Creating Music for Spirits Unfold: Part 1

Now that we've got an art team and the game is - just about - rolling along, it's time for me to get started on music, since a lot of our technical specs are finished up. I actually started last month, but a lot of last month was pretty busy with some other priorities that I've had.

November was the first real month that I got down and dirty with my music tasks. I still was pretty busy this month, but I managed to start writing a piece of music that I actually really liked. Currently, it's the theme for the game's first town - Bydale - but the odd thing about writing music for games (especially when they're supposed to match a game's setting that has not been wholly fleshed out yet) is that the mood and the energy within each piece of music may not end up entirely matching that of the setting you're writing it for, by the time that either the piece and/or setting ends up being completed. This means - in reality - that I'm writing a piece of music to match each locale in the game, but everything may end up being shuffled around by the time all of the music is written. Maybe Bydale's theme won't be Bydale's theme. Maybe it would work better in Ollarwood - a town that we haven't even begun thinking about yet. Maybe the shroud of mystery surrounding Bydale (because of spoilers) doesn't really come out in this piece of music like it's supposed to. Maybe it sounds sad, rather than mysterious - but maybe I shouldn't fix it because that particular piece of music sounds BETTER sad - in which case, I would have to start over on Bydale's theme from scratch.

Not only does the feel/style of the music affect the mood, but it's also important to determine how to orchestrate the music for each game. It's obviously important to create the music in the right context - the original Super Mario Bros. NES game wasn't fully orchestrated with live instruments. Not only did the cartridges not have the space for something like that, but it wouldn't have worked, at all. Because Spirits is replicating that retro-RPG style through its visuals, I think real instruments would work fairly well, but it still has to match the instrumentation methods that were available during the time that these types of games were first introduced. People have expectations, you know.

It's really odd how similar music composition is to creating a landscape - you have to take into account the purpose of that area, what happens there, what visual images the music brings you, what characters will be in that area, and whether to integrate other characters' themes into that area, if they have a special tie with it. Realizing this is what makes it important for me to have direct contact and communication with the developers who are creating said area, and also receiving insight and constructive criticism on the pieces I write for each. So far, I've got two themes in progress, and I'm only half-sure that I want to use one of them for its intended area, in-game.

Music composition for games is really odd. But really fun and intriguing.