Blog post #3 – Music

HI! Last week I started the creation of sound and music for the game Mermaid river. Making game audio is something that I think is interesting but that I lack knowledge of, so it felt exciting to address this task at last. In this post I’m going to talk about the music that I’ve made.

Mermaid river is a game with a pirate theme, so when I made the music I wanted it to stay within the frames of the theme. I also think that it’s important to adapt the music to the feeling of the gameplay. To make the music pirate like, I thought of what instruments that would fit the time period of the 17th/18th century, And of course I also thought of the music from the generic pirate movies and games like pirates of the Caribbean and Monkey Island. The fact that our game was rather slow phased and under water could also be related to a kind of Yoga, relax, water spring kind of music which did affect the result of this week’s music making.

The program that I’ve used is Magix Music Maker 2015, the program contains allot of different instrument effects that you can connect to a MIDI track. So the work that I’ve done is the input of each note onto a MIDI-track and the tuning of effects.magix.png

The music strip that I ended up with was a melody with three instruments (two different Organs and a drum) as a base for more development. The music made I would describe as a slow and pirate inspired and I feel that it fits the gameplay rather good. However there is one thing I fear: That the slow music will make the player fall asleep. There are some things I like to try out: a more decisive use of percussion, establishing a clear rhythm for the player to hang on to rather than slowly falling into sleep as the flowy yoga music continues. Another thing might be to add raise the BPM (beats per minute) and pitch the melody.

It has been very fun and interesting to make music for a game and as it is put into the game which earlier had no sound at all you understand how valuable this part of game making is.

Below I have added a the direction for a youtube site where I have uploaded the music strip.

/ Nils Folker

About Nils Folker

2015 Graphics