Muffles’ Life Sentence update: Where horror meets funk- Creating spooky yet danceable battle tunes
I am a sucker for contrast. Two things that have no business being together nonetheless coming together to make something new and interesting. This goes double with music- picture the action packed movie battle scene set to slow lounge music or Gregorian chanting in your futuristic space opera.
Going back to get ahead
When I started making music for Muffles, I was blindly stumbling through the dark to find the right tone and timbre for things. How retro is too retro? Fuzzy synth or crisp piano? Should fights feel like desperate brawls or fun-filled dances? This sort of aimless exploration is how projects always start, and it’s as exhilarating as it is terrifying.
My first clue came to me searching waaaaay back through my old music tracks until I found something from ~5 years ago now. It was moody, direct, and unapologetically groovy. It said, ‘I know shit’s going down but Imma do my own thing.’ I imagined a fight set to this song, and I saw an encounter that was sure to be your death, but you’re too manic to care.
And also it was dance-y and catchy as shit.
But while the Rhodes lick that was the driving force of the song was kind of menacing, it wasn’t as dark as I wanted. This was a game set in a prison, filled with freaks and assholes with danger always lurking. We needed to go darker.
Dancing with the dark
Horror music is a great love of mine. Sudden string plucks, foreboding horn bellows- what would a spooky scene be without the right ambience? But incorporating these sorts of sounds into a hip-swaying track took a few tries to get right.
A breakthrough for me was using the Lazer synth sound from FL’s Flex library in Shatter’s theme. When it punctuated the mix, it was a wall of noise, like a snake rearing up to strike. Set to a strong backbeat and crowned with ghostly arpeggios outlining a dark-tinged melody, it pushed the song forward not unlike the bass of a dubstep song or 80’s flavored dark synth.
But was I going too far? Was this going to sit well next to the other pieces I was writing- had I finally gone too far and this game was going to end up being a hodgepodge mix of odds and ends with the only through line being the umbrella of an executable file?
I wondered until I put it in Shatter’s fight and hit Play. There’s no other way I’d rather hear that battle.
There’s a lot more music that will be in Muffles’, but I wanted to share some of the highlights from working on the soundtrack today. If you’re enjoying these featured tracks- here’s another battle song that plays during a very monstrous boss fight (that’s all I’ll say for now!).
In other news…
I’m a bit disappointed to be pushing off an internal deadline. The beta demo needs another week to cook, and while I’m excited to continue work, I was hoping to be just a bit closer to getting it out and into the world.
This post was fun to write. Getting to reflect back on writing music is a much-needed break from being in the trenches fixing bugs and editing dialogue.
I’ve learned that weekly Muffles’ posts are not a very sustainable approach to releasing content, and from now on will be doing update posts on the 1st and 15th of every month.
This is good! I will have more to say in each post, and I’ll finally be able to give myself time to sit down and write these in earnest, as opposed to scrapping something together last minute Friday morning.
Next update, I’m thinking about talking more about the Skill Mask System- the way by which you gain new skills via collecting faces. By the time the 15th rolls around, I’ll be deep in playtesting and itching to get this game out there.
See you all then.