so I got to work on the running songs.

Woodlands

The first area I wanted to tackle was a forest area. It’s a pretty typical setting for a game and it matched the image theme. Actually, many of the final submissions ended up having forest-based songs or had their entire project based on the forest imagery. At this point, I didn’t have my running theme yet, so I knew that was the first thing I needed to figure out. I wanted to make sure it was simple enough to work in various styles but still interesting to not be boring. After some experimentation, I landed on a theme that I quite liked and that tended to sound good on a variety of different instruments.

Once I had that, the rest came pretty easily. I’ve written some “forest” tracks before, so I had an idea of what I wanted it to sound like. I knew I wanted woodwinds, pizzicato strings and mallet percussion, so it was just a matter of experimenting with my various sounds to see what sounded right. I actually ended up doubling up the strings between two different libraries which is unusual but it sounds better than both of them individually. Here’s what I came up with.

Seaside

My next area was the one I was most excited for. I was trying to think of an area that would help my submission stand out. I suspected a large majority of people would have a forest theme so I wanted something a bit more unique. I figured a beach area would be a good opportunity to do something unique. It also gave me a chance to go all out with grooviness, I wanted a whole bunch of percussion and guitars to really give it a latin-jazz feel.

The entire glue of this song is the Native Instruments Cuba plugin. It has an array of bongos, conga, claves and more that all give off that seaside vibe I was going for. There was also a tool within the plugin that makes it very easy to just map out how you want the percussion to sound which really helped with my tight schedule. Since I already knew the general tune, I was able to really breeze through this one. It still took awhile, but I didn’t have any issues while making it. It was really fun to just keep adding more and more and trying to maximize the grooviness. In the end, I think it turned out really great and it’s by far my favorite out of the bunch.

Frozen Glades

The final area I wanted to tackle was a snow area. I must admit, I have a soft spot for video game snow levels. The combination of the icey white visuals with generally chilling music is right up my alley. I wanted a very open piece with notes in the upper registers to give off the vibe of a frozen plain.

I ended up doing some interesting things with this one. I stretched out the main motif to make a longer, more drawn out version scattered among various instruments. I also had some fun with some of the percussive sounds and panning it all around. The final product makes for this feeling of loneliness and vastness that I was really happy with. It’s honestly not the most interesting to sit down and listen to, but I think it would fit the best in an actual game out of all the tracks.

Opening

My current total was 4 tracks—the 3 I had just made and the literal running away song that I made at the start of the jam that still needed some work. I imagined the running away song would work well as the final piece to wrap up the album with an exciting conclusion, so I needed an opening song. The idea behind this one was to start off the story with the idea that you would be forced to run away from home from some evil threat. I wanted something thoughtful, yet a bit sad.

To help thread together my song even more, I ended up using a slowed down version of the runaway song I had made before as a basis. It had a nice melancholy aspect to it which worked really well when paired with the right chords. I dubbed this theme the “home” theme and that’s what I’ll call it from here on out. The song ended up being pretty simple, mostly a cello solo with piano and string backgrounds. The cello I used is the beautiful Tina Guo library from Cinesamples. It really fits well here as that library excels at slow, contemplative music. I really like the way it turned out and it kicks off the album well.

But there was still something missing…

At this point, I had roughly composed everything I had planned to do, however I still had to mix all these pieces, which I left till the end. Before I mixed everything though, I wanted to make sure I was happy with the complete package. I listened to what I had over and over, making small tweaks here and there. I even sent it to a few friends to get some quick feedback, and it was all very positive. However, I felt like there was something missing. I didn’t like how the album as a whole finished, I thought it could be more conclusive. The way it is now, the story doesn’t end; you know the evil presence catches up with the main character and they try to run away, but you never find out what happens. It just ends with them running, seemingly endlessly thanks to the looping track. You may think I’m putting too much thought into a story for a soundtrack for a fake game, but it was genuinely bothering me. I had less than 2 days to finish my tracks, so I decided I would make one more.

This last track would be the conclusion, it’s similar to the first track in that it uses the “home” theme and similar instrumentation. However, it’s much brighter, more optimistic and hopeful. I even recycled some of the same sections as the first piece. This saved time, but it also allowed me to create an unmistakable link between the beginning and end. It works pretty well and I’m really happy I decided to make one last piece to round off the album.

