The atmosphere of our indie game in about 20 seconds

#indiegame #pixelart

Hi, everyone

Been a while since we've posted, but we've been at work all the while on new areas, new bosses, new BGM and new everything.

Here's one of the new areas we're currently working on, code name: The Cathedral

#pixelart #gamedev #metroidvania #ドット絵

Seems like dreaming up melodies is a common thing for a lot of people. Not me though. I've, exactly once in my life, heard an original melody in a dream, and it's the main piano part

Hey guys

I'm a VGM composer and co-developer of the Metroidvania Ghost Hand

I mainly do music for platformers and jRPGs. I'm not actively looking for new projects, but still generally like connecting with artists/developers I have good chemistry with, so feel free to reach out

The Ghost Hand OST so far is pretty diverse

I've wanted to write a real shitkicker for the game since I have the equipment now to record my own guitar parts, but no opportunities to organically do so came up until the boss this track matches to was conceived

Ghost Hand on Steam Soar through the skies in the back of a Dragon and explore a beautifully rendered world in Metroidvania that combine both land and Aerial combat.

Ghost Hand demo will be out tomorrow (Feb 24) at 10am PST for Steam Next Fest

store.steampowered.com/app/2563880/...

What makes VGM a great musical tradition is there's no — at least it's best when there isn't — an established canon of dos, don'ts and rules

Which is to say, thinking too hard about how to make VGM sound like VGM undermines the strength of VGM

Sketch of the Beetlebub/Beelzebug theme for Ghost Hand

One of my fav bosses in the game so far, and I thought it'd be cool to line the music up with the boss entrance since it's so dramatic

Your work always impresses me! Maybe a weirdly random thing to say, but if an opportunity to collaborate ever arose, I'd jump at the chance

My composer friend Sam and I are reviving our tradition of making a tier list for our fav games

Tonight we're doing Final Fantasy Mystic Quest:

www.twitch.tv/vermanubis

We've been working on Ghost Hand for a good while now, and it's starting to really come together

All this to say, even though I've only done Metroidvania-type stuff the past 2 years, I'd like to not let doing this kind of music slip away from me

I was hired by a team working on a jRPG in late 2022 early in development, and was well into the OST when they scrapped it and went with the genre they'd already launched several titles under, so-called "jRPG survival horror."

So jRPGs weren't too far-flung for them, but SH isn't my musical forte

Your piece for this is what originally got me to follow, but I had no idea it was part of Ode to Castlevania. Genuinely awesome

that is to say, tastemakers have opinions on how game music should or shouldn't be, and/or musical idioms/traditions get imported from specialists in other forms of media, e.g. film, stage, and so certain frameworks and "standards" pop out

I'm just sort of talking here, but though the reason why this is the case is probably many-sided, I wonder if the "institutionalization" of game music isn't partly responsible for the waftiness of modern VGM

Design goals in the MVs I've played/seen largely riff on the more "concrete" flagbearers of the genre, e.g. movement, combat, item acquisition, etc. but I think map architecture, for as large as a cumulative effect it can have, is a worthwhile thing to think about on its own terms

The same is true of some other games I've studied, like Symphony of the Night vs. Circle of the Moon

The two maps are of course different at a glance, but they're also different in many principles

But an abstract, relational thing that has a cumulative effect on the overall experience and perception of the game

This all said, I generally don’t think map design is thought of in this way, but Dread v. SM taught me that map design — or maybe better to say map architecture — is one of those things that an average player can’t necessarily point to

In spite of Brinstar having a great map design, and Cataris, imo, less so, I wouldn’t bet on either to have been deliberately designed as such, so much as byproducts of other design goals, like Dread trying to minimize backtracking

This all to say, Brinstar feels — to me at least — easy to explore, if tedious. Now, try to think of a simple, consistent strategy to visit every node on the Cataris map. If you’re like me, you’ll probably struggle!

Once you see how that works, you might notice that’s, at least in my experience, generally how people navigate mazes too: they reach a dead-end and then return to the nearest juncture and go down another path until all “branches” off that juncture have been searched

In computer science, the way a computer searches a tree structure (e.g. a classic mouse & cheese maze) is with what’s called a depth-first search, which you can go to the wiki for “Depth-first search” and go down to the example section to see in action

The really special thing about the Brinstar map is it’s basically a tree structure: a series of nodes with separate, non-intersecting branches

That means something when it comes to exploration, cuz if you want to exhaustively explore a place, you probably don’t want to keep revisiting places because you lose track of where you are and where you’ve been

If you notice only one thing about those plots, I’d bet it’s that the one on the left maybe seems a little more “geometric” than the one on the right.

I wanted to know why the two “gamefeels” were so different, so I plotted two chunks of the map from each game to see if I could find any structural patterns that could explain my intuition

A year or two ago I was playing through Dread on the heels of playing SM and something bothered me about Dread: I was constantly getting lost and disoriented, which is weird cuz the game tries pretty hard to keep you on rails

Map design in Metroidvanias really interests me. On the left here is a plot of Brinstar from Super Metroid and on the right is Cataris from Metroid Dread, and of course I’m gonna explain these and what specifically I mean by “map design”