A Music Update From Dane

Greetings Citybounders, this is your composer speaking. While things progress in the programing side of the project, I thought I'd get you up to speed on how the music aspect is coming along. The trolly will be around with a refreshment selection of ginger ale or scotch momentarily.

I'll give a few paragraphs of exposition. If you want to skip this part, go to the bold and read from there.

The original plan was to write a few pieces for each season of the game (about 4 pieces per season), with each piece being approximately 5 minutes in length. Chris and I got to work drafting up some pieces and ironing out the contextual direction for the game. Since a soundtrack can have an immense effect on the success of a game, we were very careful with our choices at the start - writing about 8 pieces between us. Here is a playlist containing the initial tracks I wrote for the game. You might recognize some of them from Anselm's updates. (Once I get some links from Chris, I'll include his work as well. I don't like reposting people's work without their permission)

2015 came and Chris and I had other projects we needed to work on. Anselm began the arduous task of building the entire engine by which Citybound will run. It came with a lot of technical information that I didn't understand. I can program in Kontakt script, but that's it. We took the year to work on our other projects and I began to really sharpen up my skills by putting them to the grindstone of Abelton and unthinkable pounds of coffee.

February 2016. The Citybound crew of 3ish is still kicking and we've stayed in touch. Everyone is doing their own part of the project, and things are going as smooth as ever. I saw that Anselm was making rather impressive strides in his C++ programing/port, and I had an itch to write. Cue music update.

Here is a compilation of the new music I've written (and finished) since February. The music here is much more diverse, and reflects more of the Autumn/Winter side of the game soundtrack.

The direction of the music has gone the way of many simulation games from yesteryear. There is music in numerous genres from Jazz to House to Downtempo to Hip Hop, and it is all categorized in respective seasons. We have upped the music production to the point where each season will likely have more than 4 tracks each, with a total soundtrack length nearing the 2 hour mark. We are currently at an hour and 4 minutes, which made a midway point update necessary.

The end goal is to write enough music to create a vastly immersive, diverse playing experience as well as get great pieces out into the world. Nothing beats a game with snappy music, and we will do our best to deliver that to you.

I would like to request you, the community's feedback. Do you like where the music is heading? Does it sound good to you? What do you want to hear heading into the second half of the soundtrack? Can you tell I'm on 4 hours of sleep based on how poorly this is written?

Finally, I want to thank you guys for sticking around for this project. It's looking really fun, and I can't wait to get my hands on an alpha copy sometime.

Comments? Questions? Cusswords? Opposing viewpoints?