Hello everyone!! I thought it would be a great idea to have a place to share the music of our games and give feedback to the music composers! Please feel free to share your submission here and talk a little about your music so people can try it and let you know what they think!
I'll start! Here is the game submission I made music for! I based it on Maruki's theme from Persona 5! Any feedback greatly appreciated!
https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer/rate/3615052
Balint here! In addition to being the programmer, I was also the composer for my team's game, Joy the Paperboy.
Due to time constraints, I was only able to get one song out (the main theme). Prior to this game jam I have not made music in almost 4 years maybe more. From the way that the game started to turn out, I decided to do a little bit of research on how I wanted the main track to sound like for the final deliverable. I ended up being heavily inspired by this one game called Before Your Eyes, and the atmospheric music in Breath of the Wild.
Feeling inspired, I booted up FL Studio and began to work. I had multiple iterations of how I wanted the main chord progression to sound like, but eventually I settled on one that I felt was the most atmospheric and conveyed the feeling of the game going from melancholic to happy. I was also inspired by the friendship and kindness that my friends displayed to me which inspired me to entitle the track youfeellikehome (which is also to an extent what the game is about).
I hope you all enjoy the music as well as the game :)
I'm Jake Psenicka, and I was the composer for my team's game, Luminary. I've been a composer in general for awhile now, but only have been writing for video games since 2021. I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on the music and the game itself if you have the time. Thanks!
Hello Jake! Omg your game is soo trippy, super super atmospheric and vibe oriented, and the synth pads you added help with that trippy, almost eerie atmosphere! My feedback would be to maybe have a bit of melody on top of the harmony (the chords). Or another instrument on top? As well as changing the chords now and then! I think this can help the music feel less repetitive (Even tho it being repetitive works with the game in this case, I think so) while still keeping the vibe you went for!
@piero I totally thought of persona 5 when I heard it! Great job.
Music was the last piece I made for this. I woke up with the melody in my head and had the whole thing done in a couple of hours. I had a kind of vision of the types of sounds to use, fairly organic to reflect the overall theme. I used Cubase and mostly native instruments for the sounds, and mostly kontact samples.
Thank you so much! I'm glad it does :D
Super cool game! The music is SOO fun, love the instruments you use, I can tell they are high quality. I would say my feedback would be to extend it more, because the loop is a bit too short, maybe adding an extra section or looping it again with another instrument, or taking out the melody for one loop could help change the intensity of the song and make it feel like its moving forward instead or repeating too much. The melody is so cute and fun, I see why it was in your head lol
This sounds great! I'm not 100% sure how many tracks are supposed to be in this, but I've got some technical notes (since subjective notes often are up to preference)!
Make sure the music loops seamlessly (I assume that it's supposed to loop). I might be wrong guessing on this, but it might be a file issue as well if the music files are mp3. (in case this helps other ppl) Mp3 files often have a tiny gap at the start of the file, which is why wav is more commonly used. Using audio middleware and such would alleviate some of those issues as well! Composition wise, some more variation in the chord progression and motifs would have been nice to see! Overall, the music accomplishes its purpose throughout the gameplay and elevates the vibes.
OMG, so that's what it was! I did NOT know this!! I usually work with middleware like FMOD and Wwise, so I always double-check check it loops well, and I use Wav, but for this project my team was sharing the files on discord and so a WAV file was too big and ended up using MP3 and did noticed it has a tiny silence gap at the beginning. I thought it was some export problem with my DAW!
Another thing to loop better is to put the tail of the loop at the beginning of it! I do it on FMOD/Wwise, but we didn't use it because they are not the best for browser builds, so that's another thing that also hurts the music from looping seamlessly. Unfortunately, my team wasn't familiar with how to do it only using Unity because it would need to start with the tail-less loop, and then, after playing the tail-included loop, and then loop that.
Thank you so much for sharing this, this is super useful, gotta learn from my mistakes!
Yeah! I'm glad this helps - it's so easy to overlook some of these things when it comes to game jamming. I think even for my own game I didn't double check my entry/exit cues for a couple loops and messed them up. I believe it was the Wwise 2023.1.17. something update (some point.. I'm not sure) they added the feature where you don't have to have the tail baked into the audio file. Nowadays I just export the audio with the tail and dump it into Wwise and let it due its thing with the entry/exit cues. It makes sense that your team used the loop then tailless loop for the music, and I think it works pretty well! I haven't looked too deeply into audio programming directly into Unity, but there's quite a bit of documentation on building your own audio system in Unity. I suggest you look into them, they're really good reads if you want to nerd out a bit with systems (and breaking your game even more before successfully implementing it).
