Behind the Music

The “GHOST MISSION: Original Video Game Soundtrack” was just released and I’m extremely pleased with how it turned out (and with the sick album cover layout courtesy of Aaron Minier). I’m excited to share it with the world as GHOST MISSION’s development enters its final stages.

I’ve mentioned before how the first Metal Gear game I played was the non-canonical NES sequel, Snake’s Revenge. Though details are hazy these days, I remember watching my older brother play it and not understanding why he wasn’t fighting the enemies onscreen. I also recall my first few attempts at playing the game myself, trying to figure out how to skip past the “boring” story bits, and getting spotted in the second game area and immediately killed. It was frustrating and I didn’t get what I was doing wrong, but I wanted to keep playing to figure it out.

Part of what drove me to keep playing was the game’s music. Its catchy melodies ear-wormed into my head and I wanted to keep hearing them – they gave me that little extra push of motivation to continue. Conversely, the game’s alert music made me tense up and feel panic-stricken. It reinforced that I’d been found out and I was in danger and things weren’t looking good. Crucially though, the music in Snake’s Revenge effectively communicated and sold its experiences. Good video game music – the music that players remember – does the exact same. Whether its pronounced or subdued, a good score stays with you and has the power to invoke the experience of a piece of art at any given moment.

That leads us to the music in GHOST MISSION. There was never any question in my mind that the game wouldn’t have a chiptune score. GHOST MISSION is a love letter to games of the past and I wanted it to have music that you could conceivably find on a NES cart from 1989. I’ve tooled around with music composition before, though never in any serious manner.  Actual music sequencing and chiptune work were all foreign territory. As with all things related to game development, my solution came in research, trial-and-error, and studying the things (music in this case) I liked to see how they were made.

Luckily for me, chiptune capable sequencing software is freely available in a lot of places these days and figuring out how to use it wasn’t too difficult. I opted for Beepbox.Co – a browser based system that offers a deceptively robust toolset. Are there better paid options? Yes, and I do plan on exploring them in the future, but when your budget is close to nothing and you’re just starting out, it doesn’t make sense to shell out cash for things you aren’t trained in.

As for the actual song compositions, I heavily practiced the DIY, “use what you know” mantra. Most of the tracks feature structures borrowed from conventions in popular music (intro/verse/chorus/etc) or in music that I enjoy. Every track was built off of a drum beat, or at the very least, a baseline tempo to lay everything else upon. It’s “Recording 101” but if you don’t know that, nothing will be in time and the song will run off course very quickly. Again, it’s a very, very elementary lesson but it’s one that I think a lot of people attempting to do this for the first time aren’t aware of.

I added bass melodies, main melodies, and bridges/solo sections after the rhythms were set. If you don’t listen to a lot of music or know much about it, it can be hard just “come up with” melodies and motifs. Knowing what keys, chords, and scales sound “bright” or “dark” is immensely helpful to this process. I don’t have formal music training other than childhood guitar/piano lessons and most of that didn’t stick, but  my point here is you can still go a very long way with very basic knowledge. To anyone aspiring to create music for their projects with a similar or no background at all – listen to more music and pick out what you like. Play more games of the genre your project is in, of the style, of the aesthetic, etc. Try to emulate the cues your hear there and figure out why they work.

Most of the songs on the GHOST MISSION OST sat on the shelf for a day or two after I finished them. I found that this was crucial to my personal creative process for chiptune music, because it let me approach tracks with fresh ears and notice things that I was too close to before. Sometimes a song section didn’t fit in a particular spot. Sometimes a melody needed more embellishment. Sometimes the song was too annoying! It all came through after giving the track space. One example that comes to mind is the song “Incrimination”, the main track in the game’s second mission segment. Its first cut was a key higher and about twice as fast in its tempo and it just felt off. I was about to scrap it altogether when I changed its tempo on a whim and it suddenly clicked.

When all was said and done, I ended up with a full soundtrack for GHOST MISSION. It’s fun listening back on the tracks now because I can clearly tell which songs where the first I created in spring of 2020 and which were finished last year. Composing tracks for the game has also been the most enjoyable aspect of the project to me. I’m looking forward to doing more music in the future solely because of the fun I’ve had with this game’s score, and I’d love the opportunity to score other developers projects in the future.

Anyway, thank you if you’ve made it this far. I know this post was mostly “basic music composition for people with no talent”, but I hope it highlights a portion of solo game development that remains unseen to most people. The “GHOST MISSION: Original Video Game Soundtrack” is out now at burnbelow.bandcamp.com and will also be available for download on the GHOST MISSION steam page. You can download the game’s alert music, “Caught!”, via the Bandcamp page for free!

Give it a listen!

Until next time,

-Kevin

Burn Below