Behind the Liminal Pt. 6: Music - The Sound and Score

While I may have developed most of Stuck in the Liminal, I’m a composer first and foremost. I have not even two years of game dev under my belt with hardly any time spent between Harold Jams. On the flipside, I have been composing music for over sixteen years and have worked with solo devs, small indie teams, and a slightly larger indie team reviving and maintaining a beloved classic MMO played by hundreds daily. This has almost made it a requirement that I compose an original soundtrack for every Harold Jam I enter.

Sound

Before we get into the meat and potatoes, let's talk the lesser-discussed aspect of Stuck in the Liminal's sound. I did most if not all of the sound design for Stuck in the Liminal. While most sounds were taken from Stuck in the Past, I did whip up a few new ones such as camouflaging, swimming, and the character talk sounds. The latter was a big one I wanted to include, as this is something I prominently want to feature in The Colors of Life and possibly other games I make. I wanted to make sure every character had their own unique voice and could convey different emotions. I would think about the overall timbre and pitch of a character's voice, recreate it in JummBox which I also used to write the soundtrack, and add a fade and a pitch bend downward to sound more voice-like. I'd love to explore other ways to create these sounds in a higher-fidelity game such as JSFXR. Yanfly's Extended Message Pack carried the voice sounds and having the settings for each voice in a common event saved an unbelievable amount of time.

A big takeaway I've noticed from 8-bit sound design is how music theory plays into it. Understanding pitch and tone and how they change throughout, intervals (such as the perfect V-I interval that forms the Super Mario Bros. coin sound), and combining waveforms and noise shapes my sound effects as much as the core concept itself.

Score

Right off the bat, I had big plans for Stuck in the Liminal's soundtrack. I wanted to pursue an expanded NES style similar to the VRC6 sound chip. This would give the soundtrack a fuller quality and more room for experimentation. There’s big reasons for the VRC6 approach which I can’t exactly disclose yet, but it was very fun to learn! A bit much for a jam game, but just enough.

Most of the soundtrack followed my general songwriting process for game jams. My mind is so geared towards my game and the necessity for a soundtrack that ideas will pop into my head given the proper context. Sometimes they immediately come out, other times they have plenty of time to marinate, and sometimes they have to be forced out like an unruly turd. Either way, my experience has a composer has built up to the point where the fundamental knowledge is solidly in place and I don’t have to wrestle with music theory most of the time. It’s just like any other art form that can be mastered, although to say I’m a master is a bit of a stretch. Just a bit.

In Stuck in the Liminal’s case, I was so invested in actually getting the game finished that I forgot to finish a single song other than the victory theme until three weeks in! This was extremely unusual of me and panic-inducing in the moment, but I managed to crank out almost every unfinished song plus a few more in a single day where I decided to take a break from any in-engine work. This meant I was able to revisit them fresh ears and come up with new ideas. Music then became a nice way to take a break from development and almost relax while still making progress.

Quite a few of the songs in this game have their own stories behind them. Take a look and listen along! Just bear in mind there are plenty of unmarked spoilers.

I'll Save Myself

The title/credits theme was the first thing I did after finding out the theme of Ascent of the Allies. Everything came to me at once and I was hit with a huge wave of motivation. The game is about Reid’s adventures right after Stuck in the Past; why not reuse its ending theme to represent the entire game? Despite this early hot streak, I only finished about half of it before shelving it for three weeks.

Kicking off with a central motif was pivotal to the rest of the soundtrack. Motifs are always a composer’s best tool for a game jam soundtrack. Reusing a melody makes writing the music itself way easier, but there’s also room to reharmonize and rearrange which I have a blast doing. Obviously enough, it also makes a stronger impression on the player than a bunch of disconnected songs with no common ground.

Liminal

The Liminal overworld theme was the last major song I wrote for SITL and was its obligatory turd that wouldn’t come out. My first idea used the chord progression I ultimately decided on when I cranked it out the morning of the deadline. I still remember I woke up earlier than usual that morning and there was a thick, deep fog covering the ground. It was the perfect atmosphere as I wrote the song while waking up and preparing for the final sprint.

Before committing to this idea, I also discovered Dream from Dreamcast deep cut L.O.L.: Lack of Love and wanted to try something like it. At this time I had no idea it was composed by the late legend Ryuichi Sakamoto, was not familiar with much of his discography, or that I was starting to consider him an influence on my work in the last week of his life. Really freaky stuff. While this idea didn’t really go anywhere, as I learn more about Sakamoto his work really does fall in line with the sound I want to achieve. RIP legend.

Kick Some Aspect

The normal battle theme, Kick Some Aspect, is a freak anomaly. It is an original song in a callmeDJ jam game that I didn’t write! My younger brother has been following my hazy, far-fetched dreams of doing this game dev thing, and when he started to get familiar with the concept of Stuck In The Liminal he wanted to do a song for it! He’s only written four songs counting Kick Some Aspect, but he’s shockingly good already and his third song is better than my thirtieth. I had most of the soundtrack planned at this point, but the one gap was a normal battle theme which his style would coincidentally fit very well!

According to my brother, Kick Some Aspect was written to be a slower, more cerebral battle theme since he felt it would fit the turn-based environment. While I did offer suggestions and compromises along the way, I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible so his style could really shine through.  I touched up the song myself after he was done, adding some extra punch and touching up some awkward chords here and there. All with his approval, of course.

Did I mention this was also his first time using JummBox? When I helped him get all the preferences set up, I immediately noticed he started the song with a Theme6 reference without even hearing it. Outside of this, Kick Some Aspect is littered with references to other songs from Stuck in the Past, Harold: Show-Stopping Hero, and even songs I wrote 12 years ago! At that moment I knew what it felt like to be a proud dad.