Loose Ends

I wasn’t done yet, I still had quite a bit to do and only about one more day to do it. The main things were to finish mixing, polishing all the songs and then making an album cover, name and uploading everything. I got to work mixing and got everything in a good place except for track 5. I had been working on it over time to finish up what I started, so by this point it was almost finished. However, there was something about that piece that sounded off that I just couldn’t put my finger on. I messed around with different instruments, messing with the effects and more but to no avail. However, time was of the essence and I had to move on. If I were given more time, I would have liked to just remake the whole thing from the ground up, but that simply wasn’t possible. I left the piece in a decent state, but I’m still a bit bothered by it, but that’s just how these things go.

Next up was exporting my pieces. Normally, this would be trivial and not even worth mentioning, but I actually had quite a bit of trouble. For some reason, some of the instruments weren’t getting effects applied to them at certain moments in the final render. For example, if an instrument was holding a note, its reverb may drop out halfway through the note. I messed around for a lot longer than I care to admit trying to figure it out, but eventually I was able to get some exports that sounded correct. My technical issues weren’t done yet though! The submission had to be posted on some music streaming platform of which I decided to use SoundCloud. I uploaded all my songs and listened back to them to find that the first second got cut off. I’m still not sure if this is just a SoundCloud thing or something else, but I was running out of time and I couldn’t bother trying to diagnose the problem. I re-exported the pieces (luckily without any effect issues) with some padding at the beginning to circumvent the upload issue.

Lastly, I just needed to finish the submission which included deciding a name. I always try to decide on a name before the last hours, but I always seem to fail on that front. I wanted to include the word “home” somehow and I wanted to avoid using the word “runaway” or anything similar to it. In the end I decided on “A Dash from Home”, it’s not the best name I think I could have come up with, but it fits well.

With that all done, I did my final checks and submitted it with about 15 minutes left in the jam. I always cut it much closer than I’d like, but at least I make the most out of the time we have. With all that done, I took a bit of a break as I waited for people to give my tracks a listen.

Results

I checked back in a few hours later to see what people were saying, and the general response was very positive. I ended up getting a lot of comments filled with kind words. It really is satisfying to see hard work pay off isn’t it?

In the end, I got 36th place out of 196 entries. It’s a bit lower than I was hoping for, but I’m certainly happy with it, especially considering the competition. I was able to listen to a couple dozen submissions, and the quality of the soundtracks is honestly astounding. Most of the submissions I listened to ranged from really good to incredible. There were very few “bad” submissions, which is really saying something. In a game jam, there are usually some submissions that aren’t on the same level as some others, and you can tell pretty easily which ones will rise to the top. However, here, the level of quality is extremely high all across the board. It makes it hard to rate them since they are all so good. Given the level of quality, I’m happy to be among the top 50, especially since I somehow surpassed some of my favorites. Everyone really did a great job and I hope they are all proud of what they accomplished.

I’m going to give a few highlights to some of my favorites, but I implore you to check out more than just the ones I listed here since there are many I didn’t even get a chance to hear that I’m sure are just as solid. Click on the name of the soundtrack to link to their itch.io submission page where you can read all about them, links to where you can listen are at the bottom of that page.

Submission Highlights

Worms Woods

Worms Woods is a really nice soundtrack. It reminds me a bit of the soundtrack for A Short Hike, which is a good thing. This soundtrack also incorporates live guitar, which is really awesome and it adds to the overall sound immensely, especially the title theme. Not many people did live recording for instruments, but out of the one that did, Worms Woods pulled it off the best.

Forester

Forester is amazing. Somehow the composer, David Caldrella, managed to make a 21 song soundtrack in just 10 days! That is not easy! And all of the tracks are really good, the level of quality is extremely high. It’s mostly orchestral, but with some chiptune and other sounds thrown in there. It ended up winning 2nd place overall, and it’s easy to see why.

