Scrap Guilds Audio Dev Log, 10-3-22

Jamie here, and today I'm talking about Scrap Guilds by Attack Wagon Games!

Scrap Guilds is a Play to Earn top-down sci-fi fantasy MMO (not RPG) - and I'm super enjoying composing the soundtrack! Often technology is seen as "magic" until it's understood - in this universe magic is the technology. How does that affect the music? You'll see when we launch our alpha in the near future! Check out Attack Wagon Games!

Today's post is on the "Arenas" music, in a track called "Night Hunt". It's a work-in-progress, but most of the components are there (art is never finished, only abandoned!)

This marks a departure from my usual process, which is to score the track in a notation program, export .mid and import in Reaper, assign instruments, finesse performances, and then export .wav to Adobe Audition, where I mix and ultimately master the tracks. For this one, I worked directly in Reaper to perform the tracks from the get-go. Actually the first thing I did was write about two minutes of a possible track in Sibelius and send it as an example, but we agreed that it wasn't the right vibe (maybe one day I'll rework that demo into a full track!). So this Arena theme initially did not have a lot in common (motivically) with other Scrap Guilds tracks, as I was building it out of "whatever came out of my keyboard".

This is Mario, poking his head out from under our shower curtain. He contributed nothing to "Night Hunt" and really hasn't done much for Scrap Guilds as a whole. However, he's the cat-son of the composer so he gets to do what he wants. (Is this funny? Or just weird?)

Back to the Arena: the goal for this music is to be mysteriously intense - danger could be around every corner. The track is adaptive, so different layers will play depending on the level of danger the player is in or near. The track in the video below has all four layers going because....that's the most fun version!

Implementation, as with everything on Scrap Guilds, is done through FMOD. It's flexible, fairly lightweight, integrates generally well with Unity, and is intuitive in its layout.

So here is the WIP version of "Night Hunt", from Scrap Guilds by Attack Wagon Games!