Posted October 03, 2025 by Chris
#music #dev-diary
~ NOTE: This post is cross-posted from my blog ~
At the time of this post going live, my game X-YZE will have been out for 1 week. This is the first of a few dev diary pieces I plan to write. It also happens to be Bandcamp Friday, so it makes sense to talk about the game's music!
The X-YZE soundtrack is availble on Bandcamp!
Maybe you'll find some other stuff to pick up in this write-up?
I've been making music for a while, but the last 5 or so years have been particularly difficult for me as a musician. After a mostly failed attempt at a freelance music career, I was thoroughly burnt out and jaded. I no longer had any desire to make music. Just the thought of making music could send me into a depression spiral. I was hardly even listening to music by choice.
I won't place the blame for my career failure squarely on the shoulders of the prescriptive, vapid, transactional, restless nature of much of the freelance/game audio scenes... but I will give it most of the blame for my burnout. Everyone's creative journey is vastly different from every one else's. Learning from peers and mentor-like figures is good, but your end goal should not be to mimic anyone. This may be a controversial thing to say, but... in my experience with professional composing/sound design, paying for mentorship, career coaching, "How To Be A Successful Composer" books, or whatever stuff like that... It's a huge waste. When receiving advice or feedback from someone, you should take a look at what that person's lifestyle and output is like. Is that how you want to live? Is that the kind of stuff you want to make? It's important to be open to a wide variety of opinions, but it's also important to understand where those opinions are coming from and where they could lead you.
Even with my burnout, there were seeds of recovery planted. I credit the eventual watering and growth of those seeds primarily to two things: 1) Melos Han-Tani's VGM picks videos, for turning me onto some really cool game music and reminding me that it's important for things you make to be weird. 2) The Socksmakepeoplesexy community's various music discussions, for reminding me what it's like to be a fan of music.
It took me a while to break out of the habit of trying to ensure everything I created fit into certain genres, forms, standards, expectations, conventions, etc... Trying to tick all the appropriate boxes and do everything the "correct" way, rather than just doing my own thing my own way. I think I finally broke that habit with X-YZE.
Given everything said above, I was very nervous about making music for X-YZE. It was gonna be my first time properly composing in several years... I didn't start on the music at all until the rest of the game was finished, though I was writing down miscellaneous ideas along the way. When I finally sat down to compose, I kind of... entered a trance... blinked... and suddenly it was 2 weeks later and the whole soundtrack was done. My passion for the game, and its strong visual identities, very much helped grease the wheels.
A general policy I had while composing this soundtrack, which I mostly stuck to, was to avoid seeking out video game music for inspiration. Video game music has become incestuous, and I didn't want to fall into that.
Oftentimes, when starting a song, I'd be completely dry on ideas, cry for a few hours, then Alix and I would go to our local arcade. I usually knew roughly what tempo/style I wanted for the song, so I'd request her to play stuff on DDR that more-or-less matched. This usually gave me the little push I needed to get out of my rut.
All of X-YZE's music (and sound effects) were made using nothing but some free PSX-era soundfonts (particularly Roland SC-88) and the default plugins that come with my DAW (PreSonus Studio One). You can check the credits section of the game's itch page (towards the bottom) if you wanna see those soundfonts.
Okay, onto some specific song commentary...
NOTE: THE REST OF THIS POST IS A BIT STORY SPOILERY!
I tried to keep things somewhat vague, but if you want to go in totally fresh, I suggest returning to this after you've finished the game!
There are 2 main motifs in the game, both of which are featured on the title screen: the repeating 3-note bell riff, and the melody that repeats a few times throughout (first appearance at 0:05). Both represent different aspects of a certain key character. I wanted the two motifs to sound both good and dissonant when played together, for narrative reasons. I also think it's really cool when games callback to their title screen music at endgame (or the title screen music is a reference to the endgame music, whichever way you wanna look at it), so one/both of these motifs are heard during the penultimate boss, final boss, outro, credits, and at the checkpoints throughout the game.
As for the melody motif... I had this distorted guitar/synth patch I was playing around with, and I liked how some notes sounded really crunchy when played together. I made a picked chord progression out of it, which is what plays right before fighting the final boss. At some point, I realized I could pluck a melody out of these chords by removing some of the lower notes and extending some of the higher ones. I really liked the resulting melody, and that's how it became a main motif!
The spark for the Data Stream song was actually a royalty-free song I put out a while back ("Future Sleek") that I've always been fond of. I wanted a riff that was similar because of its kinda spacey sci-fi vibe. From there, it was just a matter of putting the riff on loop and scrolling through soundfont patches. It really came to life when I stumbled across the bagpipe patch. I thought it sounded extremely cool with the riff.
I was listening to Kelly Lee Owen's album Dreamstate during parts of X-YZE dev. My notes list it as an inspiration for the Prison level music. I don't remember which song from the album was a particular inspiration, or what parts of my song it inspired... I just picked a song to share here, but most of the rest of the album is pretty cool. I guess I can hear some vibe similarities. I know for sure I was thinking about the siren sound effects in Eggman's first stage in Sonic Adventure 2 while making this one. This is maybe the only song on the soundtrack where I had a very specific vibe in mind and had it come out pretty much exactly how I wanted.