Penny Arcane Soundtrack
Hey Ya'll! Hope everyone had a good Jam or at least learned valuable lessons for the next one.
I was responsible for the music and audio for Penny Arcane.
https://juniperparadise.bandcamp.com/album/penny-arcane-original-soundtrack
Doing the music was a lot of fun. I kind of just jumped right into the first song which ended up being the boss battle song. I had downloaded a few drum samples from Sophie's sample pack on Splice because, at the time, our game brainstorming session was sounding like the game was going to end up fairly dark/intense. It didn't end up being as dark as some of the initial ideas but I thought I would still use the samples and it ended up working well as a high intensity ending song. Go here to listen to Trial By Fire.
That song had a bit of a hip hop edge to it so I thought I would continue that sound and started making the song that ended being the menu music. It was a lot more subdued and melancholy so it seemed more appropriate for the menu than the main game. Listen to Small Million-Dollar Loan here.
Something similar happened with the end credits song. I was trying to purposefully make the main gameplay song and came up with a nice guitar part. It kind of felt like it wanted to be a four-on-the-floor house style song. I liked what I came up with, but I agreed with the other team members that it didn't really strike the right mood for the gamplay, but it seemed good for the credits. You can listen to Death And Tax Evasion here
Lastly, I came up with a chord progression that I felt had the right emotional vibe for the actual game (finally!). I messed around with some different instruments to play it and drum styles and ended up just getting frustrated because nothing sounded good. I decided to open up a new project and start over. Pretty quickly I made a drum sequence that I felt had the right groove I had been looking for. I then tried that same chord progression again with a new instrument and things started jelling pretty well. I also found a bass part that I really liked which was a huge part of the difficulty previously. Basically I made the exact same song but just from scratch and it worked lol. Lesson learned, if it's not working out, sometimes just start over. Fight The System is available here.
Sound effects were a lot of fun as well! It was the first time I've really done game sound design so I felt pretty good with the result. Usually, a sound was a combination of 2-5 different sounds that I EQ'd, pitched, trimmed and compiled together to achieve the impact that I wanted. I think the two sounds I'm most proud of are the coin shield sound and the fireball explosion. For the coin shield, I got a sword shing sound to represent the metallic nature of the shield and a retro gameboy sounding bloop thing to make it feel more magical. The coins spinning around was a whip of some kind being twirled around that I slowed down to make the frequency better fit the rotation. The fireball explosion just felt really good because the combination of sounds that I put together gave it a really decent amount of punch.
You can check out the game here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/penny-arcane Leave a comment if you're able; I try to leave feedback for everyone's game that comments.
