Music Monday 2 - Finding the Theme news - Oswald Game

Hey sports fans! Hope you all had a great week! I wanted to briefly talk about the round-about way we got to figuring out how Oswald should sound... the game's musical theme if you will.

When I first talked to Dustin about working on the audio for this game, all I could think about was how awesome it was going to be to write music for a voodoo-themed side-scroller. We talked a little bit about combat situations and he mentioned that naturally, he would like a combat theme for the game. My thought process went a little like this:

- "A little purple voodoo doll is going to swing around and shoot magic bolts?! Awesome!"
- "Voodoo music should sound tribal and scary!"
- "Resident Evil 5 had scary tribal music! I'll use that as a reference!"

Then I went to work and made this:

   Oswald - Combat Demo 1 by Oswald Soundtrack

Although this sounds pretty nifty, it's much too intense for the type of game that Oswald is. In my excited frenzy to write 'scary tribal voodoo music', I jumped the gun and missed the target. Why? I never talked to the game designers about the theme.

After sending this demo to Dustin, we talked about it and came to the conclusion that it was much too intense and lacked any sense of adventure. I went back and whipped this up:

   Oswald - Combat Demo 2 by Oswald Soundtrack

Again, a cool little bit of music. It's less heavy and has a melody to it (which helps give a sense of adventure) which is great, but it still seemed rather slow and lethargic.

We dived deeper into what Oswald's musical theme should sound like. Dustin had me reference music from Rayman Origins and Tim Burton movies (big step away from RE5 eh?). From these, we came to the conclusion that Oswald's music should be a little creepy and intense, but it should also have playful aspects that make the player feel like they're on a journey. Hopefully you'll be able to see these characteristics come out in the music I show in the following weeks.

That's it for this time, see you next week!
Evan