Flat Earth Postmortem - Audio (part 2)

Spoiler Alert

I wrote part one of this post mortem without spoilers. I'd highly recommend taking a look at our game before reading this or checking out the OST.

Ok, spoilers out of the way - here's my overanalysis of what we did to have the music work with the theme and the game.

My goal here is to show some of what I did, but also give people ideas for how they might want to approach music in their future games. If you've come across any Ludum Dare entries that do interesting musical reinforcement link them below, I'd love to see what other people have done.

Music shift

Our peaceful little village gets invaded by aliens and dinosaurs as the game progresses and we wanted the music to reflect this turning point. I had a few goals for this - A) to synchronize the surprises in the music with the gameplay, B) to make it seem jarring while still being a smooth transition, C) to play with the idea of stability through rhythm, D) to make it sound metal without alienating people who don't enjoy the style.

A) Surprises

We knew fairly early on that the game was going to have a complete shift partway through. The storybook aesthetics felt a bit like a kid telling a story - he's happy with it, he thinks it's fun, but he gets bored and wants there to be dinosaurs and aliens instead of stupid villagers. There's something fun about arbitrary shifts in tone and I really wanted to use aggression to highlight the absurdity. We think the surprise is hilarious, and general consensus so far seems to agree with us. And if you get the chance, I highly recommend screaming about aliens and dinosaurs.

For a quick glance at the surprise happening to a couple different LD jammers on their streams:

Twitch clip thanks to @coleslaughter

Twitch clip thanks to @erikengineengineer

B) Jarring But Smooth Transition

The transition point needed to be surprising, but it also needed to flow. A jarring change in music is easy and I've thrown plenty of them into my Ludum Dare entries over there years. But a change that FEELS jarring but still allows people to smoothly adjust to the change is a completely different animal. (see the videos above)

This attack section begins by throwing a synchronized arpeggio over the last vocal line from the happy section. The introductory riff accomplishes a few things - it announces to the player that SOMETHING is happening, establishes new instruments, and provides a pivot to the parallel minor key. All while adding rhythmic spice and being a pain to play cleanly on guitar. By giving just a few seconds of this transition, people have a chance to acclimate to things shifting before I start screaming "aliens" at them. It's just a couple seconds, but without this transition, EVERYTHING would have felt worse. It feels abrupt, but it's still connected to what came before.

C) Rhythm

My goal for the rhythm was to have a few aspects of rhythmic instability that would reinforce the world getting crazy without making it too confusing. By using a couple rhythmic tricks and swapping them out in each section, nothing feels super crazy on its own, but makes the larger flow of things feel more unpredictable.

Aliens - After the transition arpeggio, we hit a section with a shifting time signature of 4+3+4/4 while I scream "aliens" over and over. This rhythm feels off-putting on its own, but by phrasing the vocals in a repeated pattern and giving clear movement in the chords you can make things feel fair more natural. If people can latch onto vocal rhythms, you can get away with a lot of other trickery elsewhere.

Verses - The verse sections use the same trick of letting the vocal melody guide things. The vocal melody mimics the happy section - same melodic movement (just in minor), same rhythms (still in 4/4). But underneath the vocals the rest of the instrumentation is accenting a 5-beat rhythmic pulse that resets every 4 bars. Polymeters are fun, but take a lot of care to make sound both clear and natural.

Lasers - The last interesting rhythm happens on the "lasers" bit. It's a bit more common of a trick - the same 12-beat phrase gets used in two different ways. Initially it shows up as 3 measure phrases of 4/4 before converting to 4 measure phrases of 6/8. This change to 6/8 marks the only place in the song that doesn't have a strong quarter note pulse. Neither of these feel particularly unstable on their own, but allow for the transition back to the verse feel differently unstable than it did the first few times.

D) Metal Enough

I'm a metal guy, that's my default, but I know not everyone enjoys harsh vocals. So my goal was to keep the harsh vocals as discernable as possible and limit them to just a few words - aliens, dinosaurs, and lasers (with a few linking phrases here and there). By keeping the harsh vocals in controlled contexts makes them feel adequately extreme without demanding the listener to power through vocals they don't like for the whole second half of the game.

Similarly, on the instrumentation side of things, I tried to keep things in the realm of "controlled chaos." You can get away with a lot of dissonance so long as you let it either be a) spice, b) enough of a focus that people get time to acclimate. I had a lot of ideas that I rejected throughout because they felt like the chaos overwhelmed the purpose. I love chaos, but usually a soundtrack benefits from the IMPRESSION of chaos instead of actual chaos.

El fin

Thanks for checking this out. This post is way longer than I intended, but figured some people might find it interesting. I'm really happy with our game and the response it's gotten so far. Looking forward to playing more games this week and seeing what gems I stumble across.