Creating music for Project RyME

Qwarq has posted several dev retrospectives (check out their blog at https://qwarq.io) from their time making Project RyME, a really cool mystery-puzzle game that takes place entirely in a desktop computer. It involves lots of file viewing, web sleuthing, running programs, and of course playing video games. I made the music for one of the minigames therein, titled "Void Wanderer", as well as the credits theme for the main game itself. Feeling inspired, I figured I'd join in and share what working on the game's music looked like.

For starters, I'll just mention that I don't have any musical training or professional experience. A little over ten years ago, just for the heck of it, I taught myself the basics of Famitracker, a program made for faithfully simulating NES-style 8 bit music. That's where my music-creating background starts and ends. For a good few years, I made chiptunes simply as a creative outlet for myself, but I eventually stopped when I entered a really stressful several year period at my work. Even months after leaving my job, I was still so burnt out, that the thought of getting back into it hadn't even crossed my mind. But when I saw Qwarq was looking for someone to create some tracks for their game, the idea of creating music for a specific purpose got that creative itch going again.

You can listen to the final results here.

General notes on Void Wanderer

Void Wanderer is a short Metroid-esque game that has three music tracks total: one for the cave area, one for the factory area, and one for boss fights. For each of the tracks, I got incredibly helpful resources that included images from the game, open-ended descriptions for what the music should be like, and references from other game soundtracks.

After going through all of the materials, I came up with two goals that I wanted to accomplish with the soundtrack. Since Void Wanderer canonically isn't a NES game, my first goal was to not make it sound specifically like one. Thankfully, there were enough techniques I could use to deal with that, which I'll describe a little later.

My second goal was more modest than the first, but also trickier to execute. Before that, some context: the description I got for the factory theme suggested that it should follow up on the cave theme, but also that it should sound glitchy and distorted. Conveniently, one of Famitracker's four basic audio channels is the aptly named "Noise" channel, and it does what you think it does. This is the channel that's responsible for pretty much any crunchy NES sound effect you can think of. And curiously, there are a handful of tones on the Noise channel that actually sound a bit melodic. Out of tune, sure, but juuust melodic enough that you could interpret them as proper musical notes. If you want to know what those melodic Noise channel notes sound like, look no further than the first three seconds of "Metal Crusher" from Undertale. It would have been a waste to not try to utilize the Noise channel this way on the factory track somehow.

And so, my second goal was to use the Noise channel for melody on the factory track, while simultaneously making sure that it was following up on the cave track somehow. To accomplish that, I mapped the most usable Noise channel sounds to proper musical notes, to see if they could form a chord. And sure enough, I got a (slightly out of tune) G-sharp minor chord from it - something perfectly good enough to use as a common element between the cave and the factory tracks. I could first use the G-sharp minor in the cave track, then include it again in the factory track with extra accompaniment from the Noise channel. With all of that musical R&D out of the way, I was ready to start creating.

Void Wanderer: Cave theme

According to the description I got, the cave theme was supposed to feel both mysterious and adventurous, though not too dangerous yet, and also sound organic, since it was overgrown and full of living creatures. The two references I got were the title screen for Environmental Station Alpha, and the Chozo Ruins theme from Metroid Prime. The final track ended up sounding closer to the former than the latter, but more than anything else, it ended up sounding like Waterworld for the Virtual Boy - and not on accident, either. I'm honestly not sure what the sound chip situation of the Virtual Boy was, but I was inspired by what sounds like a high octave Triangle wave driving the melody on "Diving". I wanted to have a similar leading voice on the cave theme, because its very "cute" sound fit with Void Wanderer's sprite aesthetic pretty well.

The G-sharp minor chord I'd previously settled on did a good job of evoking mystery, but it didn't inspire adventure and it sounded a bit too dangerous, and so I knew the track couldn't stay on it for too long. In the end, I made it meander into major territory, then back to minor, then back to major again, creating a kind of back-and-forth that mirrors exploration and finding something different around every corner. The major parts themselves were indirectly inspired by the synths on Ayreon's "The Decision Tree", a prog rock song that also accompanies the first act of an adventure, just like the cave theme. It wasn't a deliberate choice, I've just realized in retrospect that that's where my mind had wandered, but I'm happy with how it worked out. Writing this post has been fun, because these influences are obvious to me in hindsight, but they were rarely conscious choices on my part at the time. Yes, there's more of them later.

Finally, coming up with a way to highlight the organic nature of the caves was the easiest part of the creation process. I needed a rhythm for the track, so I decided on one of the most common naturally occurring rhythms out there: the rhythm of a heartbeat. I added a few hi-hats and embellishments, while keeping the main percussion prominent, but soft-sounding.

Void Wanderer: Factory theme

The factory theme was described to me as much more dangerous than the caves, and "more of an industrial or mechanical style while still being a bit low key", with glitch or distortion sound effects. The references I got were the Weapons Factory theme from Super Mario RPG and the theme for the first major area in Axiom Verge. Funnily enough, the Axiom Verge theme had independently come to mind for me after reading the description. As I mentioned before, this track was ideally also supposed to follow up on the cave theme somehow.

The track opens on the G-sharp minor chord, just like the cave theme did, but right off the bat, it's punchier and faster. It also never goes into any major key at any point, so the sense of safety or friendliness is gone. The organic heartbeat rhythm is replaced with a rigid, mechanical 2/4 time signature. The cute high octave Triangle sound is gone. Well... almost gone. It's used for a little morse code easter egg I included.

