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Life of Rixlor's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #177 | 3.718 | 3.718 |
| Impression | #542 | 2.821 | 2.821 |
| Overall | #564 | 2.805 | 2.805 |
| Composition | #587 | 2.590 | 2.590 |
| Correlation to theme | #600 | 2.538 | 2.538 |
| Quality | #628 | 2.359 | 2.359 |
Ranked from 39 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Description
The music genre is like freeform downtempo electronica reminiscent of 80's and 90's console game chiptunes, leaning to orchestral and classical. (A small amount of jazz chords make their way into it, i don't think i can keep them out of my composing it's just integral to my style)
It chronicles a generic D&D type orc who is recruited by the orc god and rises through the ranks but is befriended by a spirit in his dreams. Then he falls out of favor and goes home again.
The game genre is 2 Genres split between tactical strategy RPG when Rixlor is awake and roguelike dungeon crawler when he sleeps and is being taught tactics by his advisor Fairy being.
Each track was composed using a Roland FA-08 then exported to the computer as a WAV and a midi. The WAV file was edited to fix mostly timing problems in MixCraft 10.5 Pro Studio as my DAW. The midi forms the basis for the PDF sheet music scores via MuseScore available for download.
Descriptions of tracks
00 - this is the intro track
01 - this is his first dream when Takalu teaches him the Fire Tactic
02 - this is his first battle
03- this is his second battle
04 - this is his second dream where Takalu teaches him the Water Tactic
05 - this is a track that is intended to be used for a long time as his strategy overworld music for the 2nd half of the game
06 - this is when his fairy spirit advisor tells him he's outgrown her advice and then departs
07 - this is the music chronicling when Rixlor gets out of favor with court but gets to retain most of his spirit-power as a demigod, he returns to his home planet and serves as one of the four corner-tower spirit guards for Old Thalos (which is a square walled keep)
Theme
How does it fit the theme?
Inside my world is being inside Takalu's world (Rixlor's spirit advisor who teaches him tactics between battles) when Rixlor is sleeping. Takalu takes him on roguelike dungeon crawler adventures in the dream sequences, then it switches back to a tactical strategy game where he applies her lessons in the waking world.
Link(s) of the submission on streaming services
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/sets/life-of-rixlor-ost-game-jam-7
Number of tracks8
Genre
Soundtrack use permission
Any project
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Comments
Introduction - Heh... that guitar was a little weird). But along with the fun and simple melody, those little "broken" rhythm set an interesting atmosphere for the rest of the soundtrack...
Meeting Takālu / Learning the Fire Tactic - Yay! I love tutorials!
Battle of the Rains - Battle Time! And why does that piano sound like the main battle musician is a drunken pianist)?
Battle of the Lava - Oh, mood swing? Heh. Now that's something creepy
Learning The Water Tactic - MAGIC.
Climbing the Martial Ladder - "WHO GAVE THE PIANIST A WAH PEDAL AND A CONTAINER OF WHISKEY?!"
Demigods Don't Need Counselors - "Goodbye Spirit!
Take your piano player back to your place, please. He's already drunk all my alcohol."Going Home - "Whoo! I'm going home! I hope the piano player doesn't get to my house first and drink my last supply of whiskey :_)"
Honestly, the whole soundtrack had me haunted by the feeling of a drunk musician wandering around next to me)
I loved it!
The most fun review I had on this so far :) Lot of possibly stuffy people giving me guff for not stopping to re-master. I am a person who's more about getting the idea out before losing the idea, than refining, and my soundcloud leaves no doubt of it:
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks
Thanks terribly much for giving it a listen.
Your harmonic approach is really cool, loved it but maybe I would have liked a little more regular rhythm (personnal view) to install something before going somewhere else!
Nice submission.
Yep about half are saying this, because community on itch is producers making from DAW and not manually performing and saving :)
Synth is powerful where I can just record every few seconds and get a Midi
Glad you enjoyed it.
