It’s game jam time again (or better said: it was)! For the GMTK2025 Gamejam we submitted the game Space Calling (which you can play on itch.io!). One game, four team members, four days. The jam’s theme was “Loop”. Initially, we struggled a bit with the topic, but after a longer brain storm phase and me playing some good old Tyrian (OpenSource port), we opted for writing a rhythm-based vertically scrolling space fighter. The lore is simple: You (the player) are asleep, dreaming of a space journey and everything tries to wake you up. You can read more about the dev journey with Godot in Gesche’s blog.

With this game we wanted to make the music a bit more interactive. The idea was that certain enemy types have their own songs and that the music changes a bit based on where the player is in the game. So I went ahead with a really simple 4-bar 3-chord base for the whole track (C, Eb, F), which loops again and again and again¹. Based on that progression I started with a simple bass, some pads (which didn’t make it into the game) and then began writing small themes that could be layered on top of this.

Different enemies / objects got their own theme this time. The music also tries to mimic their movement (or the enemy got its movement pattern from the music, depending on if we created enemy or music first - it’s a game jam after all). During the jam we got more locked in with the “dreaming / wakeup” theme, so I started writing some short adaptations of commonly known smartphone alarm sounds. After I asked everyone in the group to play me their phone alarm, I started adapting them to the chord progression of our main theme (I also added some from memory and some from a very weird “smartphone default ringtone”-YouTube search). This was very fun to do but I could not get these themes out of my head again. The first time I took a longer break from the jam it took me three hours to not have the “modified Sony Xperia alarm sound” playing in my head. Anyway, we chose to use the alarm sound snippets for pop-up notifications during the game to distract the player from their game.

Mixing-wise this was the first time, that I didn’t just export a fully mixed master track for use in a game. I exported Stems instead, meaning that I exported one audio file for each track. These tracks can then be mixed together inside the game, depending on what is currently happening - interactive music! We had two versions for bass and for drums (depending current stage) and then the previously described shorter snippets for enemies and notifications. We also had a game-over alarm sound. Now, in this blog I have one track per blog post, so I had the pleasure to mix everything into one single track, showcasing all the themes that I have written and ending it with the game-over alarm. Feels a bit like making an OST (Original SoundTrack), but in a very limited way.

We played around with Godot’s interactive music classes. Originally we wanted use multiple AudioStreamInteractive - one for each group of music we had. One for the drums, one for the bass, etc. and then define transitions between the individual tracks. The problem was, that we needed to sync the different AudioStreamPlayers. No problem we thought and put the AudioStreamInteractives into one AudioStreamSynchronized. This worked (i.e. produced music) but then there is no way to switch to the next track! We either needed to get a playback of AudioStreamInteractive (which we can’t, as they’re not exposed from AudioStreamPlaybackSynchronized) or find another way to set a parameter on AudioStreamInteractive (which only works if it is the parent stream). So we ended up putting all our music into one AudioStreamSynchronized and adjust the volume as needed. Definitely not as fancy and no native transition support, but it worked well enough and we managed to stay under the 32 stream limit. To correct this shortcoming I opened up a Godot Engine Proposal and submitted a patch.

All in all this was a very fun game jam. Rating-wise we got #437 in Audio², which is nice, but in the end I got way more out of playing the other participant’s games and talking to them via comments. It definitely motivates me to make more games.

So, this time I didn’t write as many different tracks as for the last game jam, but I ended up writing a much more diverse and interactive music track. Godot itself also has a wide variety of audio effects, which would make interactive music even more interesting, so that’s something I want to look into sometimes in the future.

This song was written as part of Tower Up, our GMTK2024 entry. See the details about the development in this post.

As the deadline of the jam was nearing, the voices around me grew stronger that told me that “the victory screen really really could use something, anything the player could listen to, just so it wouldn’t be the only quiet part of the game. So, short and sweet, this track took me about 30 minutes to make and was finished one hour before the original game jam deadline.

I started out with a gallop with the vibe of a fanfare and added a victorious™ lead to it. I added some extra fill-leads later on to make it a bit more majestic and then looped the hell out of it. Originally, I wanted to change the track parts depending on how high the player built their tower, but it ended up costing too much time (and as the AudioStreamInteractive broke anyway, it didn’t matter to much).

Anyway, last game jam track. It was a lot of fun to compose stuff for a specific purpose and seeing all of the music combined with the SFX in a game!

This song was written as part of Tower Up, our GMTK2024 entry. See the details about the development in this post.

I started out with a Vital “fifth” bass (meaning the bass always plays an additional fifth to the tone I’m playing) and composed a short syncopated bass line. Then I added a short repeating filler and a wild drum line. The drum’s didn’t work at all, so I removed most of it until they didn’t sound like they were in the way.

