Well Rosie Planet worked out alright! I didn’t have high hopes and I exceeded them. Onto the next project? Maybe. I’m thinking of doing something more story-focused. The issue is that I’d have to write characters and dialogue and it’s very intimidating. In the meantime I’m doing music for a guy’s game. It's a Castlevania-like. I'll link more information or that as it becomes available, but he hasn't said a ton about it now. This is the first level theme, a swamp.
The game is pretty NES style and he's asked me to compose it like an NES game. I actually do have a set of rules that I laid out, which I'm (mostly) following.
I get 4 square wave channels (an nes has 2, but could be expanded to 4 with a mapper chip. This specific one was used in castlevania 3, I think)
I get one triangle wave channel
I get one noise channel, though I play it pretty fast and loose with what constitutes a single noise channel sound.
Any amount of echo is fine, which is not at all true for an nes
reverb and EQ are okay but only to subtly clean up the sound, and not to change it.
Mastering is okay, in the vein of those youtube channels that post mastered versions of videogame music.
In general it's been a lot of fun and pretty interesting to do all of this. I like composing in this style because I can play things a lot more fast and loose compositionally. A maximum of five notes at the same time means that you have to be relatively sparse in your arrangements, and the simple/distorted waveforms in question mean that you can get away with some notes that would otherwise clash. A lot of these songs were things I came up with in the shower, part by part.
On the flipside, it's been a little difficult writing in this "serious" context. For one, I'm writing it for somebody else's thing. With my own games, I know exactly the feeling I'm going for. With somebody else's game I have to infer it from a level description. Also, Rosie Planet would radically shift in tone because I wanted to put everything I liked in there. I made a point of trying to be pretty varied with the music. A lot of the music I wrote for that game is pretty broad pastiche - "this is the song that sounds like donkey kong", "this is the song that sounds like surf music", ect. That's all well and good, but the problem is that you can't include two "this is the song that sounds like donkey kong" songs. They'd just end up sounding the same! In this game I'm writing an entire game's worth of songs that sound like Castlevania music.
At any rate, I'm pretty excited of some of the songs I've written for this. I'm an arrangement guy, and I've been stripped of my ability to do big arrangements, so it's been fun to try and be a lot more thoughtful with smaller, more intricate arrangements.