Forgot to actually post my team's game here. I composed the majority of the music three days before the jam ended, so sorry if it sounds a bit rushed! I think it was a total of seven (???) tracks for this game in the end. I wanted to included additive layers for different scenarios (music is different based on which animals you helped in our game, especially noticeable in later levels). I'm mostly a sound designer for work, but I avoided doing sound design for this one in order to avoid legal complications with management LOL.
Most of my work in this game was figuring out what workflows work best for me in Wwise and interactive music, and it was nice taking a break from the actor mixer hierarchy for once. A lot of the music thematically also shares elements throughout the game, and each critter symbolically represents a different instrument (Tortoise = bassoon, Bat = marimba, Kiwi = flute, Mouse - harp). We on the dev team joked about it being a "my singing monsters" type music system, and it's really the best way to describe it. Our programmer, Dan, was also the sound designer for this project and was the one putting in audio tags into the engine itself, and saved us a bunch of time. We wanted to work outside our comfort zones for this jam especially for audio, and hopefully it's conveyed well in our game!
https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer/rate/3629125
This game is so cute! The music is very environmental, cute music to match the vibe! I like how the music progresses as the game goes, it keeps it fresh, really good! A feedback I have is that I felt my music was a little muddy because of the reverb. I felt like the reverb of all sounds made it sound like a big hall all the time, and I lost clarity, and I think that would help bring the music upfront, which I think is good to hear while you are exploring around. Also, the music volume could be turned up some more! I'm new to sound design, not sure what the standards of volume are, by musicwise I always like to master mine to around -6 to -3 without clipping ofc. I love the idea of representing each character with a different sound; it works magnificently!
Hey! I did music and SFX for our game.
https://nannarisarbath.itch.io/solarity
I felt particularly inspired by this! My starting point was contacting a female singer from my Uni who I knew would deliver the right dreamy vibe!!
Recorded electric guitar at home and programmed some synths. It was an extremely positive process!
Musically was mostly inspired by Sable, Monument Valley OSTs and an Icelandic band called Mum
Hey, great idea! My brother made all the music for our game: You're Not Welcome to Rennville by Distant Dimensions
This is his first time making music for a game, so feedback would be apricated!
Hey! Super impressive games! One of the most well-developed games I've seen in this jam, you and your brother make an awesome team. I really like the music, it reminded me a lot of Stardew Valley, and I loved the tonal shift with the rat's jumpscare lol ur brother nailed it here! My advice would be to extend his music so it doesn't feel too repetitive, as well as bringing other instruments other than the piano every now and then, or if staying only with the piano, then changing sections with different intensity of harmony so it feels like the music is moving forward! This game is super impressive, and for his first time writing music, he did an incredible job. Congratulations!
I made all my music with a single modified ZynAddSubFX instrument in LMMS. No edits, completely improv with one recorded take for each piece. I'm proud of what I came up with :D
https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer/rate/3625198
You can download them here https://kittyking101.itch.io/more-soup
I definitely picked up the Persona vibes from the music! It's catchy and sounds nicely polished to me, and the change in instrumentation from the title screen to the gameplay is really fun (and got my head bopping for sure). Awesome job!
I did the music and sound effects for our game (https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer/rate/3568135) and ended up with seven tracks! There are a few hiccups with implementation at the moment (certain tracks meant to only play through once, music not kept continuously through rooms, and a dynamic layer missing in one of the later rooms), but we're planning to patch those after the voting period.
In terms of process, I tend to jump back and forth between different approaches, but for this jam I mainly started with piano sketches in notation software and fleshed them out in my DAW afterward. The piano ended up sticking as the main instrument since I felt that it fit well—we had a kind of "mysterious (sometimes unsettling or foreboding) but beautiful" theme going on that I wanted to match with the audio, sometimes sliding closer toward one side or the other. I especially wanted the first room's music to be more free-flowing, so the majority of it is from a snippet of a piano improvisation recording I had on my phone! The hallway music was loosely inspired by the first area in Gris, where the delay effect on the piano creates its own kind of melody, and a couple of the sound effects were also inspired by Spiritfarer! I'd love to hear any feedback on the sound or game itself :)
Hey Silver, sorry for the late reply! Just played like 15 minutes of your game, it is highly polished, good job for that! Your music on the piano fits the game perfectly, and I actually think you could go even a bit further with processing the piano sounds. Adding crazy reverb or more delay could help with the space and magic atmosphere the game has going on. My biggest feedback is that I noticed that the music would restart every time the game changed scenes, so I ended up hearing the beginning of one track a lot. I'd recommend you tell your team to add an audio manager that stays active throughout scenes, so the music doesn't have to stop and play from the beginning the same track every time it changes scenes. For when the music does change when changing scenes, you could add a little fade in and fade out between the two tracks! Good job! The first arpeggio it plays when you open the game is gorgeous!
