Day 1#
As soon as I saw the picture and text themes, I felt like doing some neoclassical inspired stuff would fit the themes this time around.
I have been listening to Kirill Pokrovsky’s music a lot lately, so i originally thought about doing something a bit similar to how the music he made for the Divinity games sounded, but after improvising some ideas out in the daw I decided to change over to Musescore and maybe do the whole submission as 1 big suite type orchestral thing.
The reason i changed was mostly to get better at reading sheet music/notation + practising arranging and orchestration, since I never seem to have the motivation to actually start and finish any orchestral tracks if its not for a jam, which probably stems from being really inexperienced with orchestral writing 😅.
The prompts made me think of a game that would be something like the Souls series, where the death knight would be the final boss, or you would play as the death knight bringing death to some sort of immortal being/deities who would be the main bosses.
Since I had recorded some improv stuff around some melody ideas in the morning, I started to come up with some stuff based on those.
After a couple of hours i got a short foreboding introduction section that would probably be in a intro cinematic/scene of the army of the dead arriving + the beginnings of a second part, which would be a sort of battle tune.
At this point i felt I’d got enough done for today.
Day 1 progress#
Day 2#
Didn’t do much today, except a little stuff on the second part.
Mostly played Outward instead, which i can recommend for anyone who doesn’t mind a bit of eurojank in their games 😀.
Day 3#
Only did some piano sketching and slight tweaking in Musescore since i felt a bit uninspired today.
Rest of the jam#
Had some internet issues for the remaining days of the jam so I didn’t regularly update the journal, which means that the rest of this is written after the jam has already ended.
Felt really uninspired to work on the stuff i had on started in Musescore, so i pretty much spent multiple days not really working on the jam at all.
After a few days, I decided to do the same thing i did on the last Impressions jam and change the style to something totally different, since I really wasn’t feeling the fully orchestral stuff I was working on now.
Last time i switched to some retro inspired electronic stuff, so this time I chose to do something power/symphonic metal inspired, and since I changed styles well early on instead on the last 2 days of the jam, I had thought I could do multiple tracks this time (strong emphasis on the “thought” word here 😅).
I chose some 90’s Roland/Korg rompler sounds (JV-1080,Triton etc.) for my sound palette since I personally really like those sounds because of growing up with PSX and PS2 games that used them heavily. And after starting to play some improv stuff around the material i made in Musescore, I pretty quickly got this sort of a battle/boss tune going.
Initially the track was just instrumental, with a band setup using electric guitars, bass, drums and all the rompler stuff for backing keyboard parts. But since i had wanted to add some vocals in the last jam but never came up with any lyrics i liked, I decided to go all in on the symphonic/power metal inspirations and try to do some vocals this time (also for singing/production practice).
Since i usually just write stuff down on a text app on the computer, this time i tried to actually write any ideas about the track/jam on a physical notepad, and I felt like writing things down on paper really made my brain work a lot “better” this time around and got some lyric ideas going pretty quick.
I went pretty unashamedly cheesy for the lyrics (keeping with the power metal tradition of kings,heroes and evil lords i guess 😂) and through that i got the idea for the new “game setting” this track would go in.
With the pretty cheesy fantasy lyrics i started to get going, i felt it would fit nicely in a arcadey 3d beat em up game in a fantasy setting, with the inspiration for this mostly coming from a PS2 game called Raging Blades/Raging Bless that i played a lot growing up. The game itself is a basic hack and slash/beat em up where you go through multiple stages, always fighting a mid boss and end boss in every level, all while having limited lives. It’s a pretty fun not too long game (especially fun while playing in co op) highly recommend giving it a try if you can.
the lyrics started a bit more serious, but after posting some in progress stuff on the jam discord devlog channel, DeltaFox mentioned something about goblins and that really lead me to make this a bit more goofier by adding a sort of backing choir to parts where i pitched the recordings up an octave to make them sound like some sort of goofy goblins.
After i had about a couple of minutes of material in the boss tune, I started to try and get some other tracks going, which ended up in a sketch of a intro track to the game that starts of with a main “heroic” theme that then would morph with the 4 note motif for the army of death/death knight as they would show the army of dead attacking the kingdom.
I didn’t complete the sketch, but later took the heroic theme from that and added it to the ending parts of the boss track, since I imagined the fight to have multiple phases with the heroic theme coming up in the last phase to add a bit more thematic oomph to the fight.
After adding those parts I had to think of how I’m going to end the track, and I ended up just having the track building up and up to a pause, and then have short little resolution part that combines the heroic motif with the army of the dead/death knight motif in major to drive in the WE ARE VICTORIOUS feeling.
Listening to the track later, i felt that some of the vocal parts were a bit crappy compared to others and that the production on the vocals themselves was a bit crap too, but still better than some of my other earlier jam tracks like Thorns and Aerial i did during the RMCC jams.
Even though I managed to get just this one track done, All in all i was happy, since I’d wanted to do some power metal inspired stuff before but never had the motivation to start and finish anything when it wasn’t for a jam 😅.
Final submitted track:#
Final lyrics#
You can pray, but,
Death comes for all,
No one lives forever.
You can hide, but,
Death will find you,
Take your soul away.
———————–
You can pray,
You can hide,
No one’s coming,
To save your life.
You can pray,
You can hide,
No one’s coming,
So save your lies.
———————–
Remember you must die,
Death comes for all.
No one lives forever,
Death comes for all.
Remember you will die,
You can pray or hide.
But, no one’s coming to save you,
Death is final.
———————–
So, don’t be afraid sweet darling,
Death comes for all.
You may run, you may pray, you may hide,
Just delay what’s to come.
He will come, He will find, He will take you,
He will make you understand.
You may pray, You may run, You may hide,
But you still must die.
———————–
We will not hide,
We will not run,
We will stand and fight.
We will stay here,
Stand our ground,
Death will not come for anyone.
So, remember,
We will not die,
Death will not take anyone.
So, we will fight,
For whats right,
Send Death back to where he belongs!
———————–
We will not hide,
We will not run,
We will stand and fight.
We will stay here,
Stand our ground,
Death will not take anyone.
So, remember,
We will not die,
Death will not take anyone-
Send Death back to,
Where he, belongs.
———————–
So, we’ll fight,
Till the daylight shines,
Once more,
Once more.