TBA Pt. 4: Music- Tracking with Blistering Agility

I did the music and sound effects in five days.

Pretty much. Granted I did start some songs before the jam period and finished one during, but with how much game I had to make alongside a full set of original graphics, music once again took a backseat until the last week of the jam. Hell, every single sound effect was done on the Saturday before the deadline! I was a lot more confident in this decision this time around, as I knew I could write good music even when in a rush. The gameplay and graphics, however, would need more time to really come into their own. I also knew I wouldn’t have a lot of competition for Best Music, despite a daring move I made as soon as the jam was announced.

The Bet

At the time of writing this, before results have been announced, I am the only person to ever win Best Music in a Harold Jam. It’s not surprising, honestly; this is a community of game devs and I’m a game composer who thinks making games is kinda neat. I’ve been writing music for 18 years and most notably was both composer and audio lead for the latest Toontown Rewritten update (this trailer theme included!), while I really only open RPG Maker MV once Harold Jam rolls around and flop like a fish for a month. However, I wanted to see more of us step up to the plate and write some original tunes. It’s really only been me and Violet Spinel, who is guaranteed to accompany any of his Harold Jam games with an 8-bit earworm soundtrack. (RePunch is blasting in my head on loop as I type this.) I wanted to hear what the rest of RPG Beta Testers had to contribute as musicians.

I made a bet. If you write a better original soundtrack than me and outplace me in the Best Music category, I give you $25. You do whatever with it. Keep it, donate it to charity, give it back to me if you want. Your money, your choice. This sounds like a real asshole move, but rest assured I really did want to try and encourage more devs to write their own soundtracks. We’ll find out how that went once results drop.

Trial by Furnace

I took a big risk this jam and opted to write my soundtrack in Furnace Tracker using the Game Boy sound chip instead of the usual JummBox. I wanted the soundtrack to match my dedication to the Game Boy aesthetic as best as it could. There is so much that trackers can do that JummBox can’t, especially with macros and effects for each note. Plus JummBox’s noise channel sounds weird. I had planned to do this when I intended to spend a few months getting all my assets ready before the jam, which as we know was unsuccessful. 

It was more than just a more accurate Game Boy sound, however. Last year, I mentioned in Behind the Liminal that I had a big reason to try out NES VRC6-style music. This was because I scored a gig on Nowis-337’s amazing Buffet Knight! (All the music in this version is placeholder as of writing this.) After Harold Jam 4 ended, I realized I had a lot of music to go and a relatively short time to write it, so I downscaled to Game Boy style after noticing Buffet Knight’s branding.

This led me down a rabbit hole where I listened to and analyzed the music of Alberto Jose Gonzalez religiously. I’ve been a fan of him for years, between his whimsical style, strong melodies, and mastery of the Game Boy sound chip. I singlehandedly attribute analyzing the living hell out of oscilloscopes of The Smurfs and The Smurfs’ Nightmare to my Game Boy sound. The other Game Boy composer that absolutely blew my mind was Stello Doussis, who only had two released GB soundtracks to his name but used his Rob Hubbard-inspired Commodore 64 expertise to push the GB sound chip to its limit. In general, I find that many of my biggest VGM influences are European as often as they are Japanese.

Some of my Buffet Knight music has already made it onto Nowis’s Twitter, such as the main overworld theme and a tune for a village in the clouds! The cloud village theme is actually an unused song from Dracula is Dead that languished for about two years! It didn’t make it into the jam release and the Definitive Edition never came out, but I loved it too much to leave it there and thought it would make a perfect town theme. I even had a Buffet Knight song tearing at my mind screaming to get out while making H&TCoT, but I just didn’t have time to start until after the dev period. It’s in progress now!

Secrets to Speed

I've naturally written enough music to be able to both conceptualize and write down songs fairly quickly, but I had to make a lot of decisions to to cut down the soundtrack's scope the moment it would expand. A big one was contemplating how long the player would hear each song and keeping the length down. For example, Fred and Eliza's theme almost had a B section but I cut it out as time was short. I also tried to write songs with multiple purposes, such as a catch-all danger theme for any precarious situation and a cave theme that doubled as a dramatic final encounter theme with Fred and Eliza.

