Original music · Game score
Three levels.
Three moods.
A jump and run that drops the player into a desert, a dead space station and an ice field. Each one needed its own theme, recognisable as the same game, but nobody should mistake the ice for the desert with a coat of paint on it.
The level you see,
the music you get.
Step through the three. The picture is a frame from the game as it actually plays, and the track underneath it is the one that runs in that level.
The desert theme is the widest of the three: long notes, a lot of air, the sense of somewhere hot and unfinished. It has to survive a level built out of scaffolding and repetition without turning into wallpaper.
The station is the opposite: tighter, colder in the harmony, with the pulse further forward. And the ice level is thin on purpose. Fewer instruments, more space between them: a room where you can hear how far away everything is.
One of them, start to finish.
The excerpts above are windows. This is a delivered master in full, so you can hear whether it still holds after two minutes, which is the only test that counts for music a player hears on every retry.
Watch it played.
Just over two minutes through all three levels, with the music as it runs in the game. Nothing loads until you press play.
Same game, different air
The trap in a level-based game is writing three unrelated pieces and calling it a soundtrack. The player then experiences three games. The other trap is writing one piece three times, and the player stops noticing the level changed at all.
What holds these three together is the instrumentation and the way phrases end. What separates them is register, density and reverb: how much room the sound sits in. That is enough for a level to feel like a different place while still belonging to the same world.
Written to loop, heard for hours
A platformer level gets replayed. A player who dies at the last jump hears the opening bar again, and again. So each theme is built to come back round without a seam, and none of them puts its best idea in the first four seconds. That would be the fastest way to make it unbearable.
And one that never shipped.
A separate commission from the same period. The game was never finished. The theme was, so here it is.
How many places does your game have?
Every one of them needs to sound like itself and like your game at the same time. Tell me what the levels are and I will tell you what holds them together.