Finding the vibe

The games I love most are the ones you sink into, and a big part of that is sound. I've made thirty-odd pieces of music for Starquest, with themes for every faction and area, and something about them was off. Then came the intro video. I went looking for the sound of the 80s and 90s games I grew up on, and wrote one song I fell in love with the moment I heard it. That song is now the sound of the whole game, and I'm redoing the rest to match.

Films decide how you feel with music, usually before you notice it's there. Put the same scene under a different score and it's a different scene. Games work the same way, except you're in them for hours, and in a game like Starquest a lot of those hours are quiet: a small ship, a lot of space, a rock you're slowly cutting into. Out there the music is most of what you hear, so for me it matters as much as anything on the screen.

Thirty-odd songs

I don't have a studio or a band. Claude Code writes each piece as code in SuperCollider, a programming language for sound, and the code renders straight to an audio file without anyone playing a note. ChatGPT did a lot of reading for me on how FTL, EVE Online, Minecraft and the X games use music over long sessions. My own scripts check that every loop joins without a click and that every track sits at the right loudness. Then I listen and keep the ones that work. It's a strange way to make music, and it took some getting used to.

I tried to give everything its own identity. A short phrase from the title theme, Old Light, runs through most of the soundtrack, and each faction plays it in its own voice: brass and timpani for the Federation, heavy industrial synths for Carbon, slow synthwave for Meridian, organ and choir for the Conclave. Sora has a theme of its own. The asteroid belt has a warm, low track for long mining sessions, Eden has something close to a hymn, and the empty frontier gets a drone with no melody at all. Then there's battle music on top.

Something was off

Taken one at a time, most of them were fine and a few were good. But when I played them back to back, something was off, and it took me a while to say what. I'd written them as background music for a calm game, a drone with a little music in it, slow and safe. They all did that job, and they all did it in much the same way. It's an odd thing to admit about music I'd spent weeks on, but very little of it stayed with me once it stopped.

The intro

Starquest opens with a short video, narrated over a series of pictures, about how humanity ended up in Andromeda. I wanted music written for it that follows the story as it goes, rather than a track looping underneath.

My first three attempts each had their own instruments and their own key, and they still sounded like the same song. So the instruments weren't the problem, and I changed direction.

For me, the best game music came out of the 80s and 90s, and FTL does that sound better than almost anyone. Its chip voices are warm and simple, a bit nostalgic, and they never get in the way of a game about a small ship in a big universe. I wanted that, with EVE Online's huge, dark space underneath it.

Not Yet

That experiment became a score I called Not Yet, after a line near the end of the intro: "You are nobody special. Not yet." It's built from soft 8-bit voices like FTL's, a pulse-wave lead with a new theme, a stepped triangle bass and small chip drums, all over a low, dark drone. It doesn't change with every sentence. It moves in chapters as the story does: Earth dying, the crossing, the wrong stars, and the turn to you at the end. About a minute and a half in, when the story reaches the warp drives, the drums come in under the theme and the whole thing starts to move.

I fell in love with it the first time I heard it, and knew straight away that this was the theme, and more than that, the vibe. This is what Starquest should sound like.

What happens now

I'm redoing every song in that vibe. The title music went first, and it's now a main menu track called Farther Out, built on the same theme and the same sounds. The rest will come one at a time, and when a faction's music is ready I'll put some of it up here so you can hear it.