Last note; he also came up with the name. I could not have come up with a better name if I tried.

Singing Drums

Singing Drums, the main dungeon theme, is the most complex song I’ve ever written for a game jam outside of the title track from Harold: Show-Stopping Hero. There shouldn’t have been any reason for me to go this hard on a jam game song, but as it turns out Singing Drums is actually a Colors of Life song in an 8-bit outfit! I based it on the concept of a melody performed by a resonant, melodic drum, hence the name, and formed a droning, almost devotional background not long after. I like to think it would play in a forest temple. It had a few months to marinate beforehand so I didn’t have to think too much while writing it. Nonetheless, by the time the honest to god Colors of Life rolls around and Singing Drums finds a new home, it’ll probably go through another round of marinating and being reborn. Maybe it’ll stay the same. Only time will tell.

Singing Drums half-intentionally leans in the direction of composers that influence the sound I want for TCOL; specifically David Wise, Lena Raine, and the criminally underrated Dean Evans who wrote incredible ambient soundtracks for Ocean’s mediocre-at-best SNES games. I also feel like I channeled a bit of Underground Path from Dweller’s Empty Path as I tackled it in 8-bit, which makes sense as Toby Fox (accompanied by Temmie Chang and Camellia on this track) is another one of my biggest influences as a creative.

Fun fact: Dean Evans came out of retirement and started writing solo work during this jam! It was a welcome surprise and snapped me out of a conveniently timed mental funk.

Liminal Rites

Little story time; I was supposed to write an original soundtrack for Mooglerampage’s Soul Survivor last year. Unfortunately I was in the worst musician’s block of my life that whole year and only drafted one chord progression. Since it was homeless, I ended up repurposing it into this song and into Liminal from there. Happy it found a home because it’s one of the most unique chord progressions I’ve ever written.

Reunited By Happenstance

The final boss theme was another song that had plenty of time to marinate. I started it early into the jam with the intention of it being a battle theme against Harold rather than with him. I didn’t want to write this song too late into the process since I did that last Harold Jam and my final boss theme kinda sucked as a result. As fate would have it, the second half of this song was a late-night grind less than 24 hours before the deadline. Contrary to my fears, however, it ended up becoming my favorite SITL song and only one tiny chord progression sticks out in a bad way to me. There was a point where I had no idea where to take the melody and my younger brother happened to nudge me about referencing Kick Some Aspect at that very moment without knowing. It happened to work perfectly!

Thank You

The ending cutscene theme is called Thank You. I called it that because I used it for both Reid thanking Harold and the bonus thank you cutscene for Human at the end (which I originally wanted to rearrange Stuck in the Past’s Wisdom Shines Down for). It’s a funny name for a song that honestly gets me all misty-eyed. The first half ended up sounding like the ending themes from Pokemon GSC and Super Mario Land, and I like how the main theme reprise in the second half sounds more conclusive than it did in Stuck in the Past. Finding so many different ways to rearrange and reharmonize Theme6 is always a highlight of every Harold Jam for me. I wish it were the last song I wrote, but it came to me a few days before the deadline and I wanted to capture it before it flew away. My memory is not the best.

Form-al Invitation

I wrote Form-al Invitation, which plays in the form cutscene after the credits, in ten minutes. It was actually the last addition to the game before testing and submitting. There was only a little over an hour before submissions were due so I had to speedrun it to give myself enough time for final testing. I took a stream-of-consciousness approach, went for a conventional NES sound to reduce the number of channels, and structured the song to not have any loop points to make things faster. Was only slightly nerve-wracking.

Conclusion

Overall, what I’m most proud of with this soundtrack is how much of myself is in it. While I didn’t go as far as to completely neuter my sound in my previous soundtracks, it is true that Stuck In The Past and Harold: Show-Stopping Hero borrowed from 8-bit RPGs and musical theater respectively. All my other soundtrack work has been for games made by other people, so naturally I had to adhere to their visions. Stuck in the Liminal was not trying to be anything other than itself, and as a result I had no ground for any of the soundtrack outside of my own instincts. It’s pretty awesome actually, especially as someone trying to really discover their creative identity.

Harold Jam has a non-zero chance of being done, but this is far from the last you’ll hear from me. Remember that MMO I mentioned earlier? Toontown Rewritten. The community organized remake of the MMO that defined my childhood. I’ve been on the team for a little over a week and started writing my first song and it still doesn’t feel real. There’s so much more I wish I could say, but my work is gonna be under wraps for a good while. I’ve also been offered some very exciting opportunities from others in the RPG Testers community which I hope to bring my all to. Results haven’t dropped yet and I can still say my confidence as a composer is sky high right now.

4/27/23 UPDATE: Results came in and long story short SITL won best music of the jam. One random subcategory would be awarded $50, and just like last year it landed on music. I could not be any happier that I chose to tryhard one last time for Human, my boys, and my passion project. Of course I couldn't let my little brother's efforts on the normal battle theme go unrewarded so I gave him all the spare bills in my wallet. He's $9 richer now and we're both super happy. It's insane that I achieved the same result as Show-Stopping Hero last year but made a full-fledged game instead of a glorified visual novel, prototyped my dream game, and rediscovered my love for making games and telling stories on top of it. It's just an unreal level of joy and I am so excited to keep creating. Thank you all so much!

Wait, how did all those cool embed links get there? That's right, the Stuck in the Liminal Original Soundtrack is out now on SoundCloud and itch.io! There's a few songs in there we didn't cover today, so give it a listen!

Up next, The Journey and all its ups and downs!