I too recorded and performed some instruments as I mainly improvise in my composition process but I always find that something rhythmically out is always more interesting when juxtaposed with more straight rhythm to enhance contrast!
I do really like a lot of your harmonic and melodic ideas, I think they were really cool and had a very regal feel to them, which i liked a lot! However, there were a few issues with everything lining up that made it a bit harder for your cool compositional choices to stand out as much as they could have; reading through the comments I can tell that the choice to be more freeform and not quantize the music was seemingly purposeful, and while I respect that and encourage people to branch out sometimes it felt like even in the free form nature parts that probably could have lined up to match each other a bit more didnt (I especially noticed this with the drums in Battle Of The Rains and Introduction). My point being, while I think you had a creative approach in your choice to go a more freeform direction, I still think some of those finer details are things you will want to watch out for when you attempt a naturally harder to arrange style, which is one of the main challenges with doing more free form work.
That being said, I can still tell you have a very strong ear for the actual writing part, and if you played all this yourself thats also really impressive! This is just a bit of a harsher critique because you chose an approach that I think naturally is a lot harder, and i wanted to direct my feedback in a way that would help you the most if you choose to tackle this again. Keep it up!
Thank you for your candid comments :) I'm just kind of wedged between work and my side music. Moebius Cul-De-Sac (#CCIV) proves I am on occasion able to grind layering against Jazz for a full six or seven minutes of a loop and soldier it out but yeah this time since the assignment was a truly open assignment I went with creativity -first-.
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/moebius-cul-de-sac
or try Spittin' Game (CLXXXIX):
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/spittin-game
or This is Making me Positively Truculent (CLXX):
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/this-is-making-me-positively-truculent
so I -can- do loops its just...for the maiden itch.io we went This Way, lol.
I don't often use pre-rhythm-patterns but We'll Just Start The War From Here (CLXXX) was my one House track so far:
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/well-just-start-the-war-from-here
so it's possible....to get me to regularize I just wanted to get that out there.
Takes longer though!
Again super many thanks for your review. Glad you had fun.
The two different versions of Wah-Wah-Walk (CCLIX) and (CCLVIII) show me actively trying to pace my rhythm on the slower one.
Just as a working example.
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/wah-wah-walk-fast-timing-guitar-predominan...
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/wah-wah-walk
the faster of these was so successful that it was my first strike against me from Spotify claiming I'd used robotted streams! haw.
I applaud you for essentially going fully organic and essentially fully performing this work. I think you could have probably taken some more time to dial in the mix, quantize, etc, but your harmonic language and use of texture keeps things interesting throughout. Nice job!
i might just not be a fan of the genre, but this feels really messy. the mixing isn't great on a lot of these tracks. the hand-played (i'm assuming) keyboard always seems to be the most upfront in every mix, with the other instruments far behind it, making it sound like each song is just a keyboard solo performance. your playing isn't bad by any means, in fact it's really really good, i think this soundtrack just suffers the most from the mixing. love the experimentation with the genre though, if you perfect the mixing you could really be on to something here. the story is also pretty interesting.
The Roland sound is recognizable, very beautiful and warm. I would have mixed it a bit better with the other sounds, which are a bit low in comparison. The arrangements are also interesting, but I would have used a broader range of timbres. It's nice that you wrote it on the keyboard, but I would have had the synth play a melody, perhaps layered with other instruments, and assigned the harmony to yet others. In other words, as if you were transcribing a piece from piano to orchestra. I think that way, the arrangements would have gained even more value. ☺️
Occasionally a real musician will pop me on the head and remind me that there are professionals amongst the submitters :)
I do cheat a bit by copying unison over to the other instruments. Time permitting I will break things out but it's hit and miss for a bedroom producer who does things off the cuff at the same time as working a 9-5.
I am sure, that if i did a game project on Itch that went into months in length or with a degree of strictness, I'd be better behaved (almost) immediately.
