As mentioned in my previous post, today I finished composing the music for the video game assignment. The last level I needed to compose music for was the halloween layer. I noticed in a few reference tracks that there was big tubular bells present with a slow haunting melody in the glockenspiel. I decided to use this orchestration and build off this foundation.

I also liked the sound of playing this haunting melody in the bassoon, and flute in different octaves. The last aspect that was missing to this was to compose a slight variation for when a power-up was hit by the character. For this, I chose to compose some rhythmic synth and horn parts, which was played overtop of a syncopated cymbal and tom pattern.

At this point, I had all the music composed for three of the game states: the menu selection, desert level, and halloween level. The next step was to do some mixing and automating, By default, some of the instruments were very loud in comparison to others, so I had to adjust their levels to make sure they were blended with the sound design elements I composed previously. I adjusted the levels because I didn’t want for these sound effects to be lost.

Automating was a fun challenge for this assignment. I had to study the video game closely to know when to mute certain instruments/levels based on where the character was in the game at a given moment. For example, the game started off in the menu selection state, so I needed to bring the volume all the way down for all the sounds from the desert level and the halloween level.

The next game state it went to was the desert level, so I now needed to bring the menu state volume down, and the desert level volume up. The other challenging aspect was knowing which specific instruments to add in at different moments while in the game state. For example, when I started the desert level, I chose to start with just the drums for approximately 4 bars, and then bring in the melody afterwards. In the halloween level, I decided to start simple, but then build in more instruments as the character got further into gameplay.

The final stage of this assignment was exporting the final version of the game that was automated, as well as preparing a folder of audio assets. This folder contained all the background music I created, as well as the sound effects I used for the sound design. My professor asked for very specific naming conventions for these files within the folder. She explained the reason she did this is because game developers will want to keep things organized because they will need to load all the information into the game engine.

I really enjoyed doing this assignment, and I am excited to hear feedback on how I can improve for future assignments, or if I am ever given the opportunity to score a real video game!