Hey gamers! This is callmeDJ, lead composer for the Best Music-winning The Dream Is Dead. I did some other things too but that’s for another devlog. This was a really important soundtrack for me, as it was my first time breaking in FL Studio and filling in the gigantic production hole in my skillset. Most of it was written in less than two weeks! Classic DJ procrastinating and then rushing at the end, even if I did have a lot else to do on this game. It was also very hard for me to lock in early on, although by the end I started to cook.

This was the most collaborative soundtrack I’ve done for a game jam. Lumi is a composer in his own right and is doing most of the music for his game Vagrant Shifter! Once we had a basic idea down, Lumi got to work whipping up a list of tracks we needed, some of the names included. Lumi also had specific vibes for each track which I sought out to recreate. So many of Lumi’s ideas I wouldn’t have dared to give a shot myself. Our Best Music win is a testament to taking big risks, selling your idea, and working with individuals not as like-minded as you’d think.

By the way, unmarked spoilers from this point onward. I highly encourage you to play The Dream Is Dead and experience the soundtrack firsthand!

Tools of the Trade

Most other game jam soundtracks I’ve done use just one software. This one used four!

FL Studio

This was my first time using FL Studio! I knew from the get-go I wanted a program that could turn glitchy noises into samples. I almost went with OpenMPT, but then I remembered I had a copy of FL Studio I had never even touched! I learn really quickly when on a deadline, so I figured this would be a good excuse to get acquainted with the industry-standard DAW. Lumi also used FL Studio for the two tracks he wrote.

The soundfont that pulled most of the weight was SGM V2.01. Since the pitch for the game-within-a-game was an ambitious young dev trying to mimic Toby Fox’s success, I decided to go with the big man’s weapon of choice. I also used Papelmedia String Ensemble that comes with FL Studio and even got to flex the same general MIDI soundfont I use over at Toontown Rewritten!

I also got my hands wet with those fancy VSTs. I refamiliarized myself with Spitfire LABS, a collection of virtual instruments that sound way too good to be free. Most of the mixing and mastering VSTs were stock FL, although iZotope Vinyl was key for crunching up some of the glitchier tracks and Lumi’s voice in The Dream Is Dying. Lastly, a little FLEX shows its face in the world map theme.

BeepBox

While you don’t hear it, BeepBox is still my go-to tool when I need to crank out MIDI fast. My method was to rough out each song in BeepBox and export it into FL to make it sound good. BeepBox does apply some weird volume settings that I didn’t find out how to fix until late, so some of the tracks I wrote near the end are entirely in FL.

Audacity

And now I reveal the secret to those beautiful glitchy noises; importing random files as raw data into Audacity! This was a trick I had wanted to bust out for a while, so I’m glad it went towards a game as fitting as The Dream Is Dead. This is not something I would have come up with on my own, and indeed I learned this from my Toontown Rewritten co-composer Techno Cinema. Bar none the best composer I have ever worked with, by the way. He is a freak.

I went a little too crazy with importing raw data. Among some of the files you hear in The Dream Is Dead include:

• RPG Maker MV’s EXE file.
• The Game.exe file for an old build of the game.
• Various MV plugins.
• icudt53.dll and node.dll in the RMMV folder.
• Koma’s sprite, mixed by my younger brother to become a snare drum.
• Probably a few others I’m forgetting.

The best results came from the DLL files. From there, I mixed and mashed them up in FL and sometimes just let them sing on their own.

HxD

You thought my madness would end there? My final glitchy gambit for this soundtrack was corrupting the songs themselves in a hex editor! I wanted the corrupted town themes to be as convincing as possible, so I opened up the raw data and scrambled it all around. This created the muffled sound and random blips throughout, which I then spliced some of the Audacity glitch noises into. I learned that this was a form of art called Datamoshing, which I studied religiously as I trudged through the trial-and-error process.

