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Thank you! Looking at this project again with a week of distance, I totally share your criticisms. The tracks should have had more time to develop and more of a goal-oriented feeling, rather than their current pop song structure. Also, you are not the first to mention my bass mix and I promise to be better about bass levels and clarity/EQ-ing in the future.

Thank you for the feedback! Listening back to some of those tracks with a bit of distance, I would also change some stuff, especially the percussion part. I may yet do that!

Gazing: I KNEW I heard Outer Wilds in there =D

Great job on the music, it really hit the feeling of the story you described here.

The beginning of Open and Shut is almost claustrophobic and I thought for a second that you just didn't know where you were going with the mix. And WOW was I proven wrong! Fantastic atmosphere, great sound choices - the synth coming in where you might traditionally expect guitar feedback, just being a lot more controlled and mellow, is really tying that track into a package. Love it! 

Rumbled had me thinking of film noir and the second half screams femme fatale to me!

The Insistence of the Restless is absolutely fantastic, with the bell-like tremolo guitar accompanied by the heartbeat drum and the super slow bass, morphing into high synth notes- together with the breathing sound I was thinking of hospital equipment and that song ending carries some real tragedy for me.

I don't think I have listened to a soundtrack in this jam that gave me more story vibes than yours and I'll be sure to take some inspiration from some of your tracks. The only thing I would suggest you consider is that while synths are great, you don't always have to do all the sound design yourself - samples are OK and may have gotten you closer to your vision on occasion (you mentioned that you had a human sounding sound in mind and it came out like an organ). 

Overall, I am really glad I listened to your project and despite the low rating count, it really stands out to me as one of the greats in this jam!

Awesome, thanks for clarifying.

I saw your name on the notification and just knew you'd ask me to think more out of the box =D

Thanks for the listen and the feedback, I'll certainly take a few ideas from your soundtrack and implement them in my coming pieces. 

Another clarifying question: would it be in the spirit of this challenge to have multiple midi tracks  but send all of them through only one instance of a plugin on a bus? Like - use the pitch wheel, but have it affect only the melody, use an arpeggiator, but only on the bassline, counterpoint by midi channel... anything like that? I'm not asking to bend the rules,  just to get a feeling for the intended limits.

For fair voting, you'd also need to listen to somebody else's music in its entirety. I can't engage in critical analysis for an hour and I'm not sure many others would, so I'd say 30 minutes should be the absolute upper end of allowed time.

Thank you!

I guess I also used woodwinds, but Uematsu was certainly more rhythmically playful in that OST than I. Thanks for the comparison, I love that game and I hope to some day be able to create something rhythmically complex and still totally working within the piece like that one part in the FF9 battle theme! 

Yeah, I love the sound of BBC Symphony Orchestra, but the free version does not have all the controls of a paid library and I really missed dynamic control beyond just midi velocity. At least the "alive" part can largely be fixed by throwing some money at the problem instead of, y'know, getting better XD (and I promise to stop quantizing everything to the grid)

Thanks for the feedback, I will take stock after the voting ended and make a self-improvement list based on the comments.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll be honest - the End Credits track was the first one I made and drew most of the parts for the other pieces from XD
More movement - meaning more variety? I certainly struggled with that and have already decided that that's one of the things I'm going to improve on in the near future.

Thanks, I'll try to be better with the buildup - I know that I'm rushing things a bit to get to the good parts early ("don't bore us, get to the chorus") and I need to keep an eye on that tendency.
And length-wise I could have done with more time - usually, a track takes me at least a week, so the extraordinary circumstances of a jam cut all of the extra development time short.

I like the textures you have used in parts, like the harp glissando in  "In Search of You" or the bells in "Memory". I think "Out Past the Waves" hits a little hard and low for an exploration theme, I would put that more in the "finding a cursed village" category.

It's pretty music that nicely captures the vibe of the image prompt, but I'm not really getting a feeling how this would connect to a game, since the tracks feel like they would all fulfill the same function. 

I love your style - I hadn't considered something like "Malo" for a game soundtrack before, but you manage to not ride the trip hop too hard, so you still make it work. "One Strange Ally" is nice and spooky, especially because of the subdued (felt?) piano and I got actual shivers when you suddenly turned this atmospheric piece into a full-on waltz with distortions. That was like a trickster spirit inviting me to a dance and every instinct is screaming that their grin is just a tad too wide... 

"That Summer Night" is nice and creepy with the reversed reverb, giving nice time-shenanigans vibes. I also really dig the amount of delay with well chosen timing, adding to the time theme. 

It's a cool idea to have basically just one long piece that covers most of the story and you execute that very nicely. Like Jofes also mentioned, the proportions feel off with "The Fire Slowly Dying" taking up so much more time than the other tracks and the flute runs in "The Fight" make me think more of fleeing rather than standing your ground. In "Taking the Night Ferry" and "End of Demo" I hear your Uematsu influences most clearly. Those are tracks that would very much fit a game in the style of Final Fantasy 9. 

I think the phaser overstayed its welcome a little - I love the effect, but after a minute it starts to just take focus away from other pieces of the music that deserve attention. Other than that, I love the chill vibes in the first track and the excitement of the second!

I was hoping people would find it helpful, so thanks for the feedback. 

Thank you so much!

Thanks =D

That is a patch from Spitfire LABS astral... something. So it's a free instrument and I love the thing to bits!

That instrumentation is really hitting the arcade feeling and I'm getting a feeling of many different machines vying for my attention, without ever clearly overwhelming me or burying the intended melody. Really, really cool! 

I'll keep that in mind for the future, thanks! 

I totally love the urgency you are creating with your rhythm in Lunar Eclipse and the very natural feeling timing variations in some pieces. 

Funnily enough, even though Guiding Star is super short and structurally a lot simpler than all the other tracks, I spent proportionally a lot longer on that one than on any other track (those 20 seconds took me about 4 hours)

Thanks! I'd love to make more tracks like this =)

Thanks for the feedback. What mixing issues do you think I should focus on? Please don't say panning, I'm basically deaf on my left ear XD

Very cool idea with the meter to go with the hour, woud have loved to hear the 11pm piece ;)

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'm quite proud of the menu theme, so I'm happy you like it.

This game is a fun set of improv prompts for two players. I've used it to pass an hour of time while collaboratively making up a story about a rescue mission on an alien planet. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to play sci-fi games that are so rules light that you can literally start playing within a minute of picking up the one page of rules for the first time.