For those that have time to thumb through the Soundcloud history prior to me coming to itch... (which isn't most of us) around 5-10% of my things over there of the 320 pieces so far have enough rigor to pass muster.
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks
I -can- do these things it's just a question of energy level and time. My output is rather up and down. But all the same glad you had some fun reviewing this one.
No problem, I completely understand time constraints, and they need to be considered when evaluating work because we all had only a week to write music, which is already limiting. But it’s something you have to get used to in this field. Anyway, if you have time, try to continue your compositions because I think they have great potential. As soon as I have a bit more time, I'll gladly listen to your tracks on SoundCloud!
What an experience, really unique trip, experimental and interesting, I can imagine you in your music bubble and just flowing with your keyboard and your world and thats really satisfaying. They fit very well with the pics!
Well done!
Really well done, especially if it's all being played out by hand! This album gave me strong Jun Fukamachi vibes which is always a good thing. I personally like the mix, it gives the music a really authentic feel that you just don't get nowadays. I gotta know how you did these chord progressions, they are so unorthodox and beautiful. Great work! (Water Tactic is my favorite but it was hard to choose.)
Glad you enjoyed it.
I -can- step record and quantize on the synth i just....often times don't and didn't for my first Itch outing :)
(for which see : Arandulia's Lament)
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/arandulias-lament
my track list over there is kind of a complete record of how i slowly climbed beyond my one year of piano lessons to teach myself advanced keyboarding by the bootstraps (with the sequencer -in- it, you don't have to hold the stuff all in your head anymore)
I'll tell you a little bit of that is just tunneling-forward first with manual performance, daring myself to do chords that are barely in my ability limit, say going 3 seconds then going "ok save" or if i know i have a clear concept but i have to dial the tempo dial on the synth from 120bpm down to 80 or even 60, then back up to get it right. At length hearing my own composition enough times I can then play (some of) the constructions at full speed. But often it only took 1 or 2 takes anyway.
Okay, this was an absolute audio adventure xD
I think the biggest issue this soundtrack overall faced was mixing/mastering. Some instruments totally overpowered the rest of the song, and some songs were relatively quite different in volumes levels from each other, which takes away from the cohesion of an OST. Overall, really enjoyed listening through the songs, and that Introduction definitely had me raising eyebrows to new levels. Zugzug
it's a similar story all down the comments this Jam because I am coming in rookie from general Soundcloud prior to itch and manually performing the stuff on a synth with an inbuilt sequencer and just hitting save, then exporting MIDI/wav
Yeah the recording level will be all over
Meeting a calibration phase where I am slamming into the fact that you folks are (most of you) seriously building in a DAW by other slower methods element by element.
My slant hitherto is more getting a thing produced than refinement (and that will need to be refined...)
But it was good to jump in and see itch's culture as a preliminary!
Liked this one a lot.
Love the way you've taken the sound and feel of a classic chiptune soundtrack and then turned it on it's head and made it sound very experimental. I think that really fits the narrative you described of having it focus on what would usually be a generic enemy or antagonist.
Some great use of recurring motifs and very nice synth sounds.
I did think the balance between instruments was a bit off in a couple of places and some tracks were noticeably at quite a different volume level to others but it didn't hold it back too much.
yeah that's consistent all through my soundcloud journey prior to coming to Itch that i've been more about shoving the compositions out before i lose what my idea was, rather than long refinement:
the below is kind of a continuous fossil record of the whole run from Jan 2023 (for those brave enough to scroll that far)....
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks
glad you had fun reviewing!
makes sense!
Thank you I'll be sure to check it out! :)
Your music is so full of creativity. Outstanding work. (love the crazy chord and tempo changes!)
I don't know if you have a body of stuff on soundcloud already (mentioning because we're in the same cohort that joined 55 ish days ago for OST Jam 7) but what i did was, having figured out the project creation process to submit, I realized hey i can load my albums as projects. So from Rhombus to NovemDeka they're all here (and you might do the same). Just sharing what i figured out.
