itch.io

Thank you for listening!

Thank you for taking the time to write your impressions of each track! I had originally written a closing track, but it wasn't working like I wanted it to so I scrapped it.

The score for A Bittersweet Retirement is available as one of the downloads, and the canon is separated out into the top two voices, with the 2nd voice coming in at measure 21, if you're curious!

What a cool track! The sound design of the cut scene made it easy for me to visualize the story. And then the battle music is epic and intense. I like how you mixed up the rhythms to make the 8 count go from a straight rhythm to feeling like a 3+3+2, and then smoothly switched between that and other combinations of 3s and 2s to give us some odd time signatures that felt so seamless I didn't catch it on first listening. The odd rhythms give the feeling of keeping you on your toes without sticking out.

I love how you used the creepy minor third bell motif. In the beginning it feels diegetic and ambient, and then it's brought into the music. It made stacking the minor 3rds to get that Bb-G in the violin melody work to sound creepy without sticking out as too dissonant or out of place. All the melodies and harmonies worked together. The only tiny detail I could possibly nitpick is that my ears didn't like the high overtones riding along with one of the repeating 16th note bell sounds.

Awesome work!

Thank you for listening, it's great to hear your impression of the different phases!

I was insprired by Atomicrops, which is the best farming sim + bullet hell game I've played, and which has an incredible soundtrack in a style I haven't heard in any other game. I wish there were more games in this genre that explore the mechanics a little further and are a bit more cozy in their daytime cycle, so that's what I imagined.

I'm glad you mentioned Dissociation Delamination, I'm really proud of that one!

Haha the music and story together really paint the picture of this Goron Golf sequel. The noises and sfx are a great way to make your story convincing, add an element of fun, and bring some consistency between the mood of the tracks. Stuck in a Hole is my favorite, especially the opening sections. What a vibe.

The slow methodical nature of Standing Waves in Motion creates a total vibe. The clave rhythm interrupted that a bit for me, but overall I like it.

But I love Wandering Wavering! It has this great tension where it's a bit dark and methodical in the lower/slower voices, then fun and active as the higher voices come in, all working together and sounding coherent. The way you varied things made me never get tired of it. All the layers feel awesome together and it's just really tasty.

Ha, I recognised your style listening to this and realized you're the same person from Snowly jam :) And similar comments apply, I can really hear how much this piano part wants the human touch to bring it to life.

As a LOTR fan I love the concept!

Your guitar playing is so pleasant to listen to. 

I love the concept of using a canon to represent the complex and repetitive industrial production of machines in a junkpunk videogame. And then your second canon creates an unsettled feeling of call and response, which fits so great for the "call." I think this is a great combination of composition ideas and live performance skills.

You can really feel the despair in the first track. I really like the canon, it captures a lot of emotion with the voices. When the drums and other instruments come in it feels very climactic. Your attention to the psychological and emotional part of the hero's call really come through.

Solid composition with so much variety while feeling consistent and polished all the way through. The arrangement, the chords, harmonies and melodies, all put together like someone who knows their theory, without a single note out of place, which makes me remember you from last jam :) But this set of pieces has so much more going on, and I'm amazed at how fast you got this not only written but produced at such quality.

I liked the different phases in the second track, and my ears especially like the detail of how you mix up the order of the notes in the section with the arpeggiated triads. The final stage had such a nice feeling of being the big climax boss battle. My very favorite part was 39s-1m, especially how you chose to put the IV chord in 2nd inversion the second time (putting E in the bass line, instead of the root C again). It set things up to make us feel the Eb flat six chord more truly, as the root of a M7 chord that contains those same violin melody notes we heard with the I chord. Really solid instincts.

The only thing I'd change is that I found myself craving a sharper attack on the instruments, especially in the parts where sharp percussion is paired with relatively lazy brass and woodwinds that take agonizing milliseconds to come to volume. I know it's likely a limitation of the virtual instruments you have available, or an accommodation for what sounds less artificial. I hope you find the opportunity to get your hands on a live orchestra.

Simple but it works, I feel like you probably made smart use of your skills to create something that does the job and is listenable. I like your idea to lean into the hunter aspect of Krems with the kick sounds. You created some nice texture by using a variety of different kick tones and rhythms, rather than a standard kick drum loop pattern, and it really fits this challenge.

I'm guessing this was designed to loop, thus the abrupt ending. You've just got some dead space left on the end of your export, which happens all the time if you don't look out for it.

This is an ambitious style that's difficult to execute, and I'm impressed you made this with only a few days to work with. There's a lot of composition in these 3 minutes. 

There's a spiky texture to this that does feel just like the thumbnail image. If this were a human performance with more expression and dynamics, really accenting certain beats and bringing out some notes over others, I think it would really find its spiky texture groove pocket. I think the relatively flat nature of midi tends to make the ears meet each incoming note equally, making it sound more chaotic than it would be if the ear could latch onto those larger shapes and compositional ideas through phrasing and expression.

I enjoyed how the music and sound effects take us through a story. And that Friend's GF is named 0_0 which seems like a match made in heaven, until she shows her true personality. Personally I didn't relate to the comment about raging women, but other than the generalization I like the story concept and how it has a different take on :) than I've seen before. I hope after this boss battle we can support our friend :) in finding a healthier relationship with a less violent partner.

Thank you!

This was my first time trying Ableton Live, and I underestimated how long it would take to learn basic navigation of the software. I have no idea how the bass got panned in the first place, I probably clicked something by accident :'(

I am so going to learn to bitcrush! Ideally I would have liked to use effects to warp sections of the audio instead of replacing it outright with clips of white noise. Look out for Round 3, by then I hope to have learned how to use Ableton a little more effectively :)

Thank you! Yes, that's me, just altered a bit in Audacity.

