I ended up working sounds/music on two different games and both teams turned out to be amazing. This is my second LD jam and the caliber of participants is consistently phenomenal. Shout out to my teammates!

Draconomics (Music/SFX):

*Game *

*OST *

Over The Threshold (Music):

Game

*OST *

Hi!

I did the music and sound for Wheels of Rage and I wanted to give some insight into one game musician's process.

First, this wasn't my best outing as my power went out two nights in a row leaving me with about half the time to make some tunes and SFX. So I went into hyper focused mode and somehow pulled it out.

I'm going to focus on one song in particular as it's the gameplay BGM and thus the most important. The song is called 'gas'.

Beginning As you can see it's not a complicated song. The game is a slower paced, strategy game so I made the BPM low enough to give the player room to breathe and put all of their focus on the game. The other issue was how to pair the music and SFX, which have a lot of running engines, explosions, and other noisy sounds to compete with. So, other than sparse guitars, everything would be fairly smoothed out and rhythmic. So the first thing I got down was the rhythm; primarily the bass/kick. It plays throughout the entire song letting the other instruments fill up space while the kick drives the game forward. I used a sub kick to consolidate instruments (again minimalist design so the SFX don't get overwhelmed) and give the song a more modern feel.

Recording I recorded some clean guitar parts, unsure of how I wanted the distortion to sound, and mapped out most of the song using just guitar and bass. When the song started taking shape I eventually kicked on Guitar Rig and shaped out a sound. I did run into an issue with my recording giving too much feedback, so rather than re-setup my rig I just cut out the silences, thus the chopped up audio. An important lesson, always check your tracks for issues before ending the recording session.

Once I had a good drive going I focused on melody, adding in bouncy synth to match/counter the bass kick instrument. Again, I tried to make the melody as sparse as possible so the song never overpowers the game mix. At this point I pretty much had the song that's in the game and I had to stop so I could work on SFX.

The song just didn't sound finished and, again due to power issues, I didn't have the time I wanted with it. So I finished it post submission and threw it up on soundcloud.

*Finishing * I edited the hell out of the previous version but it's mostly just moving bass/melody notes around for more impact. I added another kind of mournful pipe synth to it (I was thinking Morricone style but abandoned that) to address the desolation more, give the player a reprieve from the drive, and fill out the melody. After that it was time for some fat piano chords to replace the guitars, round out the ending so the loop feels good, and donezo.

Here's the finished track: gas

I hope somebody gets something out of this! I'm not used to writing out my process so thanks for bearing with me.

Good luck to everyone and if you comment with your game I'll definitely check it out!

Wheels of Rage: Enter the Sandstorm

Those are my percentile scores (I'm audio) from my last 3 (and only LD) jams. The fact that all of my work has been in the top 10 percentile (and one in the top 3!) is amazing and makes me feel ecstatic.

This is because I've only really been making music for about 3 years and I've only been doing game audio for a little over 1 year. I feel like I've found something I truly love doing and I can't wait to explore it further. You all are a fantastic community and I think LD is a very special thing.

Thanks again everyone and I'm excited to see you all at the next one!

ADDENDUM: I used https://ldstats.info to get the above info

I did the music for Sticky Diagnosis and just wanted to talk about that for a bit. @zombree and @made3 came up with the mechanics and setting. They wanted something kind of goofy and hillbilly-esque but I thought adding a more serious/darker tinge to the goofiness would play into the "deeper and deeper" theme.

Try our game out! Sticky Diagnosis

I knew right away that I wanted to use banjo and heavy synths because that just sounds dope. I like the dichotomy of bluegrass and dance. I wanted the banjo to have little reverb, like it was close to the player making them feel small, and the other instruments to have more reverb/echo to give the feeling of being in a large space.

The first thing I needed to do was figure out how to midi a banjo. I found good samples and took a lot of time to get the slides/nuances as close as I could to analog. I used a lot of trial and error. You can see below that I definitely repeated lines (a must in 72 hours) but I tried to keep the "solo" banjo as varied as I could.

The drums were pretty easy. I made a kind of trippy/funky beat adding a four to the floor kick and 16th hi hats during the dancey part.

The bass mostly follows the drum beat with changing note lengths to give the feeling of momentum. The setting is weird so I wanted the music to feel weird as well and varying the rhythm slightly like that helps. Also in the picture below there's another ending melody during the dance part. This is pretty close to the initial banjo melody with a big synth attached.

Other than that it's just adding little synth instruments here and there to fill it out.

Our game involves a lot of frogs. Mostly frogs. Only Frog.

In honor of the frog I made this chant (which is actually used by the evil witches in the game).

We originally wanted to have an audio feature where a new layer of music came in the closer you were to a singing Frog. The idea being that there is a steady instrumental happening in the loop but the frogs play on top. This was a challenge and we weren't able to do it due to time but it was fun figuring it out.

Here's the finished song sans frogs. Only one made it out alive.

For kicks here's my very first pass at the frog song. A lot changed lol