For the past year I've been working on an awesome computer game Artist Life Simulator by Interactive Fate which saw the official release today on Steam.
I created more than one hundred candidate songs and soundbites for the game, which needless to say, was quite a challenge :D Nevertheless, going out of my usual comfort zone proved to be an extremely entertaining and valuable learning experience for me. Otherwise I would have never probably explored the genres and sounds I did when composing music for this title. Starting from rag-time and ending up with psytrance, the compositions touched quite a range of genres. Interestingly, the most valuable lesson was something else, which I will discuss below.
Perhaps it is interesting to start by sharing how working on such huge project feels and looks like. In the past, I've done soundtracks for video clips where I usually request a set of adjectives that would describe the mood of the video. This is followed by a back-and-forth of updates and feedback until the complete track is produced.
However, with a project like Artist Life Simulator game, much more content is needed. When we had our first talk with Edvin, the head of Interactive Fate, we really were not sure what is needed, except that the music should fit into the era where the game was taking place --- early 21st century. Of course, I'm not a classical composer, but I have some tricks up my sleeve to make this work. Besides that, the game takes place in an alternative universe in a city called Nova Oportunia, so some deviations in style would be completely acceptable and perhaps even intersting.
The game also has a unique aspect of condition and feeling cards that you acquire during gameplay. The cards can describe emotions such as love, sadness, passion frustration. They can describe situations like madness, poverty and so on. For a composer, this is a great set of guidelines how a particular track should sound like. Of course, this is not as easy as one might think. For instance, how does "humility" sound like? Or what about "admiration of nature"?
The approach that really worked for me was not over-thinking it and going with whatever popped into my mind. The approach of composing varied vastly from piece to piece. Sometimes I spent more than a week finishing a song, sometimes I made five songs in a day. Needless to say, not all songs yielded this way were not great and many needed to be scrapped. But this experience tought me to create songs and do it all over and over again, even when I had zero inspiration. This is the most valuable lesson I learned and for sure helped to grow as a composer. I usually only finish a small percentage of songs I start. My hard disk is full of unfinished projects.
I felt I was pushed to my limits as I often felt I was repeating myself. But the time-pressure made me go on. I did not have much time to work on the project either as I had my daily job, I started doing renovations at my apartment, I was working hard with Mandarones as Summer of 2022 was full of concerts! Yay to our 10th year anniversary (more about that in another post).
However, after playing the launched game, I was very satisfied with the result. Huge kudos to Taavi Viikman for the final mixing and editing that had a massive impact on the final result to blend the tracks into the game as they did.
So there you have it! If you want to hear more, go ahead and get the game from Steam and enjoy!