Development work has been very light this week, so I thought I'd write a post about music composition.

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In some ways, writing music is the hardest part of making the game. Programming is my day job - to me, it's actually the "easiest" thing to do and the aspect of game design I feel most confident about. Artwork is actually quite challenging and I have definitely had my struggles with it, but for a lot of things it just boils down to the tedium of actually doing it. But music? That's something that's so open-ended, it's so difficult to actually figure out what I want from a song. Arrangement of melodies is torturously difficult for me, and all the music theory knowledge I've read up on doesn't seem to help much with things!

I think a large part of my problem is that I do not, nor have I ever, natively thought of my music in terms of chiptunes. In spite of having written them since 2012, I always picture my songs with other instruments and compose my music with that in mind. It's almost as though I am forcing myself into a genre that I don't mesh with all that well, which is a shame because I love chiptunes! Hell, my playlist is filled with NES soundtracks.

Dissecting apart .nsf files over the years has helped with being able to get the most out the 2A03 soundchip and learn some useful techniques along the way. But none of this actually help with actually *writing* music. I play piano, so I do have that exposure to playing existing music on an instrument. But for some reason, the music I'm trying to write is difficult to reconcile with my chosen format. I think part of my issue is that I haven't really dedicated enough time and effort to really getting my specific style to shine through. I do have a couple good examples out there: this song called Dark Umbra is pretty solid, and the villain's theme song turned out fantastic! But overall I haven't really put in the time to feel comfortable composing in my style and not a poor imitation of somebody else's, and it really shows.

And then there's arrangement. I cannot for the life of me understand how some people write songs with such ease. Watching videos of people's composition process only marginally helps, and again I think this comes back to using chiptunes as my musical style. It's easier for me to come up with solid progressions in my head, but they don't readily translate to what I actually compose. I'm having a hell of a time figuring out exactly how I want to write my theme song for the game. It's got such an amazing backbone: it begins in F dorian, modulates to G mixolydian later, and includes a section in D dorian and (possibly) a final part in A flat major. And individually, they sound great! But how do I arrange them all together into one satisfying song that sounds cohesive? I'm still figuring that out. The Slime Warrens had that issue, and what should have been a quick composition took over 20 hours of work to figure out what the heck to do with the second half. Trying to fit in this section caused me more of a headache than you can imagine. Ultimately that part wound up being cut out altogether.

I know I'm not a bad composer, but even after over ten years of *very* intermittent composition I still don't think I've truly found my voice, so to speak. Working on all of this music is slowly helping me find that voice, but it's going to take a while to really feel like I know what I'm actually doing. In the meantime I have to fight that nasty little voice tries to tell me that I'm just wasting my time trying to do it at all. I'm sure every musician reading this has had to endure struggle and discouragement to get to where they are now, and I need to remember that I'm no different!

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What remains of music composition is the title theme, an alternate theme for Level 1-9 (the penultimate stage of each level is going to be styled like a gauntlet), and some music for the trailer when the game is nearly ready for wider release. The trailer can wait for some time, but I can't really put off the title theme much longer. I've gotten very little done this last week because this is looming over my head real badly...but it can't be avoided forever! Once it's done, then I will resume work on implementing the game's remaining features. There isn't that much left to do, honestly. In the coming weeks I'll write a post detailing what major features remain to be coded.