Music in Olvand news

Olvand

By Woseseltops | Released Aug 18, 2012

Olvand is a little multiplayer sandbox RPG, where the players live in self-built towns and can go on all kinds of adventures together. Imagine living with your friends in a small town in the mountains, or creating a new group of friends in a pub in the metropole you all live in. There will be several mini-games the inhabitants of a server can play together, among which will be combat based games like King of the Hill or Capture the Flag. You will be able to play against other people in your city, or as a city against another city, or as a whole server against another server. The combat works with self-built guns, in which all kinds of powers can be combined to create unique effects.

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Olvand's soundtrack is based on so-called 'leitmotifs', little melodies that represent things related the game. You'll hear these melodies whenever the thing it represents is shown, talked about, or in some way relevant.

Posted by Woseseltops on Aug 16th, 2012

Olvand's soundtrack is based on so-called 'leitmotifs', little melodies that represent things related the game. You'll hear these melodies whenever the thing it represents is shown, talked about, or in some way relevant. A well-known example of leitmotifs in modern culture is Howard Shore's soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings: it has motifs (or 'themes') representing the Shire, the Ring, the Fellowship, etc. (if you're interested, [here] you can hear a nice compilation of the various variations on the themes for Rohan and Gondor). I like leitmotifs because you can really 'play' with them; for example, when your main character is sad, you can play a sad version of his theme, or when two characters fall in love, you can play their themes together, etc. [Married Life], from the soundtrack of Pixar's Up, is brilliant in this respect: we hear the main theme of the movie in a happy and playful variant, a 'hopeful' variant, a nostalgic variant, a sad variant, but it's all the same melody. And there even many more variations throughout the soundtrack of Up (for example, during the action scenes).

The concept of leitmotifs is, sadly, rarely ported over to games. This is surprising, because games are very well suited for it. Are you in the forest? Okay, play a track that contains the 'nature' motif. Are you in your home town? Okay, pick het the track that contains the themes for 'home' and 'city'. And if we've a got a calm and more more lively variation? Simply look at what's going on for the player. The computer can do the work!

The tracks in the background of the videos mostly were variations on the 'nature' theme (because, hey, the videos mostly take place in the forest), but I've been working on much more. Here's a compilation of five tracks, all work in progress:

You hear:

A very calm version of the 'home' theme.
Another variation on the 'nature' theme.
A more bouncy version of the 'nature' theme, for friendly battles in the forest.
A little playing around with a new theme, the 'city' theme.
Music for the first battle arena.