As some of you may know, I've worked with Massive Galaxy Studios for a few years now, particularly on For The Warp and Lakeside which you can check out on Steam, or listen to the soundtracks I composed over on my Bandcamp. The team at Massive Galaxy is small but super friendly, and it was great to be commissioned to work on their latest title 'ARC SEED' which is currently in development.
One of my favourite parts of working on these projects is creating the overall sonic style and character of a game, something I feel that's imperitive to get right to create the appropriate atmosphere for player experience, and this is true of both music and sound design of course. Since ARC SEED again benefits from the wonderful pixel art of Kirokaze, it already has a strong visual style that I needed to bare in mind when designing the soundscape of the game.
The first step towards this sonic charcter was composing music for the game's teaser trailer, which helped me create a pallette of sounds for use in the future as development progressed. As usual, I created a few different skecthes to start with, but soon found that two of them just didn't feel right with the pace and style of the trailer, so I focussed on the idea you can listen to below.
As you can hear (and rather unsurprisingly) I made use of a range of synthesised sounds and textres, and I was pleased to incorporate the wonderful sounds of one of my latest studio toys, a Roland SC-88VL into the mix. It's providing those huge drum sounds, along with a bunch of other parts including electric piano, brass and pads. I felt this lent an early 90s vibe to the music, which was one thing I was keen to experiment with during composing this piece. I'm going to create a bit of a 'show and tell' video to look at this track in more depth, which I'll post via my Discord channel, so if you'd like to find out more about it's production head on over and say hi!
Thanks for reading, Martyn