With that said, let’s take a look at the songs that have more backstory than crapping it out in an hour or less!

Song-By-Song Breakdown

Theme6-cursion

The inevitable Theme6 remix for the title screen and credits! This is one of the slowest burners of the jam, and it had been in my head since Harold Harvest. My original idea was to have it in swing and sound like the opening to that Finnish TV show with the morphing people. Once the jam actually begun and the island requirement was announced, I put it in straight feel and gave it more of a Latin vibe. Pretty much nothing else about the song was changed, although a few late-blooming motifs found their way in.

Also this song has some of my favorite 8-bit percussion I’ve ever written. It’s so tight and punchy! My confidence in using mostly noise for percussion skyrocketed just in the last week of the jam alone. This song was super annoying to write but so worth it.

I’ll Never Steal A Song Again

It’s called that because I most definitely did not steal Burt Bacharach’s I’ll Never Fall In Love Again. I heard it on the radio one day and thought it could like a nice comfy RPG town tune if put in the right hands. Probably not the most elegant choice for a game jam where I bet money on an original soundtrack, but as we learned from Ed Sheeran you can’t copyright a chord progression. Also Burt Bacharach passed last year so like hell he'll sue.

I was hell bent on debuting this song in Harold Jam for whatever reason, and not even a tropical setting could sway me. In fact, I think it fits the island and the tone of Curse of Teebeyae more! It’s Harold and Marsha living a carefree life on a tropical island! On the topic of Harold and Marsha, I really wanted to channel their adorable relationship and especially Marsha’s dorky witch girl energy through this song, which I at least believe I achieved. First time I will not be extremely angry having my masterpieces called cute. Next Harold Jam I gotta do a few songs in advance just to keep the vibes up.

Speaking of doing songs in advance, part of the reason this soundtrack got pushed so close to the end is because I wanted to use the melody of this song as a core motif. Unfortunately I did not finalize the melody until the very last day of the jam. Priorities. I don’t think the soundtrack suffered too much though, as it was pretty challenging to repurpose anyhow.

I also challenged myself to a soft no arpeggio rule with this song. For reference, that’s when you play a few notes very quickly one after another so they sound like a chord. It’s very commonly used in 8-bit music to keep chords to one channel, but I figured a more sparse arrangement with more organic harmonies and countermelodies would benefit this song. I think it turned out really great! All in all, one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written and I’ve listened to it on repeat so many times.

Kept You Vacating, Huh?

This was the first song I finished for H&TCoT and, until about a week to the deadline, the only song in the game! This song let me really feel out Furnace again and warm up for the rest of the soundtrack. How many of you noticed the incredibly obvious Encounter motif in the melody? I’m very proud of how it came out, but I especially love the part at the end when the Encounter melody drops out. I almost repeated this section but didn’t have time to go back and extend it.

3 2 1

3 2 1 is the oldest song in the soundtrack. It started as a song my little brother started in Mixcraft in 2022. He quickly abandoned it because it wasn’t mixed well and it sounded like all two other songs he had written before. He ended up writing the normal battle theme for Stuck in the Liminal afterward and it was a huge hit! In a stroke of genius, I approached him and asked if I could rearrange and expand on his unfinished and untitled song for Harold Jam 4 and he graciously let me do so. The first half of the song up to 0:41 is based on what he wrote, but the second half to the loop at 1:22 was all me. The second half was actually the first bit of music intentionally written for the jam! The 8-bit slap bass solo at the end was inspired by Domino Line by Casiopea.

Fun fact: I was pissed writing this song! Not because it was hard, but because I believed it was too good for Harold Jam! This banger for a game jam less than 30 people will hear for two weeks and promptly forget about? Fate worse than death! It’s probably really egotistical of me to say things like this, but ever since being featured on slightly larger projects I’ve been a little regretful that only a handful of people and several Buy 500 Followers Right Now bots have heard my best music. This song is the sound of raw cockiness.