So, I ended up with a rather boring repeating piece and it needed something. I searched through my Vital presets and re-discovered the sample&hold presets I made (see/hear Party Computer and Angry D&B Computer). After some playing around I ended up with the slowly developing lead you’re hearing now. I then turned its volume down until it isn’t too much in-your-face.

I think the song serves well for selecting upgrades.

I participated in the GMTK2024 Gamejam with the topic “built to Scale”. We entered with our game Tower Up, a vampire-survivors-like game, where you operate a small robot that works hard to scale up a tower while constantly being attacked by crabs and other enemies (the itch.io page has a far better description). We achieved overall place 3184 of 7626 and place 2032 in enjoyment!

For this game, I focused myself on making sound effects and music. While it wasn’t my first time making music for a game, this was the first time I actually tried to do some SFX for a game. So, in the game, you can enjoy:

• sounds of me making dying sounds (when an enemy is hit)
• sounds of keys against metal bowls (when the robot is hit)
• some small chords with reverb all the way (when buying upgrades)
• annoying seventh intervals (when the battery is nearly empty)
• some wooshes (power-ups)

While making sound effects was a lot of fun, I at some point had a bassline in mind that didn’t want to leave my head and that is how “All Systems Go” started. I then added a beat and just started jamming with my keyboard to it until I had a decent enough lead and recorded it¹.

Originally, I had multiple versions of this song, which I then put into a Godot AudioStreamInteractive, that then progressed through the parts and looped the right ones, so I wouldn’t have to “compose out” everything and the engine does the work. 5 minutes before the deadline we learned that this feature was broken (the music lagged, it was no fun to listen to and kinda destroyed our gaming experience). Luckily, the game jam got a one hour extension, so I re-rendered all the music that was originally dynamic into one big piece for each track and repeated the sections that needed repeating. Not as cool, as originally planned, but working was better than broken. This version didn’t work well for the blog post (as it was pretty long), so I, again, re-rendered the project, added some fading out and here we are.

When I first proposed to put the track from this post into the game, it was deemed to be “too energetic”, especially if you only have a few enemies around. So I sat down again and made a second version that is now playing for the first few tower sizes: It’s basically the same song, but the bassline is way way less jumpy and this version only contains the first lead, not its progression.

…I kinda forgot about this track! DUN DUN DUN DUUUUN I found it in a group chat, where I apparently showed it to some friends. And with this I also have my first sequence break, where a track with an earlier date has a higher number than its predecessor¹.

This track was written as part of the “let’s try to do something that is loosely related to synth wave” project about a year ago. Listening to it again now, it does have some synth wave elements (like the bass!), but other than that is way too cheerful. Not that that’s a bad thing, just not very synth-wavey. Also not enough tom toms. Are you even allowed to make synth wave without overloading it with tom toms these days?

The last track that I made at the January gamejam - a dramatic synth-entry! As I rarely use automations and also often forget that I can actually use FX other than instruments on my tracks I decided to make a track in which I could give my lead a more dramatic entry by having a lowpass filter open slowly as the lead is introduced. Mix it with a dramatic bass and you have a somewhat dramatic demo-track.

Short loop, which sounds like “space”! And, that’s it. This was also one of the tracks that I made at the gamejam I participated in, though it had not much to do with the actual topic. I just had fun playing around with this.

I composed this piece as part of a gamejam. One of the three topics was “heist”, so I tried to do a main menu theme for a heist game.

For this track I decided to start out with a pizz contrabass for the bass line and a shaker for setting the mood. This foundation is then accompanied by several other instruments I deemed heist-worthy. I’ve been told the trumpet ensemble gives the track more of a medieval touch, but you can’t make everyone happy at once. ;)

This time I didn’t use vital. Everything was sourced from sfz files in combination with the sfizz plugin. I used samples from the VSCO-2-CE / VS Chamber Orchestra Community Edition.

This was also the first time I did a composition with a clear time limit while being in the same room with a lot of people working on their own stuff. The combination of constant music playing outside and people talking was more challenging than anticipated. Maybe it was also part of the problem that everyone else was not composing music, so the audio channel was used for other things. So the next time I’ll do something like this I’ll either talk to the group beforehand about my needs or will bring headphones that do a better job at shielding against outside noises. It was still a pretty fun experience, but I was very much exhausted afterwards.

In my mind this is the soundtrack for a level-completed screen, where you can see your highscore pulsating to the beat of the music. The “glidy” lead should bring across a “haha, I still made it, against all odds!"-vibe.

I probably could have done better on the synth on the fake organ pattern, but… eh. Finally made some music again. :)