Feed The Gods: OST Journey
How to write soundtrack?
That is the question that I keep asking myself almost every day. Someone says it should be the part of visuals, others believe that soundtrack gives the visuals it's vibe. In this post I want to break my creative process into different steps and tell you the story of Feed The Gods (FTG) vibe.
Lets start from phases I've been working with:
- References from team;
- Own references;
- Creating several melodies and sharing it \ putting into game to test the vibe;
- Find the most comfortable and cool melody \ lines from that previews;
- Expand the melodies, give them ability to breathe with additional accompanying;
- Test, test, test;
- Start from p.3 if things moved not in the desired way;
...Overall, I believe, thats fine. It would be too stupid to give up on the very beginning of the long journey I dreamed for years about... Especially in the case, were you have good results and positive feedback from the team.
At this exact point I have tried several iterations of soundtrack, lets look at these and gather some facts about the game.
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Feed The Gods is a fun card battler for 3-6 players. Enter a chaotic party roguelike where you and your friends forge your way using powerful cards. Escape the pit of doom and leave rival cultists to be devoured by the ravenous Hungry Ancient Deity. |
p.s. Please keep in mind that all of these audio files are not mastered drafts which were made for testing purposes only.
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Iteration 1: Level 0 |
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The main idea of FTG is to move 6 cultists through the 5 level tower, every cultist - is potentially a real player, who strive to throw everyone but themselves at the bottom pit to stay alive and win.
At some point of development we've got the right feeling about changing the music intensity depending on how many cultists and on which level are in the moment, from that, we generated the idea to have at least 2 loops in order to see how will it feel:
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Iteration 2: Level 1 |
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Iteration 2: Level 2 |
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These two tracks were made after me re-listening a Grim Dawn OST, I like their vibe as was playing it extensively, guitar-ish ambience with simple but intuitive melodic patterns. What I really like in that OST, is simplicity. So here I tried to re-create that as we also have some grim and dark vibes.
The next phase for us was to unify it quickly and slice for 5 intensity patterns. Listening to this now, definitely want to say that I don't like it, but as far as I remember it was pretty good inside the game except that we wanted to sleep while playing first two levels, not talking about our ears that were bleeding with unmastered loops on 3+ levels of intensity.
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Iteration 3: Level 1 |
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Iteration 3: Level 2 |
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Iteration 3: Level 3 |
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Iteration 3: Level 4 |
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Iteration 3: Level 5 |
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After several more tries and fails, I decided to take a pause for couple of weeks and to learn more about sounddesign and listen to other's composers music, also discussing the situation with friends. The good device I've received is to not only look at the game's graphics but to add something to it.
And here we have a something close that was accepted by the team, and most importantly - by myself. Melodies are fresh and not annoying, meanwhile you don't want to sleep listening to these:
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Iteration 4: Lobby |
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Iteration 4: Level Starts |
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Iteration 4: Level 1 |
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Iteration 4: Level 2 |
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Iteration 4: Level 3 |
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Iteration 4: Level 4 |
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Exactly today, I'm continuing working with the pre-final iterations of OST for the game. I think I will make the next update regarding the project around October - as soon as the game will be released and share which obstacles were met during the latest pre-release development phase.
The next post idea I have is UI story for Feed The Gods, if you have read up until that line, feel free to Email me with questions/proposals and comments on how can become a better composer :)
