Some good fundamentals:
1. Write melodies you can hum, not too complicated but catchy
2. Learn song structure
3. At start its better to stick to one key, so use scale highlighting in your daw and go crazy :D
Toby fox guide on making music (google it, its quite easy to find on wayback machine) is a good guide for music i used a plenty when i was starting almost one year ago :D
I saw this comment after I wrote my comment back to you. I agree that these are some good fundamentals. I would probably put charystuj's number 3 at the top of the list. Understanding that not all notes sound good together and learning how to write within a key is a basic building block and this is a good strategy to help keep yourself on track. I really love the first point about melodies and I personally like to start my songs with a melody line. But there are so many ways to write songs: start with rhythm, start with bass line, start with chord progression, start with a catchy lick/hook, etc. Not every song has to have a catchy melody, but many video game songs do. This is a fundamental for listeners to want to keep listening to your music. Song structure is a strange thing that people have different thoughts about that make it tricky to learn early on. Some people will use terminology like intro/verse/chorus/bridge and these folks likely have a pop/rock background in their song structure understanding. Others use "sections" and "transitions" which I think is a simplified version and maybe easier to digest and lends itself much better to short video game looped music. The basic idea is that a specific section has a pattern to it (often based on chord progression) and when you move to a different pattern, you are in a different section. I like to label my sections with letters i.e. A section and B section. So if, for example, these two sections moved back and forth from each other in a loop, my song would have an AB structure. Many classic video game tracks use the structure AAB to state an idea, build on that idea that is now familiar, and then transition to something different to keep the momentum and interest up before going back to the first idea of what is familiar. Many pop songs use the structure ABABCB (translated to A=verse, B=chorus, and C=bridge) and it just shows that there are infinite possibilities for how a song can be structured. I think the reason that structure is being offered to you as something to work on is because of the repetitive nature of some elements of your song. While you do transition which instrument is playing the melody, the bass is the same and implies that the chord structure is not really shifting, so it feels like a long extension of the "A section". So by suggesting to learn song structure, this is an indirect way of a listener asking for a B section. AB music is very valid and is very common in many of the tracks in this jam! I personally don't think it needs to be more complicated than that and I wouldn't spend much time looking for content on structure specifically.
