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Hello?

Hehe, that’s a sound joke for you…

If you are reading this, you are probably my fellow student.
Which means you probably don’t want to be here.
Well, too bad, because our teacher is forcing you!

Good news, though. Even though I’m a programmer, I’m not gonna force you to stare at 1337 lines of code and listen to lame logic explanations.
Instead, I have some music for you.
Jaay.

I’m the Lead Sound for my dev group, and I got to spend last week making music for our game. I honestly don’t think I can express how exciting that was.
My school assignment was to MAKE MUSIC!

I’ve been making music in my spare time for years now. The whole reason I’m at this education (besides learning how to make games) is to get inside the game industry so that I might get the opportunity to make game soundtracks for cool games in the future.

But OK, enough about that and more about my team’s game.

Our game is inspired by Hindu religion, and the first thing that comes to mind for me regarding Hindu music is India. They have such a beautiful range of instruments that are so very different from anything that you will hear in western music.
And that honestly makes it really easy to make music, because there’s just so much inspiration to draw from.
I managed to get my hands on a collection of India inspired virtual instruments that I can use in my music program. I’m working in Studio One 3 (worst name ever?) and it looks something like this:

Our game is focused around Rebirth. You get new powers when you die, and the player changes appearance according to the new powers. If the player changes appearance, it’s also cool if the soundtrack changes to enhance the feeling of the players new powers.

For example, if the player gets the power of electricity, the music should be fast and hard-hitting, just like lightning.
And if the player gets fire powers, the music should be more powerful and consuming, to capture the destructive nature of fire.

Right now I have 3 different tracks that are playing different instruments, and in the game I’m fading the volume up or down depending on what power is active.
Currently there’s 1 foundation track that plays together with all the variations, regardless of what power is active, but later on this will probably also change so that each track is even more distinct from each other.

Take a listen to the different tracks here below.
“Samsara” contains the foundation track together with one of the variations on top.
“T1″/”T2″/”T3” are the three variations solo.
Which one do you think represents electricity, fire and ice?

About Robin Gerndt

2016 Programming

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