Looped Noise

A look back at the 3 day jam for EOL and the music that came out of it.

Friday

I started writing music immediately after the idea for the game was agreed upon. I got about 80% of a song done that night. I soon realized it was not a strong enough song to be the world 1 theme. I wanted something more mechanical sounding and it needed to be catchy.

Saturday

I created a playlist of NES tunes in NoiseES. I listened to it over and over while I laid in bed and thought about what I was going to write. I looked for anything with robots in the NES library. Of course a lot of Mega Man was in that playlist; it really shows its influence in the world 2 theme.

I spent the next seven hours making the world 1 theme “Programmed to Work”. Somehow I found a second wind and late into the night (4am) I created the world 2 theme “I Won’t Byte”. These are the two main songs that made it into the jam version of the game!

Programmed to Work

I Won’t Byte

Sunday

Early Sunday morning I revisited and finished my song from the first night, “Trust Your Circuits”.

Trust Your Circuits

Next I started writing the title theme, but it kind of went in a different direction. Lucky for me it fit perfectly with the narrative idea, “passing of time”, that we had talked about. So I skipped ahead on my list of todos and finished this small song and named it “Epoch”.

Epoch

Staying with that idea, I also needed a shorter “passing of time” song, so next I wrote “System Time”.

System Time

With those tracks finished I needed to get back to my original task and write the title theme. I got stuck for awhile and threw away a few ideas. None of them felt right. I wanted a simple, short melody that was memorable and sounded like an epic journey was about to begin. After an hour or so “Does Not Compute” was born. This is the only other song that made it into the jam version.

Does Not Compute

Finally I moved on to the ending theme “Bits and Pieces”. It’s the first chiptune I’ve written in 3/4 time.

Bits and Pieces

I was finished with music around 8:20pm that night (so all the music was written within about 48 hours). I made the decision to stop writing and focus on SFX the rest of the time. It was a good decision, as you can see half of the music I wrote didn’t make it into the jam version of the game! I started on the SFX and stayed up until 1am.

Monday

I tweaked a few of the SFX from the night before and created two or three new ones. With my remaining time I designed two levels! Only one made it into the jam. I finished my second level literally four minutes before our deadline, so there’s no way it could have been added.

Recently

After living with these songs for a few weeks I think my favorite is currently “Does Not Compute”. I love that melody, I whistle it constantly. My second favorite is “Bits and Pieces”. I can’t help myself, I LOVE ending themes.

Since the jam I’ve been working on my level design chops. Rusty and Shaun always have great feedback. I’ve written one new song and have plans to write a few more. The new song, “Data Corruption”, is a glitch/dubstep style track. I think it’s very appropriate for this game, and this is my first time ever attempting to write something like dubstep. Because the music is all about EOL and the repairbots, and it’s written on the 2A03 sound chip, I like to call the genre botstep. So here it is (and only using the five standard NES sound channels too!).

Data Corruption

Maybe soon, we can explore the finer details of some of EOL’s music. I’m really happy with what I created and in such a short amount of time. It’s rare to love most everything you start working on without throwing it away or hating it a few hours later. Not that quantity has anything to do with quality, but for comparison: EOL currently has over 14 minutes of music and Super Clew Land Complete has 9. I really hit a stride. I must have had this robot music bottled up inside of me all these years.