When FallRight asked me to be part of this project, I initially felt a wave of Imposter Syndrome crash over me. Sure, I went to college for music, but I graduated three years ago and haven't done anything in the field since then. But after learning of the limitations imposed on the O2A2 (Only One of Any Asset) Visual Novel Jam, I thought that maybe the project would be small enough that I could handle it. Just one piece of background music and just one sound effect. Easy!

Coding in Ren'Py

FallRight didn't mention that I was about to get a crash course in Python and Git!

The code in Ren'Py didn't actually look too unfamiliar. I played around with HTML code in high school so the concept of using an editor wasn't completely novel to me, but jumping into lines and lines of code was still intimidating. But the simplest scripts (are they called scripts? I dunno) in Python have a conversational logic that made it very easy for a beginner to grasp.

To be fair, my coding was mostly limited to "play this sound here at this volume," while FallRight and Tamafry were the true masters on the project. The indents! The equals signs! It'll take me a while to get to that point, but working with this team has given me a strong foundation for future projects.

Musical Inspiration From the Abyss

Before FallRight invited me to this project, I started getting reacquainted with Waveform by Tracktion, my DAW of choice, before I fell off the music train for a while. (By the way, if you're interested in getting started with digital music, Waveform is a great place to start. The base version is free!)

While browsing Tracktion's site, I noticed an ad for Abyss, a visual synthesizer by Dawesome. The deep sea-inspired visuals immediately lured me in. And then, I watched the overview video and was blown away by the dark, vibrating drones produced by plucking tone colors from the "depths" and adding them to the color gradient bar.

Abyss took some getting used to. The main issue is that it's a very technical synth despite the intuitive color gradient picker. In the beginning, I wasn't sure how to use all of the sliders on the side. Because of the price tag and the unhelpful interface, I wouldn't actually recommend this synth to a beginner unless you want to stick with the presets. That being said, once I became comfortable with the sliders, I had a ton of fun blending tone colors and blasting the deep ocean through my speakers.

Background Music for Cave

I think FallRight reached out to me literally the day after I bought Abyss. What sound should I use for a dark, spooky cave and a murderous will-o-the-wisp? The answer just came out of my bank account!

In the end, I didn't actually move too far away from Abyss's presets. For the background music, I used the default "The Abyss" template, swapped some of the colors around for a slightly brighter tone, and made the most basic four-note bass line that anyone's ever seen.

I didn't want the melody to distract from the gameplay, so I tried to keep it as reserved by "drowning" the levels in the abyss. I chose a water organ and a glitchy alien pad from Spitfire Audio's LABS plugin (which is 100% free! Try them out! They're awesome!).

I wanted the sound effect for the sprite's "no" sound to be as ambiguous as possible. I didn't want the players to immediately associate the sound with "good" or "bad," so I chose another Abyss preset with a dark base and a brighter middle. The preset, named "Dirty Bell," just needed a shorter tail, and it was perfect for spectral communication.

Diving Deeper

Okay, so "following a killer lightbulb into a cave" and "diving into the monstrous-deep" aren't the best metaphors for the re-start of my music journey, but they're what I have to work with. Despite everything I've learned so far, I'm only just beginning to see what's hiding below the surface. I'm not sure when it'll be (perhaps Spooktober?), but I can't wait to dive into my next project.

Later! -Twinbewwy