Listen to the soundtrack here!

With the release of Feather Park, the first real game I'd composed for, I'd talked about my raison d'etre, why I do what I do. It would be a bit redundant to go with that same topic of "I've wanted to make music for video games all my life!", so I want to try and offer a different angle to the idea of "Why do I do what I do?" - why do I make the musical choices I do, and how am I brought towards them?

As much as music is my calling, the language of art I feel the most comfortable in, it's also one of the more abstract ones when it comes to representing ideas.
I'd written in my retrospective of Feather Park that I feel that "there aren't any real answers when it comes to sound design, I think - just personal opinions and justifications on how you think your opinions will impact others' experiences."
What I hadn't mentioned there was that music isn't all that different, honestly. Compared to how two people might draw a bee spy or a cozy barn full of friends, two composers may approach each of those ideas completely differently. Sure, there are musical tropes, cliches and associations that a lot of us may choose to draw upon, but that's just that - associations.

Hive Spy Remi brought to me two challenges in that regard: How do I musically represent that this is a game about a bee, and how do I represent that it's a game about stealth?
Regarding the former, I had a discussion with Naughty Monkey - the sound designer and audio implementation wizard on the game - about what to do. I started off by bringing forward some 90's stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, Goldeneye 64 and Tomb Raider (probably stealth? I've never actually played it), and agreeing that we should soften its tone up to fit the whimsy of the characters, I found additional sources like Rayman 2 and Looney Tunes' Sheep Raider.

Those last two probably ended up being most important, informing the choices I made with both the percussion and DnB loops used in the main themes, which ended up driving the music in a way! Metal Gear Solid informed additional rhythmic sensibilities (There's a part that just takes the rhythm from MGS2's Twilight Sniping wholesale) and additional context as to what the 90's consoles were capable of when playing sequenced - and not streamed - audio.

This is in pretty stark contrast to my approach for Feather Park, where my direction very naturally found itself without explicitly relying on any reference material. (I did listen to a lot of Animal Crossing, though. I wonder if it shows at all?)
I'd remarked to myself countless times during production that I felt in over my head. Since stealth is a genre I never really partook in - neither for study nor for personal enjoyment - its musical language and the way it conveyed tension was actually quite unfamiliar to me!

Drawing so heavily from existing material makes me feel a little insecure about myself, honestly. I wonder if it's how artists may feel about heavily basing a work off of something else (albeit not tracing it wholesale). Sure, Igor Stravinsky- the composer of The Rite of Spring - has been attributed to saying that "a good composer does not imitate; he she steals,” but it sure doesn't make me feel good, you know?

Representing the bee side of the game was equally challenging, in no small part because I couldn't find anything that I felt musically represented bees besides... Flight of the Bumblebees, which is clearly not something I was interested in drawing from. (Somehow, neither I nor anyone I'd spoken to brought up Buck Bumble, though I don't think that really hits the mark either?)

I'd initially started by thinking about the buzzing of bees, and trying to represent that with flutter-tongued muted trumpet, but it quickly proved that in a stealth setting, the sound was nowhere near subtle enough anywhere but far in the background, where I simulated it using a regular muted trumpet sound with a volume filter.

From that turned into "what if I had tremolo violins for a similar but less brash effect?", which I ended up using at the very end for the title sting. Eventually, I landed on the idea of the BACH motif - embedding a name or word within a melody through the letters of its notes - which B - E - E lent itself to very easily. That was actually what it took for me to finally start writing a melody, at which point the song started taking shape.

With all this in mind, I get the impression that composing music for video games ends up as a bit of a problem-solving exercise where you're brought to consider what you need to represent through music, and you have to consider all sorts of creative ideas that sometimes will fit, and sometimes you'll just have to look for a different idea instead, but one will find you as long as you're willing to consider a wide variety of ideas and learn on the job.

That last point - "you learn on the job" - is something I've been told countless times about any position, and that's fair enough, I suppose. We can't all be completely perfectly equipped to solve any problem that's thrown at you from the get-go; no one is, and that's why it's all the more valuable that we find it in ourselves to adapt to these situations. But I can't help but worry about whether it takes me too long to accomplish that, you know? Not even just in music, but in life, there's always a part deep inside me that ruminates over "what if you're taking too long to get started; you're taking too long to learn how to get started?"

I'll have to take solace in the fact that I've gotten started, and I've put out art worth enjoying. Finishing my work on the game was still a really satisfying moment - it was the happiest I'd felt in the two weeks since I'd started working on it - and... well, at the end of the day, it's just another example of how composing music is my drive, the battery that fuels me to move forward no matter what.

So... see you on the third game!