Venture

Venture is unique due it it being one massive song instead of a whole soundtrack. You could argue that having just one song defeats the purpose of the OST Jam, but it’s allowed by the rules and Venture is really good so I’m willing to give it a pass. It’s a mostly orchestral piece, but with a much larger scope. It’s very grandiose with dozens of instruments. Similarly to Worms Woods, it also employs some live instruments with the tin whistles. While the implementation of live instruments is a bit rougher here intonation wise, it’s still a live instrument which always adds another layer to a piece. It’s not perfect, but it sure is impressive and worth a listen.

Cedar

Cedar is one of my personal favorites. It was one of the first ones I listened to for the jam and I was really impressed. It blends a lot of different musical styles well to create its own unique voice. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but I really enjoy all the songs here for different reasons, though An Ode to Wishes is probably my favorite. It ranked below the top 50, which seems really low to me so give it some support!

Again, the overall level of quality was beyond what I ever expected. If you are at all interested, here is the page for the jam itself and you can see all of the submissions. There is so much variety among the submissions so you are bound to find something you like.

Let’s Majimjam Again

I thought my musical adventure was over for the time being, but to my surprise, I was presented with the opportunity to write another song for Meri’s Cafe. This happened due to the composing team making more songs than could fit in the game. To circumvent this, we doubled the game’s soundtrack by having an A and B side of the soundtrack that you could select at any time. Due to this, we needed an extra song to fill the B side which is where I came in. I wasn’t expecting to write another song, but I was happy to do it, especially with the Composing Jam experience under my belt.

This time, I was tasked with writing a less upbeat piece. It still needed to be jazzy, but just more somber and thoughtful. My deadline for this song was a bit tighter which made it a mini jam in it of itself. Just like the composing jam, I decided to compose the whole thing in Reaper instead of messing with notation software first. I fiddled around with some ideas and landed on something that I quite liked, and once I got that initial start, the rest fell into place fairly easily.

This piece ended up being really cool, while my last piece for Meri’s was much more “jazzy” with a standard jazz form and even improvisation, this one was much more straightforward. The saxophone melody almost tells a story, what that story is, you’ll have to play the game to find out.

With that, I was done with my Meri’s Cafe pieces. If you want to play the game, you can do so right here. It’s short, sweet and a relaxing time. If you want to listen to my songs, be sure to play with the B Side soundtrack since both of my pieces are there. The development and composing teams put a lot of work, so it would mean a lot to us if you played it!

Soundtrack Links

As promised, here are the links to both the Meri’s Cafe and A Dash from Home soundtracks. They’ve been scattered throughout, but here they are again in one place for convenience. My tracks for Meri’s are track 10 Time To Cool Off and track 14 Shot In The Dark.

Website Updates

Note from the future: Since I updated the website in 2024, none of these updates apply anymore.

Additionally, I’ve updated the website with a new music tab! I have enough music at this point to populate it, so if you ever want to see all the music I’ve worked on, it will be there. Check it out!

Along with this change, I also moved some stuff around. I consolidated my Reviews and Other Posts into one section called Other Posts. I haven’t really used these as much as I expected, so it didn’t make sense to have them split up when there is such little there. I also moved the link to the Archive (basically a giant list of all my posts) to the footer instead of the header. These changes help make things a bit simpler. Nothing’s been removed, just relocated.

I do want to do a full website overhaul at some point, especially since I have a lot more experience in web development since I made this site almost 4 years ago (wow that’s hard to believe). But any updates I can do now to help improve what’s here already is good.

Cadence

And with that, my merry musical months meet their miraculous end. I gained a lot of experience from these opportunities which I plan to use while I’m working on the Phases soundtrack. In fact, I have started to get some music for Phases ready to go, so I hope you look forward to hearing that when the time comes.

I mentioned how I’m trying to write more dev-logs. I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff lately, but I don’t like having my entire internet presence go silent for a few months, so I’m going to try and post more dev-logs in the future. Maybe one every month or two instead of one every year. Phases is progressing, but I don’t really want to show more until we are further along. I have no idea when that’ll be, but hopefully sooner rather than later. Thank you for your patience.

All that being said, I believe it is my time to say goodbye. As always, thank you so much for reading my silly little posts. This one in particular took a long time to put together (things just kept coming up), so I hope you found something here insightful. Grab a drink and play Meri’s Cafe, or go listen to your favorite tune. Whatever you do, you read this whole thing so take it easy for a bit. We’ll see you around.

Thanks for reading,

Andy