Postmortem 4 - Music

Music

This should be a quickie, mostly because I can't really show many musical examples. I'll be doing my best using Beepbox for musical examples, but I'm going to write this with the expectation that nobody will click the links.

I have a complicated relationship as a composer. I'd classify myself as "the worst of the best" which is to say that I can do a thing that very few artists can (compose music), but among my peers who do have that talent, I'm generally the weaker link. This is typically not an area I try to compare myself to others in, because I actually quite like my music just fine, but naturally in a game jam setting, I have no choice.

The good news is...

There isn't much competition. Like I said, most people can't even compose music at all, let alone make music for their whole game jam.

The bad news is...

DJ is here. He's a great buddy of mine and I genuinely wish him the best in all of these jams, but he's also effectively the only obstacle preventing me from taking home an easy victory in the music department. Last year he blew the competition out of the water with Show Stopping Hero, a full-fledged musical. This year, well... I haven't seen the bulk of his soundtrack yet, but unlike last year, he's going to be making a chiptune soundtrack. Now, if you know anything about my music, it's that chiptune music is pretty much all I can make right now. So, unfortunately, I'm competing directly with DJ within the same style of music, and I'm gonna be real, DJ's just better than me at chiptune music. So, I'll probably have to settle for second place in this category. And that's good enough for me, because my goal wasn't "win best music", it was "make a damn good soundtrack", and with that, I put in a ton of effort!

So, with limited time in a game jam, how does one go about making a custom OST?

Here's my secret: Leitmotifs

You don't have much time, so the easiest way to go about composing the music in a jam is to reuse the same melody frequently. This is actually a really neat double-feature. Not only does this save time by basically giving you a "base" to work with for every track in the game, but it hammers in a melody that will quickly get stuck in the player's head. With a limited runtime (less than an hour) you can't really make a single track memorable by itself the same way we grow attached to the themes of towns or battles that we spend a lot of time in with other games. So, by repeating the same leitmotif in a variety of contexts, you can at least create a memorable melody during your short runtime.

This, of course, has all the advantages that leitmotifs have in longer projects top. It establishes association between what's on screen and the music playing.

So, last year, I composed a leitmotif for Harold which I used throughout the entirety of Re:Punch, and this was an extremely effective motif. It's extremely catchy and it still gets stuck in my head to this day. Naturally, I wanted to write a motif for Reid that would have a similar effect.

I composed the basic melody for Reid while I was on a break at work. I think it's quite catchy! It's got a bouncy repetitive quality that doesn't get old, but repeats enough to hammer in the main idea of the track. This is a great start.

But the big problem I noticed is that it's only 4 measures long, and it's not very easy to build off of compared to Harold's theme. The first thing I ended up trying to do was add another set of 4 measures to fill out the melody. It... works well enough. But it's still lacking in that sheer SPUNK that Harold's theme had. So, my next strategy was actually to move on from this and start writing a battle theme. Specifically, I started with the battle theme for Lucius.

Weirdly specific, right?

Well, the reason I went with that was because I already knew what vibe I wanted to give to Lucius, so I could start with that vibe and inject the leitmotif into it. From there I would work backwards, seeing where the full song took the melody, and trying to create more of the main theme out of those results. So, for Lucius's theme, I wanted a computer-y science sort of vibe, which I quickly concluded would work best with  a lot of fast beeps scattered across multiple octaves. This was surprisingly versatile and I was able to use the single measure repeated across a large chunk of the final track, unaltered. However, there was a lot of empty space in there, so I made a choice that really pushed the song further: I added reverb! The change was HUGE! It fit the cold and calculating Lucius really well.

From there, I built up the song, adding a fast paced drum, a simple whole-note bass, and a square wave quickly lowering in pitch to make a kinda rhythmic "dyoom" sound! Lastly, I added in Reid's motif, and came out with a pretty strong start! I went a little crazy after that point, adding in what I intended to be the "chorus" by pretty much just going wild and placing down random notes within my key signature, filling out the gaps with what felt right. I only got away with that for a few measures before I got impatient and decided to return to Reid's motif. Since I was coming back to it so fast, I decided this would be a kind of buildup to a bigger musical moment, so I prepared it as such, using long bass notes slowly rising through a minor key towards a big climax. Near the end, I decided to cut out everything except the melody, which is sort of the musical equivalent of slow-mo: you're telling the audience "pay attention, something huge is about to happen!" What followed was very easy for me to figure out: the entire song up to this point had mostly only used two channels, save the "dyoom" sound. All I needed to do now was merge everything into one final payoff, taking the A section and B section and effectively playing them at the same time, which gave us the big musical climax of the piece. The majority of the melodic changes to the motif here were intuitive. I just went with what sounded right, and eventually the song found its way to a decent looping point.

Unfortunately, though, the motif didn't "find itself" in this exercise. It still felt like it was missing something, and at this point I had actually more or less given up on giving Reid his own "theme" and would instead just use this leitmotif to start with.

Next, I decided to write the theme for Project FOSSIL. I wrote a  few tracks before this point, but I'm bringing this one up because it utilizes one of my favourite techniques in music, which I lovingly refer to as "backwards leitmotif". 

It's not what it sounds like.

Yes, playing a leitmotif backwards can be a really cool musical piece, but most people aren't even gonna catch onto that, making that decision destined to only appear in Youtube trivia videos. Instead, when I say "backwards leimotif", I'm referring to when you take a part of a song you've already written and retroactively decide "this section is now the letimotif of X". For an example from Axial, we had already composed Amara's Overflow Theme before writing her main character theme. When the time came, we simply returned to that track we had already written for her and decided, "alright, this is your leitmotif now", after which point we (by "we" I mean DJ with my supervision) wrote a new track based on that leitmotif instead! Players are going to hear Amara's main theme first before they ever hear their Overflow theme, so to them, the Overflow theme is calling back to Amara's theme, even though when we composed the soundtrack it actually worked the other way around!

So that circles us back to Project FOSSIL!

The astute among you may have already caught onto where I'm taking this. Before I made any other decisions for this track, I had already decided that the beepy noises from the Lucius battle theme would be the theme of Project FOSSIL! So, I took that measure, and immediately did as many changes to it as I could while still keeping it recognizable, and decided to use that as the base for the rest of the song.  From there, I could feel out a sort of industrial vibe which fit the idea of the location very well, so I added in a very low bassline with some heavy clanging drums. Around this point, the song needed some more melody added to it, so you know what that means! It's time to whip out our trump card, the Reid motif! I basically just slapped it in there and then tweaked the rhythm a little to better suit the vibe. Lastly, since I felt the track needed to be a bit longer, I simply repeated the last four measures, but iterated by adding a little beeping sound in the back which made the melody "recontextualized". There are a lot of very simple changes you can make to a melody that can make it feel like a completely different section of the song without having to write a whole lot.

Okay, now I'm gonna be honest.

I could be trapped here for hours breaking down every track in the game. I didn't even touch on my Theme6 use in the final boss theme! But, out of respect for your time and my own, I'm going to call it quits here. But before I go...

How was it received?

I mean, it's a kickass soundtrack for sure. People love it, it's really hard to go wrong in this category for me. However... the tricky part is seeing how it stacks up against DJ's soundtrack. Only time will tell, but even if I don't get the gold in this category, I feel that this soundtrack was a resounding success.