This is also the track where I use the Noise channel for melody. Normally, I and most other chiptune composers only use the Noise channel for hi-hat or cymbal crash percussion sounds, it's very uncommon to use it for much more than that (maybe besides actual sound effects, like explosions, waves crashing, etc.). Now, you might be wondering - if I'm using a Noise channel note for melody, doesn't that mean I'm missing out on percussion sounds? Technically that's true, but practically, as long as there's percussion between the notes, the human ear will just fill in the blanks. I didn't use the Noise channel for melody constantly, I just sprinkled a note or two here or there. That gives the song ample breathing room to still use the Noise channel for percussion without it sounding weird and wrong.

For inspiration for this track, besides the linked references, I deliberately looked to Kraftwerk, and I especially listened to a lot of Computer World and The Man-Machine on my commute for a few days as prep. Metropolis was a song I was specifically trying to call on for inspiration, though the final track ended up having more in common with The Model. I didn't realize this until after the fact, but it also sounds a fair bit like the verse to Burnin' For You by Blue Öyster Cult. More subconscious yearning for dad rock on my part.

The factory theme went through several more iterations than the cave theme, which by comparison was finished relatively quickly. At one point, it sounded a bit like chapter 2 Celeste music combined with the Crazy Bus theme. It wasn't very pretty.

Void Wanderer: Boss theme

My pointers for the boss fight theme were to make it more intense than the factory theme, and for it to sound "manic and mechanical". The references I got were the boss themes from Metroid Prime and Axiom Verge, with a particular emphasis on the latter.

On the one hand, I felt from the start that the boss theme was going to be easier to compose than the other two - not because it was going to be less complex, but because battle themes are just my default mode in Famitracker. On the other hand, it was going to be a little trickier because unlike with the other two tracks, I didn't have a concept in mind beforehand, no connective tissue to use. Doing the G-sharp minor chord thing a third time in a row would have been way too repetitive, so I instead came back to a different main feature of the soundtrack, the "cute high octave Triangle" that I relied on in the cave theme. Only this time, it shared the role with a high octave Square wave. The two of them trade the role of lead voice back and forth, as a way to add chaos to the track.

Another easy way to make the track sound more manic was to make it higher tempo than the other tracks. While I was at it, I also made sure to keep the drums varied and constantly changing. Throughout the 52-second loop, there are four different drum patterns on the sample channel and eight different drum patterns on the Noise channel. Besides one single instance, no combination of two patterns ever repeats itself.

I didn't stop there, I also included lots of rapid note patterns, including this not-quite-arpeggio that appears at the start and then repeats halfway through the loop. The halfway point is also where my non-video game music preferences make themselves apparent yet again, with something resembling thrash metal riffage in the background. Maybe the sci-fi horror of the Axiom Verge boss theme subconsciously pushed my brain towards some Vektor? Who can say.

In service of helping this track sound less NES-specific, I used the Namco 163 module for one of the channels. It's there in an accompanying role throughout the entire track, and it stands out the most in the latter half of the loop, where it plays a sustained tone that keeps wandering higher and lower.

Oh, and last but not least, the track also opens with the first eight notes of Bad Apple (the original in-game version, not the music video one) on the lower register. This was also a subconscious decision, but one I'd realized well before writing this post. Did you know this isn't the first time Project RyME and Bad Apple have been mentioned in the same breath?

Project RyME: Credits theme

(There are no specific spoilers ahead, but I will be talking about the mood of the game's ending, and the broad state the characters and the world are left in by the end.)

In addition to making the music for Void Wanderer, I was also tasked with doing the credits theme for the main game. My instructions were to make it "a bit upbeat" and "evoke older tech/synth", with the ending theme to the original Half Life provided as an example. It was also supposed to reference the game's title screen music in some way.

I wanted to be absolutely certain the credits track would distinguish itself from the Void Wanderer tracks, so I knew I wanted to do something wildly different with this one. At first, I considered using the VRC7 sound module in Famitracker. The VRC7 sound chip was a late-era Konami sound chip for the NES that was only ever included in a couple of games, the most notable example being Lagrange Point. It was a unique enough sound that I might have been able to do something with it eventually, but after a bunch of experimentation, I hadn't come up with anything I thought would work for the credits theme. So instead, I took a different swing: I decided to give Beepbox.co a shot instead.

And let me tell you: Beepbox is pretty neat! Its basic functionality is intuitive, and it does have a bunch of advanced options if you poke a little deeper. They can be more cumbersome to use than they would be in a more traditional music sequencer, but overall, the program makes a pretty good first impression. Good enough that I did end up making the credits music with it.

The credits theme combines chiptune channels with more modern midi synth instruments. Chiptune waves are the sound I feel the most at home working with, and so even though I was no longer restricted to those 8-bit NES-style sounds, I still wanted to include them here, at least partially. The midi synths ended up forming all of the backing instruments, while the chiptunes ended up forming most of the lead instruments. The theme starts with a very direct reference to the title theme, and I'd regret not referencing it again at the end, if not for the fact that the latter half of the track ended up being my favorite part.

After the introduction, the rest of the track's first half is empowering, but not entirely positive. I wanted to convey that even if the battle is won, it took a lot to get this point, and the events that led to this journey in the first place can never be righted. That's all well and good, there's just one problem: this track was supposed to be optimistic. And so, if I was going to start it like this, I had to make damn well sure I was going to end it on a high note, in both meanings of the term.

To help infuse that missing optimism into the track, I subconsciously called upon Ayreon for help again, this time coming up with a glowing synthy sound, approximating something off of Universal Migrator Part 1, such as The First Man on Earth. Lastly, to give the track a sense of finality and closure, I ended it with an amen cadence, which is one way of saying "you're done here, you can leave" in music.

The end result is a track that accomplishes the goal of being "a bit upbeat" in a pretty asymmetrical manner. It doesn't hold that tone consistently throughout, but rather opens bittersweet, and closes on an unambiguously positive note. It's supposed to make the player reflect on all they've been through, while ultimately leaving them with a sense of accomplishment, and a feeling that the future is brighter than the past.