Original music · Sound design
Under The Stars
A science-fiction visual novel by Dream Quill Interactive: you play a space smuggler, and most of the drama happens in conversation. The score had to carry rooms the art holds still, a bar, a bunk room, a hangar, and then get out of the way when someone starts talking.
Five pieces of the score.
Each excerpt starts at the loudest sustained passage the importer measured, not at the opening bar, so you hear the piece, not its intro. The second tab plays one cue in full, for the whole shape rather than a window into it.
A room the player cannot walk out of
In a visual novel the camera does not move and the scene does not cut. The player can sit in the same bar for twenty minutes. That makes the music the only thing still changing, and the fastest thing to become unbearable if it was written to impress on the first pass rather than to survive the twentieth.
So each piece was built as a loop with somewhere to go: a figure that returns slightly differently, a bass that moves while the melody holds, an ending that hands back to the beginning without a seam.
One world, several rooms
The bar cue is treated as vinyl: filtered, noisy, sitting in the room rather than over it, because in that scene the music is playing somewhere, not scoring from outside. The orchestral chapters do the opposite: they are score, and they are written in sections so the game can move between them when the story does.
Between those two sits "Hope", which exists in a long and a strong version. The strong one is here: same material, more weight, for the moment the scene needed to actually land.
Three rooms, three problems.
A bright commercial hall, a cramped bunk room mid-argument, a hangar the moment it turns into an arrest. Same game, same score, three completely different jobs.
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The weapons hall Wide, bright, public. The music has to sit under a briefing without flattening it -
The bunk room Close and hostile. Anything lush here would fight the scene -
The hangar A conversation that turns into an arrest, with no cut to hide the change
And the things that shoot back.
Delivered alongside the score: weapons in variations, the ship's main cannon, the lab alarm and a wind bed. Three of these survive only as the exported mp3, so they play without a waveform instead of a made-up one.
Writing something people will sit inside?
Visual novels, narrative games, anything where a scene lasts longer than a track. The music has to be built for the repeat, not the trailer. Tell me about the scenes.