One of the biggest parts of our game will be having music that can help to invoke a feeling of loneliness, while still being upbeat and catchy in a way the metroidvania music often is.

With our last presentation (back in Semester 1) as well as a brief talk on the music in more detail, Marvin and I decided that we knew how we wanted this phase to go.

Essentially, we wanted four pieces of music, this includes:

• A Title piece for the start of the game
• A piece for the Apartments
• One for the Underwater Mall
• One for the Power-plant level/ final area.

This on top of possibly adding in some elements of foley, we knew this could be too much for one person. Most of the music students said they’d be making music for us in their own free time, so the last thing we wanted to do, was to give them too much on top of their own classwork. After some careful discussions, we decided if possible, we would ask two students if they would be ok working together as well as with us to create two pieces each.

In the end I contacted both people we wanted on Discord to make sure they’d be alright with the arrangements:

Getting back these responses made me super happy, as it meant we’d be able to get great quality music from two people. I had also worked with Louis over the few days that we had the Global Game Jam, as he did music for the game in that weekend-long project too, so I knew he’d be a good fit for our team (more on the GGJ later).

With this all now being sorted, we decided to make a small group chat on Discord where we can now communicate ideas and see how things go overall.

It had been a while, but we got the music back from the composers after a few more talks, One of the things I was super excited about, was the main theme. We did a whole talk, where we had the idea of making it so the main theme would spell out A-B-E-L. This was supposed to be inspired by the theme of Kara from Detroit: Become Human. There was a video by the composer- Philip Sheppard. (Below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uubz-_f1p4&t=199s

Sheppard describes that he was inspired by the flickering of fire as well as the name KARA being turned into notes, When I told this to the composer team, they quickly composed something that was just simply amazing.

All of the music they have been able to do for each of the areas is so inspiring and captures every element of the game, from location to the vibe of isolation and searching.

If I can get them into a proper format, I will try and put the music here, so you can hear them too!