Song-by-Song Breakdown

Now it’s time to break d-brbrbr- b̵̞̀r̸͙̮̉ë̸͓̂à̸̤k̵͖̽ ̶̻̗͠d̶̺͓͋̚-̴̢͖͛d̵̯̩͐̚-̴̑͜ḓ̸̡̔̓d̷̞͍̈͌d̷͚̍̈́d̶̥͒ḓ̶̽d̴̳͗̓d̵̫͖͑̄

The Dream Is Dead

Classic DJ throwaway title theme. Atmospheric, has a leitmotif, throw on some suspended chords and there you go. I did have a gameplan going into this song, as I had already written the four-note melody for The Dream Is Dying and figured it would be cool to foreshadow.

Koma

I wanted Koma’s theme to be something special, but when a song has to be something special it makes me freeze up. I was a little obsessed with the town theme at this point, so out of desperation I figured why not just take that melody and throw it over a ii-V-I? It came pretty naturally after that and was a really fun exercise in basic bitch jazz theory. ii-V-Is everywhere, sharping and flattening those 7ths and 9ths, that stuff. Shoutout to my dude Charles Cornell; congrats on the kid. I pretty much gave Koma a Disney princess anthem and I am not mad.

I also like how Koma ended up getting a signature instrument; a Fender Rhodes electric piano with a music box or glockenspiel on top a la Born to Run. I don’t think I’ve ever had that happen before! If I keep this jazzy Rhodes stuff up, then I might be a quarter as good as the late great Shaun Martin.

its_home

This one kinda came out my ass, believe it or not. One of my favorite songs I’ve written in recent times and I just half-assed it in a single night. I think the spirit of Go Ichinose may have been guiding me here. The big inspiration behind this one was I kid you not the Tyler, The Creator Grinch EP. I was a little worried it would be a little too happy for the vibe Lumi wanted, but he thought it was perfect so we ran it. Very proud of this one, my personal favorite of the soundtrack.

The Key To Her Heart

I do not like this song. I think it has potential, but it was written in the last morning of the jam with another song left in the same day. What stinks was I had planned the whole song out during dinner one day and then immediately forgot it. From there, even thinking of nailing the vibe intimidated me so much that I did everything else but this song and its inevitable glitchy remix!

While we were making The Dream Is Dead, Lumi was playing the Wizard of Oz DS RPG with the trackball controls and the Final Fantasy Tactics and Wild Arms composers. The song that plays in the Yellow Brick Road has an absurdly whimsical vibe that Lumi really wanted for David’s lovesick dream. My personal influence was the score of Napple Tale, an eccentric Dreamcast game with a legendary composer at the helm. Tragically, I am not Cowboy Bebop composer Yoko Kanno, especially when it’s a day left and I gotta force something out fast.

Nonetheless, I tried. I went for a 5/4 time waltz with a ton of tritones and whole tone scales, and the second half kinda turned into Air on the G String which fit considering David’s dreams of marrying his girlfriend. I took so many jogs around the block to refresh my brain while doing this one. I even found a pile of white petals that had fallen off a tree and tossed them up in the air to get myself in the mood! Maybe I’m too harsh on this one, but it is just too unpolished for my standards. Too bad this next track was standing between me and a finished entry.

Heart.Locked=true

This one sounds the way I felt writing it! This was last song I wrote for the jam, mere hours to the deadline. I had been raring to do this one for a long while, as my plan was to chef a beat entirely out of glitchy samples. While it ended up being completely stream of consciousness, I don’t think it suffered too bad.

I started by chopping and screwing The Key To Her Heart as a base. I then went absolutely ham on the FL Sampler, sampling as many glitch noises as I could. I realized the step sequencer would make this process way easier, as I could just plop each sound on the 16^th note where I wanted it. The custom bass and the lead near the end are taken from a random burst of Commodore 64-style pulsey goodness inside Game.exe's raw data. I finished it off with some Papelmedia strings, default FL Bass Drum, and the crunchy Amen Break Lumi sampled in a later track to give it some extra body. Big OFF vibes from this one; no wonder Lumi liked it so much!

i⤉s_ƕ0mmmm

I wanted to do a more complex beat for this track not unlike Heart.Locked=true, but not only was my time and inspiration low but simply corrupting the normal town theme and leaving it at that would be far more convincing. I had also done the even more corrupted town theme already, so I could easily glitch this one up just enough to fall in between.

