For the “Global Game Jam” in January, 2022, I contributed music tracks to the game “DualKitty” (about 90% of the music used in the game)
The theme for this Global Game Jam was “Duality”. In other words, the game needed to encompass some dual nature. Well, everybody else on the team is a cat lover (I’m more of a dog person). So they voted to develop a game based on the dual personalities of cats. One personality is that of a furry, lovable creature who just wants to relax and take it easy. The other personality is that of a king (or queen) of a kingdom. The cat is a lion, and all must obey him!
This game jam requires that a playable game must be finished in a weekend; from Friday evening to Sunday evening. I joined this team of about six game developers. Three were programmers, two artists, and myself, a music composer. The members of the team were:
I had never done this; it was a lot of fun! I was amazed how much could be accomplished in such a short time. The game developers decided to use the Unity game engine; a very capable yet complex system for developing professional-level games. They started out with a game scope of three minigames. They ended up by completing double that scope! For each minigame, a separate music track was needed. Time is of the essence when developing a playable game in a game jam. So, I applied some ostinato rhythms from Sonuscore’s “The Orchestra Complete 2”. I also added melodies using Aaron Venture’s “Infinite Woodwinds”. But the most fun part of the music is the “MeowSynth” that I discovered on the web, and installed and used to generate notes with a cat-like meow. This gives the music a nice cat-like quality!
One of the issues with music in an interactive game, is that each game player will spend an indeterminate amount of time in the various activities. The music tracks are all finite in duration, but we do not want the music to end prematurely. Therefore, the art in the music tracks is to make sure that they can be looped. We do not want the music to end abruptly; it should sound seamless. This is done by planning the beginning and the end of the music tracks, so that there is no abrupt change at the point where it is looped.
You can try playing the game online, through the web site itch.io. Just click on the link below. This game is open-ended; you can’t win or lose the game.
