Patreon Q&A rambling (Patreon)

Hello, you gave me lots of questions in the last post so I think it will be fun to answer a couple right now.

I'm still actively improving at composing music and becoming more intentional with it. There's two techniques I will use depending on what's needed. The first is the old technique, which was to jump into Audacity and just layer sounds and effects, many found from Freesound, and eventually mold it into something that feels how I want--but often in this process I end up creating extra music for scenes that don't exist, and this music inspires me to make those scenes (which is how the trash compactor in The Upturned came to be, probably because that music reminded me of World Of Goo). This kind of process is good for ambience and unique, emotional soundscapes. I remember doing it in the Roblox era, but I think I became confident at it while making Welcome To The Dark Place. Audacity is good for powerful, orchestral swells of raw emotion.

At least in the old version of Audacity I use, all the transformations I make to the audio are lossy and can't really be undone, so it forces me to just forge ahead and go with the flow. To get certain chords I can up pitch the sound wave by a certain number of semitones, but it distorts the audio. I did use Audacity to make the Fat Pajama Man theme (and there's a clip of that on twitter somewhere but I have no idea where.) If I do make rhythmic music in Audacity, it tends to be messy and nasty in a way that I just can't replicate anywhere else. It's easy to add all sorts of fun flourishes. The V60 trailer of Lethal Company was done this way, which you can see in the above video. The Place For Staying Still Very Quickly was made in Audacity practically before starting development on The Upturned, and it shaped how I wanted the ending to feel.

The other technique is to get into an actual DAW software (which is currently LMMS because it's easy to put MP3's in and use them as notes.) This lets me actually compose like a musician. Through making The Upturned, I think I've just begun to get a little better at creating satisfying melodies and good bass melodies. But I still have no idea what I'm doing, and musical terminology and music theory is so confusing that even after trying to learn it for several years, none of it really helps. (I think the next step would be to learn an actual instrument, like a guitar, but I haven't crossed that barrier.) The last time I used this technique was making the 4th and 5th ambient track for Lethal Company, which I approached like poems or symphonies, with a narrative flow. That was really fun for me and I got sort of carried away with it. The next time I make a silly or bouncy sort of game (like The Upturned), there's going to be obvious improvement in the soundtrack, but it will be different.

I think I aspire to John Williams' ability to capture a specific tone and whimsy with the perfect melody, making something instantly iconic and memorable and yet unique. Two moments where I felt like I did something intentionally were this moment in Shrimp's theme and the jazzy bass line in the beginning of Gonna Do All. There were a couple moments where I toyed with the idea of a central musical motif in The Upturned, but it never went anywhere since I felt like I was shoehorning it in. Certainly didn't go as far as creating a musical language like Undertale does.

I'm worried to talk about the literal meaning of certain events in the story, because obviously that would ruin the mystery which indicates that there is a larger world beyond what the characters can see. But I'm going to brainstorm a little about what might have inspired this part. My storytelling philosophy in The Upturned was very nonchalant and "discovery-written" with a focus on character and charm and fun. So a lot of it was just following where my heart wanted to go.

Since the story takes place in the afterlife, for me it naturally veered into "eldritch" horror. I haven't read Lovecraft, but I've become familiar with this kind of horror (cause it's been pretty popular), and I think I'm channeling some of that. There are evil and good forces at play, which are gigantic and unknown to these characters.

I've realized that one of the primary emotions I engage the world with is fear. There is terrible, cowardly fear. But there is also wonderful, unforgettable fear, like coming face-to-face with a wild lion, or a god that loves you. If the unfathomable, eldritch being is always just an inhuman abomination that wants to take over (or wouldn't mind squashing me under its feet), in my opinion, it starts to feel pretty fathomable. On a smaller level, this was the kind of realization that led to making Shrimp, a character that's supposed to make the player feel ambivalent. Ambivalence is sort of a mix of fear and hope, which feels disarming. I think a lot of The Upturned is reflecting a sense of ambivalence I have.

But besides that, I think The Upturned is also just about asking why bad things happen to good people. While writing it, I recognized some parallels to the Book of Job, which is about a good guy asking why he's gone through so much undeserved misfortune and lost everything, and the answer is kind of indescribable.

I think many horror games are too hopeless and grotesque. Dead Seater felt overall distant and unlikeable for this reason. Even though that was sort of intentional, I didn't like the result. So The Upturned was almost a direct response / antithesis. Try comparing the ending of Dead Seater to The Upturned. It gets really trippy for me when I start making connections.

I don't know. When I was a kid, I liked to run around with my hands up in front of my face, turn all slowly, and pretend my entire field of view was the screen of a first-person stealth game. So I've lived video games since I can remember, and I always messed with level editors when they were available. Recently, I randomly remembered having a whale of a time with the level editor in Rabbids Go Home for the DS. So if there was an editor, you know I was on it. I've always been fascinated with human psychology. When we had a couple hamsters, I set up mazes for them with upside-down Dixie cups and watched them run through.

Maybe looking at what things you've always liked to do as a kid could help you find your "creative drive." Because of Roblox I was lucky I didn't have to do much searching. (Though I do literally own over 400 abandoned games on Roblox, which were just me messing around with no sense of scope and no idea what kind of games I really wanted to make.) But if you know you want to make games and don't have a creative drive, the best thing is probably to find and play all sorts of games.

If I had to choose anyone, I would say my brother helped give me an appreciation for animation and music. He is very critical, and that helped me to start appreciating good storytelling and judging and evaluating the art I take in.