Crimson Locks

I randomly came up with the intro while relaxing outside one day. It was very heavily Zelda inspired, and I quickly jotted it down and crapped out a little melody to go along with it. The original name was The Curse of Teebeyae, but I later renamed it to match the puzzle in the cave where you unlock a door as well as the hint written on the gate. It was honestly spur of the moment, and the next day I contemplated scrapping it altogether and doing something else.

One problem though; I couldn’t get it out of my head! I'd be at work completely unable to shut it up for days on end.  I realized that I wanted Fred to have just as strong of a melodic motif as Harold, so why not use it for him? While I did add a little Theme6 bit at the end to allude to the Harold lookalike Teebeyae, the main melody of the song ultimately got reused as Fred’s theme on top of a bassline and chord progression I came up with while at work. The melody also ended up as the big epic chorus in…

Drop Dead Fred

Honestly this is not my best final boss theme. Serviceable, good even, but obviously rough around the edges. Maybe it’s just my own perspective, but there’s a lot of copypasting and abrupt transitions that come from reusing patterns.

This is because I wrote the final boss theme of Harold and the Curse of Teebeyae in half an hour with about an hour to the deadline.

I have a four-Harold Jam streak of writing my final boss theme on the last weekend of the jam, but none nearly as close as this. What saved me was I had a rough enough mental outline that I could just go off that. I had a few clear influences, such as the Champion Kieran battle theme from Pokémon Scarlet & Violet and Chaos King from Deltarune: Chapter 1. Pokémon and Deltarune influencing callmeDJ; what else is new? It also felt inevitably Castlevania as a result. It was mostly improv though, and the moment I’d finish one pattern I’d get the idea for how the next one went.

I mentioned in Overall I was SUFFERING writing this song. Body temp at a fever pitch, whole body shaking, couldn’t even feel my arms. Might I remind you I was supposed to have the whole soundtrack done before the jam started and finish the game in a week. With that said, listening to it again I really enjoy it! I kinda can’t believe how fast it came out, especially since Furnace is more time-consuming for me than JummBox.

Conclusion

I have a very weird stance on this soundtrack. I feel like a lot of it is more rushed and less polished than usual, but is this really a bad thing? A jam soundtrack being less than phenomenal isn’t the end of the world. In fact, it angers me when my best music ends up in a jam game less than 30 people will play. Fifteen THOUSAND Toontown Rewritten fans bore (ahem) witness to easily the worst draft for a boss theme I have ever written while barely anyone knows Reunited by Happenstance exists?

I regret using Furnace Tracker in the jam setting, especially with how little time I had. I used JummBox for almost every 8-bit jam soundtrack I had done before, but Furnace proved to be more time-consuming. I even found myself sketching parts of songs in JummBox if I got stuck! The funny thing is I don’t regret Furnace for this jam in particular. Considering how hard I was going on the Game Boy aesthetic, I wanted to make sure I got the authentic Game Boy sound to match. It also helped me warm up for Buffet Knight which was a huge plus! I’m also contemplating entering GBJam 12 as a composer, and as it turns out there’s a utility that converts Furnace tracker files to hUGE Tracker files which GBStudio uses!

With that said, I'm happy. Although it'll always sting now and then how much time I could have spent on this soundtrack in advance, I think it works. Above all the other positives I've mentioned, I've been diversifying my musical influences and inspirations and I think it's showing in this soundtrack. I've been getting into jazz and bossa nova harmony and flatting and sharping my fifths and sevenths and ninths, and I do think that's one of the next big steps for me alongside learning how to use fancier DAWs and VSTs and stuff. The grind never stops!

Speaking of Game Boy aesthetic, tomorrow we’ll take a look at Graphics: The Bold Artist for my first true-blue whack at pixel art! Don’t forget to check out The Bonafide Album on itch.io and SoundCloud as well!