I threw the slowed and reverbed version of its_home I made for the even more corrupted town theme into HxD and deleted, created, and rearranged random chunks of hexadecimal code. Then I threw it back into FL Studio and chopped it up, threw in some glitchy noises, and repeated a few bits like a stuck cassette tape. And there you have it!

town.mid

Lumi had the genius idea of the beta town theme sounding like an old MIDI file. As I mentioned above, this is a style I have plenty of experience with, and I thought the idea was too good to pass up. I took a lot of care to make this sound deliberately less final than the version you hear earlier. I swapped the key signature, removed a few instruments, and rearranged some parts to sound a little more copy-pasty.

The town theme sounds really nostalgic in that classic MIDI soundfont, almost like a childhood memory you could swear really existed. I definitely have a special attachment to general MIDI from being obsessed with Toontown Online 16 years ago, and I’m sure my OSRS fans reading this will also agree. Works really well in F major too!

Unfinished

My very first song in FL Studio! I wrote this song by looking up How To Write Ambient Music In FL Studio and found a really neat trick where I could turn an arpeggiated piano into a pad by soaking it in reverb. The arpeggio didn’t export from Beepbox which was annoying, and I also didn’t know the shortcut to create an arpeggio from a chord right in FL. It was my first song, could you blame me? Backing it up with some strings and sub-bass was not a chore, although finding out how automation channels worked was.

This is the only track I renamed for the OST! It was simply called World as a placeholder name which I ran with, but while compiling the soundtrack for release I figured another name might be better. Seeing as the world map is made of huge patches of empty grass and sand, Unfinished felt like a fitting name.

Infernal Love - Succubi Dreams OST - Rejection

Another one of Lumi’s strokes of genius, this time a placeholder song from a hypothetical game that Devon, the in-game developer, really liked. It’s supposed to be a song that plays when you get rejected in a succubus dating simulator. A character from Infernal Love also appears as a NPC in the beta village. Lumi referenced this game’s universe in some of his other jam entries so there’s continuity here! I really loved the way he made the game feel like it could very well exist, even if it may have needed one name drop for context.

The most important part of this song was making it sound like it came from a completely different game. Lumi’s main reference for this song was Silence. Introspection. from ULTRAKILL. I decided to give Spitfire LABS my first proper whack since my trailer for Toontown Rewritten’s Under New management update and it absolutely did the job. Soft Piano gave it that moody Beethoven-ish top layer while Piano Pads added an ethereal demon heartbreak atmosphere. I had wanted to use Piano Pads for so long, so I’m glad I got my chance here. I also found out Soft Piano is the one Spitfire LABS VST Toby Fox used in Undertale and Deltarune, breaking it out in My Castle Town which I had previously thought was played live! It’s that convincing!

Listening to this song gave me an out-of-body experience. I’m so used to writing chiptune and obviously programmed MIDI that it felt like someone else’s song I was listening to. It really makes me wonder just what I could be if I took my existing compositional skills and applied them to more lifelike instruments.

9 AM

Lumi wrote this one! He doesn’t have a ton to say about his two songs, so sit back and enjoy the sounds of an eternal 10:17 AM.

Clocked Out

Another one of Lumi’s songs. He quickly churned it out when we realized I wouldn't have time to get a proper chase theme out myself. I will mention that having a few Lumi tracks makes this soundtrack feel a lot more dreamlike in its rapid stylistic shifts. All three dungeons with tower keys have a completely different soundscape; emo placeholder track for the library, droning ambience and crunchy beats for the office, and a mess of glitchy noises for the corrupted room. Just a bit of a blow to my ego, is all.

The Dream Is Dying

This song was Lumi’s idea. I say that up front because this is the standout of the soundtrack if not the entire game. I will even say this is the song that won us Best Music. Lumi had been listening to Wallsocket by underscores nonstop as he developed The Dream Is Dead, and his idea for The Dream Is Dying was based off the track You don’t even know who I am. This song was used as the placeholder for The Dream Is Dying, and beta testing the very difficult final dungeon while the Dance Dance Revolution announcer kept yapping in my ears nearly drove me insane.