Glad you enjoyed my submission!
Very chaotic and experimental, one of the most unique and hectic soundtracks on here so far! You took some very intruiging rhythmic choices and chord voicings, I can hear a lot of jazz influence in your arrangement style. An unorthodox approach on game OSTs, very fun to listen to as I never know where it's taking me.
It's definitely heavily dependent on game context/genre, as I would have a hard time while trying to analyze the music I'm playing + strategizing.
Otherwise, keep riffing on!
Glad you enjoyed, yeah I am coming into itch.io for the first time, doing manual synth performances on the keyboard with a workstation so powerful that it has an inbuild sequencer (the Roland FA-08) ...and encountering commenters who are painstakingly building their stuff in the DAW a note at a time, so it's a culture clash and a calibration phase for me :)
my soundcloud tracks list since Jan 2023 has a more comprehensive story of how I traveled to this point in skill
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks
Glad you had a good time rating this one.
Probably the most insane take I've listened to up until now! WOW this is so so rich and dense, amazing!
Okay this soundtrack is REALLY out there, synthesizer + acoustic instruments layered on top of each other with crazy jazz harmonies. This feels like it was written and performed by a time traveling bard, who came back to his original time with a synthesizer and played it to flabbergasted audience. It's really chaotic and weird, but the most important thing is that you embraced the weirdness and performed it with confidence and gusto. In a vacuum it's not my cup of tea, but I'm absolutely sold on the performance.
Dude, I am in love with all the places you've taken the leitmotif throughout the soundtrack. Your chordal knowledge is off the charts. I had so much fun listening to each track, they're so unique, I haven't heard anything like it! Please please please keep doing what you're doing, I'm all in! So much fun!
Yeah i'm heavy in the jazz space, I loaded all my soundcloud(and later other platform-thru-distrokid) stuff from last year and into this year, into a bunch of project pages just to as it were "move into" itch.io
So there's plenty more of that with having done 309 or so pieces before the Jam (since 1/24/2023). I posted youtube links in the trailer/watchalong space of each page.
Glad to have an upbeat review since i know i'm going to be calibrating against all the folk that were sequencing their stuff the hard way one note at a time. I -can- do quantized step recording in the Roland where i just 'type' notes (see: Arandulia's Lament) it just didn't occur to me -this- one time as the first Jam. so I leaned hard on syncopation like usual.
It’s certainly experimental! In the best way!
The opening piece feels like multiple pieces in a way. It’s regal and aggressive at the same time, capturing that vibe quite well.
The synth riffs over the harpsichord were interesting, especially with how often they’d he a little off from another in sound. Sick chord progressions though. It absolutely does get that 80/90s feel down.
Guessing this is a battle tune. Interesting choice to have the aggressive parts come in and out, it creates a really interesting parallel between softer sounds and extremely aggressive riffing.
Love the synths in this, they’re a little unpredictable and the chords don’t often resolve where the listener would expect them to. It still rises so well which is great.
A boss theme? Just as chaotic as one would expect it to be. Fantastic.
Another boss theme! Yesss this one is also fun!
Listened to the rest of the soundtrack and think it is great! Lots of unusual sounds that I would love to hear more in video games. Very jazzy, very excellent body of work. Lots of variety that I could hear being in the cutscenes of the games as opposed to the main background music that would be playing. Love your chords, by the way.
Yeah this is my on-ramp coming into itch.io after slugging it out on SoundCloud from January 2023 and making 309 pieces over there first (and moving to Distrokid and the rest of the platforms in May of 23). Youtube links to all those 'albums' are in the itch.io project pages i hastily made for all my stuff after submitting Rixlor.
