🎵 Listen to Two New Paralives Music Tracks! (Patreon)

What’s up everyone! Andrei here ready to bring you some music!

As you might know, this past year and a half, we’ve established a lot of things concerning the audio direction in Paralives. We made many music exploration demos, tested different sound approaches for foley, ambience, UI sounds and many more little secrets! As a matter of fact, these past few weeks, we’ve been brainstorming the details on how our Parafolks will actually speak and communicate with each other (more to come in the future 😌).

At this point in the development, we are pretty much done with brainstorming our music direction, so we wanted to show you all what we decided to go for in the Build mode specifically! I’m going to go into the specifics of our core vision for the music, how we got to the end result, our plan to produce the rest of the tracks and how the music actually interacts with the game! 

🎥 In the above video, you can listen to 2 new Build mode tracks:

🎵 0:00 - “Farewell Froggy” track
🎵 3:26 - “4 am” track sample (showcasing the day and night cycle music transition)

How we came up with it!

Our main vision for the music in the Build mode was to do something catchy, easily identifiable while not too distracting and avoid being annoying through repetition. The music should evoke a sense of spaciousness to reflect all the possibilities in the Build mode and inspire the player to come up with fresh new ideas. All of that while fitting the cozy mood we want to give to the game. That sounds pretty simple right? Well 😅, it took up until the 44th demo to find something that would really bring all this criteria to the next level. In that last demo titled “Unconventional”, I wanted to take an instrument (in this case my acoustic guitar) and play it in as many ways as possible and combine all the layers together in an “unconventional” manner. The result was pretty cool!

After reviewing all the demos created, we decided to combine this 44th demo with another demo called “Paradigma” that featured more ambient, spacious, soft elements. The end result were tracks just like “Farewell Froggy” and “4am” as featured in the video above. Both these tracks feature a main riff as the core of the song and have similar instruments such as electronic hi-hats, soft pads, and various acoustic instruments. And voilà! That’s pretty much how we got to the Build mode musical direction!

Here’s a screenshot of the many layers that comprise the track “Farewell Froggy”

How it works in the game!

The cool part about the music inside the Build mode is that each track will have 2 different versions: one for daytime and another one for night time. As the player switches time of day the track versions will switch too to fit the different mood. So, going back to what I said earlier, the “Day” versions feature mainly acoustic instruments  and therefore the “Night” alternative versions  feature their electronic counterpart. So technically the instrumentation and arrangement between both versions is (most of the time) “exactly the same” which allows them to transition smoothly. We had brainstormed many more ways to make the music interactive (more versions, divide it by layers) however, we concluded that either they were not a fit for the Build mode or they were too ambitious time-wise to do for the base game. Which leads me to my next topic!

How we’ll do the rest!

Our production plan is pretty simple. In order to produce a Build mode track, we have to make 3 different 1-minute demos first. Once completed, we’ll choose our favorite and leave the other 2 for consideration later in development. I’ll then polish and extend the demo up to 3-4 minutes and make an early mix to implement it in the game. The alternative version of the track will be produced later in the development. Once we attain the number of Build mode tracks we aim for, we will go into some post-prod polishing and maybe even do more tracks!

So there you have it! So far that has been our work with the music of the Build mode. There’s so much more I’d love to show you such as the music in the Paramaker and other game modes (which I won’t mention 😉) so those ones will have to be for another time! Thank you all for your support and I hope you enjoyed today’s post!

Buh byeee!!! 🪕🎵

Andrei

Edit - April 6, 2023: This post is now public, feel free to share it!