I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have during the rating period and I really want to listen to everyone's work, so I'm getting a head start! It's fun to hear how a bunch of different people think mushrooms sound. I didn't pick that theme because I had no idea how they sound myself. The association that mushrooms are natural fungus that grow in the woods -> woodwinds, wood blocks, wood xylophone, totally makes sense.

Hehehe I liked the transition sfx ;)

The 5/4 in the first part is really pleasant and nicely used, it gives that stealthy unpredictable feel without being chaotic or overdone. And then switching to 4/4 for the Giant Krems phase makes sense. All the sounds are so pleasant and mushroomy and foresty, I especially like the subtle little tapping percussion.

Your pixel art Krems is so cute! I can really envision this game between the music and the pixel art, and I'd want to play it.

All the fast bits in your tracks fit together really well even when there were a bunch of voices, and all the variations kept it from feeling repetitive. I like it!

Ooh I'm getting the JRPG funky beat vibes! Very danceable and fun :) I like the theremin!

This pair of tracks creats such a specific atmosphere and really effectively tell a story. The almost circus-like melody in the first track make sense for :)'s jester-like appearance and outwardly friendly face. I love the use of all the real sounds and samples that bring life to the second track. 

I don't think I've ever heard such good use of Locrian. You're really taking advantage of the unsettled nature of its lack of a perfect 5, rather than avoiding it or not knowing what to do with it.

Really cool!

Ooh, I love the different sections. It starts so melancholy and then takes us new places. I like how the opening section really gives space for the melody to feel lonely and for every note to feel important. And then the transition is really cool.

This is such a fun idea, and you really made it work! Love all the variations that keep it feeling fresh.

this game balanced my chakras

good noise good noise, made me definitely feel like the only unsolved problem in society is that my speakers should be bigger. Got that art gallery feel with this up on my projector and the sound up. Like those dark little rooms behind black velvet curtains, but without having gone through the institutional filter.

To be clear, I'm not serious about the Dvorak thing :) But I'll go too deeply into it anyway, just in case you're curious.

Dvorak is a very uncommon keyboard layout used by huge nerds like me who want the physical comfort and good vibes of having all vowels nicely organized on the home row, and who are willing to endure months of mental agony in order to make the switch from QWERTY.  Almost everyone who uses the layout is touch typing on a regular QWERTY keyboard and can switch to QWERTY when needed for a game or something. 

But, in general, games can take keyboard input either by the unicode for the character, or the code for the physical key location. I use Godot and it's easy to set the input map to use physical keys, so WASD is where I expect it even when I've got my layout set to dvorak. And it'll also make WASD work for less esoteric layouts like the French AZERTY. Next time you're setting the inputs for a WASD game you might check if your engine makes it super easy to choose the physical option, but it's not something I'd worry about if it takes more than a minute to figure out. Any gamer who doesn't use QWERTY is used to having to change their layout themselves on occasion.

In exchange for this information I would like to know if it is possible to get to the 2nd portal.

The music when you get on a ship is so epic! I was sad my ship journey was over so soon... until I found the blimp, which was even more epic! The feeling of being able to quickly traverse around the map felt very freeing after the relatively slow movement of walking around.

I love how Starri follows you around, the characters are cute and their dialogue feels iconic for the genre. Don't worry about whether things make sense, just listen to the talking chicken and everything is fine, lol.

After a while I wasn't sure how to progress, unless I needed to collect more of the crystals. But the map is very large and my lunch break is almost over, and I wanted to comment before the jam period ends!

I'm not familiar with the game this is a parody of, so I might be missing some of the humor. But I'm fascinated by the genre of parody games. In case you're interested, I enjoyed this GDC talk by Bradley Lovell about parody games: 

This is such a fun concept for a roguelike deckbuilder. I'm a fan of the genre and I've never seen one anything like this, this is so cool!

The bones of what's here demonstrates a nice proof of concept, and it's a lot to get done in a short time, complete with all the UI, art, and sound. I'd love to play this as a full game after you've had time to build out and balance out out the mechanics so that you can really deck-build and strategize.

I collect stickers in real life so I was excited for this one!

I was confused at first but with Mozart at my back I enjoyed figuring out the mechanics. The art gives it a nice childlike quality that goes with the sticker vibe. 

I may have cheated on level 3 by using the floating block method, but I collected all 12 ribbons and that's what counts!

Thank you! I think this song is stuck in everyone's heads now :)

:D

The gems following is very cute, and I like the jump animation.

I managed to collect a pile of follower gems and then fall off the world to the left and down, and then I played again and brought my followers to their doom with me by falling off the world to the right and up. Not sure if I'm missing something.

Gentle and sweet, I like your vision of a peaceful star village where nothing bad happens. Combining the celesta with the piano was a nice subtle way to add that star sound and brighten the melody.

Thank you for listening!

Thank you! The star chime sound is me hitting a cocktail glass, with the pitch jittered randomly. But now I'm wondering if it would be cooler to have the pitches match the scale of the song? :)

Thank you for sharing your playthrough! Watching people discover the gallop is my favorite thing.

This was so fun, and so much for a small team to do in such a short time. Is the frog in the shop the one from Frogger, passing down its wisdom and experience?

All the mechanics were really unexpected, I loved growing the crops in the afterlife, so silly and fun. It kept me motivated to get enough karma to win.

Thank you for playing!

Simple but functional background music for a Festival City, with no rough edges or hiccups.

This is lovely and atmospheric, I think it would work well for background music of a comfy nighttime sleepy star town. I found the main instrument just a little piercing to my ears compared to the background after many repetitions. The background atmosphere is so nice and I'd personally prefer if the main instrument blended in a little more.

Overall nice track!