And so of course I am slamming into "oh gaw everyone is super carefully sequencing their work professionally" and im just a goober with a synth that is so powerful where i can just manually go bleb-bleb-bleb and save and export a midi plus a wav. Which i'm fairly good at that or the people on Repost Exchange would have told me to stuff my trash long ago. When you can save to an inbuilt sequencer you can teach yourself advanced piano by the bootstraps (I have 1 year of piano from 1985-86),
So I am pleased to come through your review mostly unscathed! Glad you had fun.
the Roland is -capable- of Step recording where i can just -type- regularized 16th notes (or needed interval) for which see: Arandulia's Lament which i just did yesterday.... I just....didn't think to do it for this jam :)
0) ooo regal and maybe a little hint of nefariousness or suspicion with the timing gradients (or maybe it was just in free time and I'm reading too far into it). I think that captures impressions from the artwork nicely!
1) what a pleasant blend of classical riffing and harpsichord with the 80s pad-y synth sound. Nicely evocative of like 80s/90s video game "rise for the royal court" kinda scenes
2) the slides, the soft clippiness. The classical harmonies feel like they start to borrow a little more from rockier genres here which is a nice distinction for battling presumably the first distinct foe
3) aww yeah it definitely starts to feel like Shadow Universe Elton John is puppeteering the villains we're battling which I mean as a compliment. I like how big it feels when the crashes start going crazy (maybe wish they took up more of the volume budget). I also love how relentless the progressions felt going into the latter half
4) from the first bar I could already tell I was in for some intrigue and fun
5) oh even more of a big initial impression than track 4. The formant filter synth and the traditional piano sound blend together scary well. Also a ton of nice building and falling feelings evoked. "Climbing" definitely fits but this could be an entire narrative by itself. I particularly love the one motif with the little run down the scale (at, e.g., 3:00). Favorite track
6) I like the sense of triumph coming in after the trials of the last tracks
7) Huh with the most traditional sounds at the forefront for the "going home" finale, I wonder if the synth elements were meant to represent a corrupting influence? I'll have to go back and click around to see how they line up with the other feelings
overall thoughts: generally very compelling progressions and fun melodies and dynamic compositions and rad synths/sounds
yeah in 7) its like hey business as usual but then wuyuuuuahohah political intrigue, he's falling from grace so he has to Go Home to his backwater planet and take an underemployed job at Old Thalos
kind of where i was fishing. Glad you liked it!
in the soundcloud list over on SC the individual track arts give a little more visual clue
Very jazzy, and with a good dose of those stanky chords too! But I think these tracks can get a bit distracting considering that it is a strategy game, I see these songs work more like in cutscenes with how energetic they were.
Yeah the only thing -stable- enough to be a loop is Climbing the Martial Ladder.
I do all this with manual keyboarding performance which I'm learning really fast most of the rest of y'all are very patiently and with discipline, using a DAW to build note by note. So folks doing lock-step rhythm are a little aghast at syncopation in my stuff. Being just arrived to itch.io from the outside I was bound to need to do some calibration.
Thanks for the honesty of your comment :)
--D
All right very experimental especially on the ryhtms, it feels like every song is many songs, its very chaotic, I don,t know if that was the goal but I think with some order in can work pretty well.
They were heavy preaching leitmotifs so i went by my usual world-building standard that your track needs to sound like it's coming in from Somewhere Else and also going to a Different Somewhere Else :)
I do appreciate the honesty though :) Thanks much
Introduction - Haha that rhythm is crazy. I like it. Like the chord progression.
Meeting Takālu / Learning the Fire Tactic: Love how the mario cadence suddenly gives a break from the experimental rhythm lol.
Battle of the Rains: Cool synths in the back.
Battle of the Lava: The least crazy rhythm so far. I can tell you love jazz lmao
Learning the Water Tactic: Used to the rhythms at this point haha.
Climbing the Martial Ladder: These chords are my favorite in the ost.
Demigods Don't Need Counselors: Time to turn this into a gospel track
Going Home: The tamest track here. Cool changes.
Definitely 5 stars for creativity, cool experimental vibes!