We knew off the bat we needed that narration track. The only idea we came up with was an RPG Maker tutorial that devolved into self-hating madness. Not only was it representative of Devon’s struggles, but we felt many other devs would resonate with it. Lumi wrote up and recorded a few scripts and sent them off to me. I essentially made a YouTube Poop of Lumi’s scripts, getting progressively glitchier and glitchier the more doubtful they got. The part at the end where Lumi completely breaks down is actually an outtake! I thought it was him putting his whole Lumussy into the bit for a while. I’m really proud of how I got that one to sound.

I wanted this song to be way more epic, building up to a huge climax at the end. Unfortunately, I misunderstood the assignment as Lumi wanted a quieter track that put the focus on the vocals. He also wanted it to be guitar-centric, so I once again scoured LABS and walked off with Guitar Harmonics for our leitmotif, Ambient Guitars for some drone, and Peel Guitar to match the melodramatic narration with some Midwest emo Telecaster. Lumi also wanted Rejection to become Devon’s leitmotif at this point, so I brought that back along with its own LABS VSTs to round out the ensemble. Not a very complex song in theory, but it’s that narration track that makes it stand out. Again, this is something I never would have done myself, so huge props to uncredited composer Lumi on this one.

It's Gone.

The moment Lumi pitched the corrupted town tracks, I knew right away I wanted them to feel like The Caretaker. Think the later stages of Everywhere At The End Of Time but as a digital file instead of a vinyl record. I started with a slowed and reverbed version of its_home with some iZotope Vinyl on top. Because of course. From there, the process was like i⤉s_ƕ0mmmm but way more messed up. Way more bursts of glitchy noise, way more repeated and chopped samples, and long periods of silence as if that part of the file was completely unrecoverable. I don’t know how many people have actually heard this song ingame, as the bad ending is pretty hard to reach!

See You In Your Dreams

Koma with less instruments. Simple as. Lumi wanted this as a last-second credits theme for the normal route, which I didn’t mind all too much. I also resolved the ugly diminished chord that leads into the loop in Koma’s theme, which is funny because the normal ending has that resolution but not the good ending!

This song had the nice added bonus of being the backdrop to an impassioned speech judge Nova went on after finishing the game and lingering on the credits screen. I don’t think the VOD is up anymore, but he had to have gone off for like five minutes about the mentality that goes into finishing a game and the challenges you run into along the way. It was a really powerful moment and I’m glad to have witnessed it live.

Conclusion

And on that note, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have won Best Music with Lumi. I’ll elaborate this in another devlog, but I was very hesitant to enter this jam at first. I was exhausted from finishing the Buffet Knight soundtrack, had a new full-time job sapping all my energy, and just started planning a new passion project I was chomping at the bit to get started on. If I had opted out, I wouldn’t have gotten that boost with FL Studio that could potentially spell out my future as a video game composer. Trust me, I want to shoot for the stars.

I’m going to pull a Devon and be a little open about my inferiority complex. Sometimes I wonder if I’m even that good of a composer. I know you probably want to reach through the screen and choke the Best Music winner like a goose right now, but when your audience isn’t particularly massive and you’re constantly comparing yourself to industry legends and Danny “Techno Cinema” Burns (who should be an industry legend tbh), it can really get to you! I’ve won Best Music in almost every other game jam I’ve entered, but most entrants used pre-existing music packs while I skirted by just on having bespoke music for every moment in my games. Using game jams to measure your own skill is unhealthy and I don’t recommend it, but you see where I’m going here. To see so many composers begging to join a game in the Community page and then finding out through an 8 AM ping we beat out all of them is beyond insane. Maybe I really am an eldritch deity that writes really damn good music. I promise I’m not basing my self-worth on another jam.

Man, I don’t know where to go. I really want to keep getting out there as a composer but I also want to make my own games! They’re obviously getting original soundtracks, although I do have a few guest spots lined up. I also have double Toontown responsibilities on both Rewritten and the amazing fan roguelike Toontown: The Grindworks by my buddy Evan and no way in hell I’m dropping those. The Dream Is Dead really makes me think I can be something special as a composer, and I value that so much more than the $45 card battle system DLC I am redeeming as my prize. Again, huge props to the organizers of RM Jam for hosting such a huge, talent-filled jam. It's been an honor to get to know you all just a little more.