Videogame Music

Bringing the minimalist and understatedly chaotic world of (square) to life was a great challenge! Using a unique blend of acoustic instruments and synthesizers, I created the music score and the sound design, while also handling all mixing/mastering. Yet again, I managed to be a one-stop shop for audio, with incredible results!

(sqaure)- Steam page

Soundtrack (Spotify)

Soundtrack (Apple Music)

With a picture and theme word as inspiration for this competition, I wrote a lush, melodic piece that incorporates my own live-recorded tin whistles and vocals to tell a story. Pushing my orchestration and vocal skills to new heights, this project was incredibly fun!

Out of 196 entries, “Venture” ranked 2nd in the “composition” category and 8th overall (out of 196 entries), ranking in the top 5%!

I lead a team of 4 other developers in my collaborative Software Engineering class, conceptualizing, designing, coding, and polishing an engaging infinite runner game through several iterative sprints in an agile development workflow.

We were required to use the low-level SFML framework for C++, but we overcame the challenge with style, mostly building out the game from scratch with no game engine.

I wore a lot of hats for this project (listed above), and I learned so much about the game development and software engineering world.

Following a truly crazy creative brief from my professor, I wrote a hypothetical music score for the hit mobile game Crossy Road– incorporating the ridiculous backstory my professor made up for this project. 

The score includes 7 full tracks, where the first 4 level themes progress through nonlinear looped sequences, depending on the player actions, and a Game-Over stinger is also included.

Pushing my mockup and ear-training skills to the limit, I transcribed every note of the Radiance battle music from the acclaimed indie game Hollow Knight, and I recreated the entire track according to my own creative sonic vision– purely for fun (and to build those skills!)

Be sure to check out the ending– you don’t want to miss it. The pipe organ pedals hit different.

With its bombastic boss battle themes and lush, peaceful lake level music, this score has a lot of tonal range. Here’s a demo track for the Wingless Grove area!

I’d skip around in this one– it cycles through 3 different musical layers.

Taking a scene of gameplay from Knights of the Old Republic that had no music, I created a system of musical building blocks that could fade in and out to create different layers for different “intensity levels” in the gameplay, akin to the soundtracks of many modern videogames.

Making chiptune music is decently simple. Making music that authentically conforms to the hardware limitations of the original NES is not simple!

Following these strict limitations meant having a max of only four digital voices at once– square wave, two pulse waves, and a noise channel.

I had to think outside the box, and this challenge helped me write a catchy musical theme, arranged for both a title screen and a level area.