How I wrote music for the game

Hi all! My name is Dima, and I am a musician who wrote music for the game Reflection of Mine under the pseudonym Expect Amour. This was a very mind-blowing experience that I wanted to share with you.
I’ve been writing music for four years, but from February 2013 to mid-2014 it was more like a low-quality set of sounds. When I acquired a certain skill with the help of experience alone, the project was born Tears of Eve. He lived a colorful life that lasted two years, I even managed to play a couple of live shows. The main idea was to present the dark side of music. I experimented a lot, mixed different genres into something unified, but it just so happened that Tears of Eve became an echo of the previous project, but with a completely different sound. The previous project existed within the Witch House genre, and although Tears of Eve did not have the characteristic noisy and shrill sound of this genre, the past cast its shadow on it and my music continued to be attributed to Witch House. The track Southside, by the way, was written just before the appearance of Tears of Eve.

In March 2015, an unfamiliar developer wrote to me.

Of course, I was surprised that someone was interested in my music, and even planned to use it in the game. Tears of Eve was not the most popular project in public Witch House (that’s where the developer found me). The first version of his game was meant to be a free browser for a competition and was, of course, crude. But it wasn’t for me to judge its readiness; I was rather hooked by the fact that the game already had a consistent atmosphere, and the Unicode, glitches, it all smacked of something new. I’ve never encountered this before in games (well, only if I wasn’t trying to run a heavy game on an old microwave).
The developer was satisfied with the sound of ready-made tracks, so those already created at that time were the first to get into the game Alesta, I feel it and Inversion of Me.

But, nevertheless, music for the game and https://chillireelscasino.uk/withdrawal/ a track for listening are different things, and of course you can’t push the tracks as they are. To maintain the atmosphere, in some places it was necessary to remove the drums, because the monotonous rhythm can bore the player the most. Another difference between the finished track and the in-game one is the variety in its sound. The requirements for the finished track are much stricter; it must consist of a larger number of parts. The game track should maintain the same mood from beginning to end. For example, I had to break the track Inversion of Me into three parts and make a loop from each of them. The parts differed in “saturation” and the “thickest” of them went to heavier and more intense levels.

Another difficulty was that we had to go beyond the already familiar solutions and create something that would not have occurred to us in any other situation. Here, for example, is the craziest request regarding sounds:

The required music will not always fit into the genre the musician works with when creating the soundtrack for the game. The most difficult request to achieve was to create the composition Death Jazz.

Firstly, I have never worked with jazz, and I could not write it. There was only one way out, to sample (Although I don’t recognize sampling at all, there was no way out in this situation). Secondly, when searching for jazz to sample, certain nuances came up, not all jazz was suitable, I needed records from the 60s and 70s, and the next problem arose when I found a suitable track and was already happy, but its floating tempo was driving me crazy and did not allow me to select a beat. Ultimately, the idea was a success and this remains one of the works that is difficult to fit into the general format of my music.

I wrote all this in Fruity Loops 10. More precisely, then there was version 10. Later I tried 11, 12, but for now I stopped at 12 because I was seduced by the colorful interface, which seemed much simpler than in other Daws. However, now I’m thinking about switching to Ableton or Logic Pro. Fl already seems too simple, I want something new.
The most interesting thing is that anyone can learn to make music. There are not even technical restrictions here. While Tears of Eve existed, I had no idea what a strong computer was. All the compositions posted above were written on an old laptop with 2GB of RAM, a processor with a frequency of 1.6GHz and 120GB hard drive. For me, the proud owner of this toaster instead of a normal PC, all this was terribly limiting in terms of capabilities. So don’t say that technology doesn’t allow you to do something.

I had to constantly find some way to reduce the load on the processor and look for weaker analogues of plugins. To get rid of slowdowns and freezes, I used refx Nexus 2 almost all the time. He had a huge library of sounds, and he didn’t eat that much. As for mixing/mastering tracks, the built-in FL and Izotope ozone plugins of the seventh version turned up. highlighted any part of the track and looped it, listened to see if it sounded annoying or too abrupt, then exported. In this composition, by the way, I used a live guitar, the strings of which I played in my room:

It is almost impossible to give an exact answer to how much time it takes to play one composition. Sometimes a demo is done in an evening and completed in a week. Other tracks took months to make. I now have 3-4 almost finished tracks that I haven’t been able to finish for months now.
Despite the fact that I myself have to learn a lot through trial and error, I dare to give some advice to aspiring musicians:
1) 80% of the sound of a track depends on the sounds initially selected, so take the time to select really good sounds.
2) EQ and compressor are everything, but never overdo it.
3) If something doesn’t work out, don’t be sad (and tear everything to hell, as I do), but get distracted by another project or other things, and return to what you started later.

Overall, working on the soundtrack for a game like Reflection of Mine was a great experience, and I hope my music can be heard in other game projects.