\\ The Moonlight Path //

Heheh, good luck with the complete revamp; should be worth it though! And ah, that's cool. I want to learn how to manipulate sounds for SFX and stuff in the future.

Just listened to the battle theme. It sounds pretty good, though for some reason I feel like the orchestration is a bit too thin for the most part. I think there needs to be more use of some solid, full chords. While you've got some very nice accentuating counterpoints happening throughout, but on average it seems (to my ear at least) that there are really only about two notes being played at a time (minus the trumpet and/or woodwind accents). Anyway, that's my two cents. Overall pretty cool!

Hey, Murr!

Thanks for listening, and I agree with your comments. As I said in a previous response, most of the tracks from this thread are at least a year old and really do not reflect the level of material that I'm writing right now, so that Battle theme probably wasn't the best piece to pick for an indication of what the material for this soundtrack is going to sound like.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the thoughts and I hope you'll stay tuned for the newer tracks coming out. :)

Haha. Yeah, I stupidly didn't look at how long this thread was and thought that page 2 was the last page. Afterwards I discovered the rest and thought, "Aw, crap. I'm going to sound really stupid and annoy this guy/girl!" I'll definitely be looking forward to forthcoming works!

Guy, and don't worry about it, I'm glad you chose to take a look at any of my work in the first place. Welcome to YC :happy:

I do agree that these pieces do seem short. Are these actually the final scores, or will you lengthen them later? Do they get adjusted for actual gameplay?

I liked all the pieces, but the longsaddle song impressed me the most. I'm not exactly sure why, but it was my favorite.

In the battle theme, it seems like the strings get lost in all the other sounds, especially in the middle section. That might be due to my laptop's poor speakers, but then again, how many people's poor speakers will be listening to the music? I was glad to finally get some action out this set's music though, it's good.

Edit: Woops, didn't look at all the pages :)

Wow, yeah. I didn't really notice the date till now. Umm, I must say the music did get better for sure. I love pretty much everything past the first post, and that stuff in the first post wasn't bad either. I take back liking longsaddle the most, it was good, but there is much better stuff after that. The beginning of the March of the Apocalypse was awesome, and I like all the woodwind action in the town music. That's good stuff. Very nice job!

So instead of answering the questions I put above (since they have been answered), I've got another one. What all effects do you do to fit the music into the game? I know you said an eventual ambient fade after repetition, but how do you do that? Just use an effect on the sound file that makes it fade at the end?

Heya!

Thanks for the detailed response. Let me see if I can address your points one by one (even the initial ones)! :)

-The pieces are all short. They're more "cues" than actually pieces; they're something like a demonstration of the final music that will go in that place. Some aren't meant to be longer than they are, others will be heavily adjusted and tweaked to get them to fit into the game environment.

- Seems you listened to the ones on the front page then. Those ones are good, but they're definitely not reflective of my current work anymore, so they're more like legacy tracks. This project has been around for a long time and it keeps growing — and me along with it — so almost everything you heard will be re-vamped significantly. I too like that Longsaddle piece though, so thank you.

- The battle theme's mixing is off; I would have done that quite differently now than I did then, but that just goes to show how one progresses.

So regarding your later questions, I don't really do a lot of "effects" per se to fit the music into the game. Game music is quite flexible in most cases in that it's not an entirely scripted environment (like film). I almost never have to write something for a game that's EXACTLY 2:00 or between 1:15 and 1:20....I generally get something like "make it about two minutes or so, and have it loop twice."

In terms of doing that fade effect, yes it's literally just a fade on the end of the tracks, nothing fancy. BUT, if the engine is capable of doing it, I can make a solid track with no fading and have the engine crossfade in and out on its own, intelligently, based on environmental and player triggers. I can even split every piece into layers that can be faded in and out overtop of each other in realtime to add tension or whatever.

Game audio is FUN stuff. :P