Throw away

During the crunch weekend for Game 2 I wrote the most music I’ve ever written in 72 hours, and I had to throw almost all of it away.

Friday night and Saturday morning I worked on, then threw away, five different songs before finally deciding to choose between two simple ideas. It was mid-day Saturday when I showed Rusty and Shaun the two ideas.

idea 1

idea 2

Idea one fit the mood we were going for so I ran with it. I really ran with it. Most NES style songs are between 0:30 and 1:30 before repeating. I wrote an epic adventure of a song. A whopping 4:30 before repeating. This is twice as long as any song from EOL. That was probably its downfall, it was an adventure. Musically it’s interesting and goes a lot of places (And I’m still really proud of it). It just didn’t have the high energy and mood we needed for this game. It’s named “chi” because of the elemental spirit idea that the gameplay revolves around. The different sections of the song were composed to represent parts of the game world (We actually talked about making the voices in the music change dynamically between each stage). Now you can listen to it for the first time ever:

chi

For most of the crunch I had a tough time finding the right musical feel. I came up with idea three late sunday.

idea 3

But again it just wasn’t hitting the sweet spot. After all these setbacks things still got worse, one of my nightmares came true. I hit a writing block (in the middle of a crunch). I tried really hard for the next 5-6 hours and ended up with a blank garageband file. I hated everything I was creating. In retrospect some of the ideas were probably good, I was being a little hard on myself. I felt defeated so I needed to get away from it. I created a couple of sfx then I went to bed.

While I slept, Rusty and Shaun purged the game of its impurities to try and find the fun. With that I think they threw out the bad vibes. I woke up Monday morning determined and within an hour I had a bass line I loved and the rest of the song came together quick. I ran it by the guys and they loved it. I finished polishing the song and had a few hours to spare. Next I made a simple version of the main song for the title screen. Then I created the remaining sfx and helped with some of the code for enemy waves.

elemental

Between all the ideas I threw away, the song “chi”, and the song “elemental”, etc. I’m guessing I wrote nearly 20 minutes of music in that 72 hours. In the end I only came out with about 3 minutes that was actually used in the initial version of the game.