You know, I guess sometimes when you’re stuck on plotting out a section of your story, the best way to deal with it is to put on a 3-hour ambient album and walk in circles around town until you figure it out. Specifically in my case I had a bunch of the individual scenes figured out but the connective tissue between them felt pretty flimsy and trying to think of other ways to tie them together ended up introducing new elements of the story that I didn’t want to distract from the main narrative. In other types of stories those elements would maybe add to the world that the narrative takes place in even if the narrative doesn’t explore them much, but in this specific case the narrative is very internal – it deals almost primarily with the main character’s inner world and feelings, and thus those elements would feel less like they add flavor to the world and more like they’re meant to say something about the character when they’re not. I ended up having to rearrange a bunch of the scenes, even split one in half, cut another and replace it with a completely different one but in the end it finally managed to come together (in my head at least) quite cohesively. With some luck I can keep that plotting process going throughout this month as well while I try to map out the areas in the game itself and also work on more pixel art and music.

Speaking of music, I’ve also been getting back into working on that and it’s been going pretty alright. My usual method before was mainly to feel my way through it, making random tracks and then seeing if they fit the vibe or not later. This time I’m trying to be more considerate of the musical identity of the game that I’ve established so far. I have an actual overarching direction for the music, though that does come with some limitations that have been impeding progress. A good example is the music that plays when one of the areas in the demo is revisited later on in the game. Reusing the music from the demo would not fit the mood of the scene so a new track is required. As the area itself has its own specific mood and atmosphere though(which the original track reinforced), the new track should still compliment it.

I will now talk more about my music-making process and use some examples from the demo so if you’re interested in seeing what I’ll be talking about, all the music in the demo is now uploaded on the game’s Gamejolt page. But first, we have to go back to the beginning.

“Super Five Nights at Freddy’s” is probably the biggest single inspiration for my game but a number of the ways it’s inspired me would better be described as reactions against some of its design elements. The music in the game is probably the best example of that. In SFNAF the majority of the soundtrack is made up of chiptune-y covers of FNAF fansongs. At the time I remember it felt pretty cheesy, one particular moment that stuck out to me even at the time was the sequence where the Purple Guy dispatches the animatronics one by one, each moment being punctuated by the riff from The Living Tombstone’s “Die in a Fire” in an obvious homage to the song’s music video. Nowadays I’m more charitable to it and the broader practice of using fan music in that manner(and I suppose soundtrack and licensed music as well, now that the franchise itself has made use of both on the big screen). I’ve even produced a few song covers for a fellow developer’s FNAF fangame (check out “The Ballad of William Afton”, it’s shaping up to be a very cool and unique one). Personally though, it’s just not for me. For one, I’ve actually not listened to that much fan music. I like most of TLT’s songs and there’s a few others I’ve listened and enjoyed but by that point I had started developing my own taste in music which ended up going in a completely different direction. The main reason for me not to use fanmade music though is that using pre-existing compositions like that seems too easy. I can understand other developers who are more interested in the game development part of game development preferring to use pre-existing music as a basis but I’ve been interested in music production for almost a third of my life and this is a good opportunity to show off not only my skills but my tastes as well. Fanmade music tends to fall in a few different (usually mainstream) genres - mainly electro pop and rock and occasionally rap, metal, electro swing for some reason, etc. Mood-wise these genres tend to be somewhat restrictive when it comes to their purely compositional elements(not taking lyrics into account) so for my game’s soundtrack I’ve opted to explore other more experimental genres (which I coincidentally also happen to like), the main one being ambient music. I’ve done different types of ambient over the years, from the more traditional drone-y synth pad stuff to outright noise music but for “Vanessa” I’ve specifically been inspired by projects like Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2” and Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Music for Nine Post Cards” – ambient albums where the compositions are more repetitive and minimalist, consisting of very short melodic phrases looping for upwards of 11 minutes at a time with an occasional variation in the melody or even a whole second instrument being added to the mix. It’s a good fit for my game as the music can be pretty easily ignored and allowed to sink into the background alongside the rest of the sound design.

Simply having atmospheric music isn’t enough for me thought. Ideally the music should convey more information to the player besides “you’re supposed to feel scared” or “you’re supposed to feel at ease”. Because I’m deliberately avoiding making use of more complex melodic elements, a lot of standard soundtrack composition techniques which could help with that task like leitmotifs(having a musical phrase that represents a character, a plot element or anything in particular repeated in multiple different tracks) are off-limits for me. Instead I’ve been trying to use other, more base-level composition techniques to achieve similar effects. One method I’ve been using a lot are polyrhythms(multiple rhythms with different tempos and note counts whose meters have the same length of time) and polymeters(multiple rhythms with the same tempo but different note counts)*. Outside of the drone tracks in the soundtrack, both polyrhythms and polymeters have been pretty prevalent in the music of my game. They don’t go against the limitations I’ve set for myself while still managing to introduce some variety to the music that prevents it from being too repetitive. More importantly though, it’s a way for the game to establish subconsciously the relationship between Vanny and Glitchtrap – the interplay between them is represented by the different rhythms coming together into a more complex piece and depending on what part of the story the player is experiencing, that interplay can be made more intense or more subdued by increasing the complexity of the polyrhythms, adding more rhythms, changing the tempo, etc.

The texture and the timbre of the music are pretty important too and that’s something I’ve been trying to pay more attention to now that I’m back to making music. In the demo there are two musical pieces meant to play in Vanny’s home – a more calm and peaceful one when she’s trying to relax and a more uneasy one when the psychological horror elements start creeping in. Originally I just made each piece separately trying to match the vibe the story was supposed to have at that moment and left it at that. Listening to them again though, I wish I would have made them more similar. Despite the change in tone, the location is still the same and Vanny is still supposed to feel like she’s in her home. The second track differs so greatly from the first one in terms of timbre and texture however that it feels like it could be from a completely different game, let alone a different level. That’s a problem I’ll hopefully solve in the future but in the meantime I’ve been working on not repeating the same mistake again. In the full game the game studio that the story starts in gets revisited again and the music I’ve made for that section features the same synth loop as a basis as the music in the demo. This time though it’s used in a different way and completely reinterpreted to match the emotion of the scene while maintaining a sense of continuity with the previous section of the game.

In the coming month I’ll try to continue working on music – there is at least one more scene that takes place in the game studio that will also need its own music and I’ll hopefully also get around to making new music for the apartment scene. I also want to do more sprites as I’ve been slacking off on that for a while now. All in all, it’s been a slow start of the year but with the plotting progress I made recently I’ll hopefully find the motivation to kick things into high gear.

Thank you for reading this far, if you have any questions or comments I’m always happy see them and respond.

*The explanations I gave for polyrhythm and polymeter might not be worded 100% correctly, look them up on your own time for a better understanding.