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WU 2020-12 - Music: Main Theme, Dreamcave, and Casual Battle!

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago1,747 words

I've composed some music for Divine Dreams! Here are three pieces, with the equivalent ones from MARDEK to directly compare them to!

I've done quite a bit this week other than the music - I actually composed that over last Sunday and Monday - but again it's been mostly technical behind-the-scenes stuff that needs doing, but which isn't really worth showing off or talking about.

I did make a dialogue editor for myself that should make writing conversations more intuitive for me than it was previously, and have this (stupid) gif from that:



The inappropriate expressions in that made me laugh, and I wondered whether to make a few similar scenes as gifs to promote the game. I could use them both to familiarise myself and the audience with the characters, and maybe to introduce bits of the story or world. Kind of like animated comics, in a way (though much quicker for me to produce; it'd only take a few minutes, once I had an idea). It seemed an interesting challenge to write a story or scene in just four sentences, the same length as this gif. It's something I've never tried, though, so I don't know if I'll actually do it, but it's a thought!

The most important thing this week is the music though, so let's get to that now.

I was expecting to release a video demo with the music incorporated into the game before the individual tracks themselves, so you'd be able to see them in their actual context first, but that's still some time off (though hopefully not too long), and I didn't have anything else to write about this week, so...

I've uploaded these as videos with the sheet music, which I know many people won't be interested in or be able to read, but I've included a bunch of comments at specific bits to explain what I was going for which might be interesting to you even if the notes are meaningless. Unlike with MARDEK's music, which was very much a naive stream of consciousness I felt I was channeling but not exactly controlling, I was much more deliberate and thoughtful with every bit of these. I've also learned a whole lot about the craft by looking at the sheet music of other pieces as they play, so maybe these will be useful to a couple of budding composers either now or in the future.

(The program I use for composing, Sibelius, gives essentially no options for customising the layout of its exported videos though, so if you notice stupid apparent decisions like sections starting right at the edge of the page, this is why!)

I was going to explain a bit of music theory here to make sense of stuff if you're unfamiliar with it (scales, Roman numeral chords, etc), but it'd take a while and I don't know if anyone would be interested, so I'll just get straight to the music!



I actually composed the Main Theme at the start of the year, though I don't think I've shown it off before. It'd play on the title screen, like MARDEK's did, so most people wouldn't hear more than a few seconds of it, but, like with MARDEK's, it establishes a melody which would be used in other tracks to signify their importance.

Here's the original Main Theme from MARDEK:



Like I wrote about in more detail ∞ in this late-January progress post ∞, all the music from MARDEK was very rough around the edges because I was self-taught and still figuring things out. That's still true, but I've been at it for longer now so I've figured more things out (I likened it to the difference between raw and cut gemstones).

Here's the Main Theme for Divine Dreams:



Like in both MARDEK and Taming Dreams, this melody would be the leitmotif of the Rohoph character (called Dharma in this), rather than Mardek himself. I've talked previously about how characters have 'mottos' (like they did in Taming Dreams): phrases that succinctly sum up their worldview and goals. I don't know if I'll be heavy-handedly inserting them into the actual dialogue, but they're nice to use for composing melodies around.

Dharma's - as you can see from the text in the video - is:



What that actually means would become clear over the course of the story!

Typically, JRPGs tend to have Main Themes that are either heroic and energetic (the main Final Fantasy theme), or melancholy piano pieces (FFX, FFXV, Xenoblade Chronicles, etc). This is more like the latter, though I was going for something like a dreamy, mystical feeling since, well, it is called Divine Dreams. I wanted to keep it simple, too, to make it easier to reuse (and because I'm doing everything myself and not a professional specialised composer!).

Here's an image of that sheet music so I can use it as the preview for this post:



Oh, also, I have ∞ this version of the piece ∞, where a weird synthesized voice sings the lyrics. It's not exactly easy on the ears, but it's not like I was going to sing it myself, I was curious to see how the words would match the melody, and this was the best way of generating singing that I could find in the limited time I could be bothered devoting to it. I won't be using that in the game, and actually getting someone to sing it is beyond what I'm capable of, so this is probably the best we'll get!



The Dreamcave section that I'm making first - see ∞ all the previous posts in the series for more about that ∞ - is equivalent to the Gem Mine section in MARDEK 2. The music that played there was this, which was a generic dungeon track used in other places too:



Again, rough around the edges. But not bad, really. Unremarkable though.

Here's the Dreamcave one:



I'd been wondering for a while about what the best kind of feeling for this area might be, listening to music in a bunch of other games for inspiration, but nothing really clicked for weeks. I was really pleased when something finally did come to me, and I was even more pleased when the outcome turned out much better than I was expecting!

The area is supposed to be sleepy (it's called the DREAMcave, after all) and mystical, enchanting, not just some generic scary cave full of monsters. I hope that comes across in this.

Area music tends to be forgettable to players, so I'm not expecting excitement about this, especially since it's detached from the actual gameplay experience here so you can't even relate it to memories. I like it though, so I thought I'd share to give a feel for the general music direction I'll be heading in. Thanks if you've actually listened to it!



This one is likely to be more interesting to you though, and perhaps more contentious: it's the 'normal' (or 'casual', as I've used as a title many times now) battle music, for when you fight unimportant monsters.

Here's MARDEK's, which you're likely deeply familiar with if you played MARDEK (with the sound on):



It's not bad, and it served its purpose well. There are many things I still like about it. But, again, it wasn't exactly sensibly constructed.

Here's what I've got this time:



It's certainly different! It's more elaborate, and I can imagine objections that maybe it's too elaborate for fighting random craplings. I wanted to make something that's actually enjoyable to listen to considering how often you'll be hearing it, and it's been a success for me in that regard. I know that I used to appreciate JRPGs with fun battle musics over others, and some rose above mediocrity purely on the strength of the battle track (Lufia II comes to mind).

I fantasise about people saying "wow, that's way better! I'm impressed!! I want to have your babies!!!", that they'd see - as I do - how much I've improved in the years since I made the original, but I know that's not how our minds work. We like what we're used to, and it's difficult to know how something like this would feel in-game before you actually get a chance to experience it in the proper context. I also recognise that my opinion is uniquely altered by the feeling that "I made this!"; that is a very fulfilling feeling.

Still, I wanted to share, so I hope you find it interesting anyway!



I'm getting very close now to the point where I can at least make a video demo showcasing the basic gameplay (similar to the Belief one I posted a while back, though I don't know why it took a fraction of the time for me to get to that point with that game!). Once I have something like that, I could start promoting, then do some more work, build a playable demo, run a Kickstarter, etc...

I've also been thinking though that perhaps I should get back to tweaking the original MARDEK trilogy for a Steam release. I worked on that a while back, and finished a playthrough, but there were some issues I still need to address (primarily getting Steam achievements and cloud saves working with it), plus the actual upload process to Steam takes weeks because of various checks and such on their side, forms to fill out, icons to make, etc.

I'd been planning to re-release that alongside the Kickstarter so then it could help fuel that, maybe, so over the next week or two I'll try to figure out how best to schedule everything.

(I'm curious to see how many sales a MARDEK re-release would get, though I'm not getting my hopes up. Probably just a handful. It's worth doing anyway, though.)

So yes, more on that next week, probably!

Thanks if you've listened to these pieces of music! I put a lot into them, but I know they're not massively interesting when removed from their context, and they take a while to listen to, so I appreciate it if you've given them that time.