Just show projects!! WDKY (GMTK25)
Here's some insights inside my work in GMTK25. I made music and sound effects along with music producer and director LV3TO and we gone under four days to develop sound and music assets. We both gone looking for music examples of what we're thinking given the game's theme.
It's important to us to decide the aesthetic definition of things early on. The game eventually come down from numerous shallow ideas to fewer deeper ideas the more you figure out what's the game going to be as you develop it and, expecting that this can happen, we can sit down and decide everything right away so we don't have to fiddle with bigger ideas and focus only in crafting everything we decided.
We usually have to work closely with the visuals to produce ideas we intended. The reason is that, sound is much more effective at transmitting ideas when paired with visuals and movement, and vice-versa. A clash in style between the visuals and the music will result in the game feeling broken apart in pieces (not our target feeling!), and it's not in a good way like collage art but more like liquidifier goo kind of way.
I think we definetely struggled to keep the game art and music in the same feel, specially because there's not a lot of time to make compromises when both sections of the team work in different work pacing/density. The best we can do is to believe that everyone is in the same page.
Given the game's core idea, we landed on delivering a hopeful/dystopian notes in the soundtrack, themed around retrofuturism. Something that made you feel like things are trashed, but ultimately solveable. I remembered how dirty early electronic sounded like, and decided to go for it.
Main Menu music project file
Arpeggiator Dexed patch — Main Menu project
I started drafting the main menu music with arpeggios. Dexed is usually my go-to for those vintage synthetic presets.
Wind Odin2 patch — Main Menu project
I made this wind-sounding patch with some of the Airwindow's reverb plugin. I really wanted something to add something dirty in this track to make it feel desolate.
Main menu motif in MIDI editor — Main Menu project
Main lead cardinal patch — Main Menu project
I used cardinal way more than I intended in this project.
Harmony line cardinal patch — Main Menu project
Strings kontakt patch — Main Menu project
Strings gave me interesting tinglings. I was thinking too much in La nuit silencieuse et paisible at the moment.
Background PW Square odin2 patch — Main Menu project
Norman Crook's drums — Main Menu project
I wasn't planning on adding drums. My plan was to make something more ambient-ish but since the gameplay has a bit of an action on it, it's was probably for the best to add it as an antecipation.