Soundtrack and Vibes

Plus... I Need Your Help!

Welcome back! I hope everyone enjoyed some quality family time over the holidays. After a bit of a break, I’m back to work on Fantasy Football Tactics and continue to make steady progress. I’ll give a more detailed update at the end of this post, along with an exciting poll–please help me by voting!

Today I’m sharing the first 3 songs from the Fantasy Football Tactics soundtrack! Those with keen ears have probably heard bits of these in my social media posts or previous videos, but hopefully it’s a more complete experience getting to hear the full track.

Video Game Music

Music is such a critical part of the game experience. You can likely summon a tune or two in your head right now from your favorite game, whether it’s the iconic Super Mario Bros. theme or something more obscure like the save game music from ICO. The right melody can help create tension, excitement, a sense of wonder or even calm after a stressful encounter.

As a teenager, I wrote game music with friends (I’m lucky to have a few of those friends reading this very post!) inspired by our favorite composers like Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu. I even wrote the soundtrack for a friend’s college game project, which was admittedly pretty terrible. But I now know that is part of the process, and after hundreds of songs written over decades, I like to think I’m improving.

My love for game music has only grown and I am often affectionately referred to as “DJ Roomba” by my family as I flit about the house with my Video Game OST Playlist (clocking in at a modest 10,000 songs) on shuffle. Game music is also far more accessible today than it used to be, which has allowed me to broaden my horizons by discovering composers like Noriko Matsueda, Noriyuki Iwadare, Lena Raine, and most recently, Frédéric Tardif.

I haven’t shared many of my compositions publicly, but with Fantasy Football Tactics, I’m finally throwing my hat in the ring and achieving two dreams for the price of one by becoming a bona fide video game composer in addition to developer. Why not, right?!

Main Theme

After years of just hunting and pecking around to find notes that sounded good together, I finally put my head down during the pandemic and started to learn how to play piano. I watched and studied the equivalent of two semesters of Music Theory on YouTube (twice)! I started learning my major and minor scales, the circle of fifths, how chords are built, functional harmony, form and much more. I also started composing my collection of “Preludes”, something many classical composers did to exercise their mastery of each of the major/minor scales. I have 13 written with about 11 to go… it’s something I hope to finish and publish some day!

This is the first full song I wrote with intention for FFT after these studies. I was heavily inspired by the opening tracks to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy V. The Zelda track has this floaty and dreamy piano going back and forth between two chords and a chill vibe. The Final Fantasy V Main Theme is interesting… I first heard it on the music sampler that came with the FFV/VI re-release for PlayStation 1 back in 1999. This was the first time FFV was ever available in English and what struck me was how nostalgic the song felt, even though I had never experienced the game before. That sense of nostalgia was something I wanted to evoke with my main theme as well. It’s a short and quirky song that never takes itself too seriously, while also providing an inviting and warm welcome to the player. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Churchyards

For the soundtrack to FFT, I’m taking a two-pronged approach. Some of the songs are being written from scratch, but there’s also a decent amount of unreleased tracks from my backlog that fit the vibe, most of which were written eight years ago on the bus while commuting to work in Denver. I used GarageBand on my iPhone every day and eventually produced something worthwhile, just like a monkey and a typewriter!

This is one of the songs I wrote on the bus, heading to/from Denver on I-25 circa 2012-2016. It was originally intended for my unreleased game project at the time called Chroma Keeper (I hope to revisit this project some day!), but has such a simple, catchy melody and optimistic vibe, I knew it would be perfect for the first major battle of FFT in the Churchyards level with its bright green grass and cloudy blue skies. I made a few modifications to it, specifically to improve the bass groove and modify one of the voices to be an organ to make the sound fit better for a church.

Gothic Pasture

Some songs are hard to write. They take revisiting over several days or weeks to get all the parts sounding good, or a melody that haunts you for years without being able to place... then there’s the opposite. The times where you sit down and an entire song pours out fully formed in a matter of hours as if it always existed and you simply discovered it. I wrote this track start-to-finish on my iPad on a flight from Denver to Cleveland in 2015 and really loved it, but was never sure what to do with it. I arranged a version with realistic sounding instruments and thought it might work as an instrumental rock song, but when I started getting serious about developing FFT, I knew it was meant to be a battle theme. After all, I had Canton and the Football Hall of Fame on my brain when I was writing it, and the original title was simply “Cleveland.” I imagined a dark teal pasture with rolling hills and a black barn complete with rain, lightning and thunder (included here for full effect). The song completely informed the level design for Gothic Pasture instead of the other way around.

Dev Update!

Since the last update I’ve been very focused on content, in particular the single player adventure mode, as I drive towards delivering the first playtest of FFT to YOU! The playtest will have the first four main quests, four optional side quests, and sixteen abilities to unlock and unleash. It will also have the Quick Match mode allowing you to play head-to-head with another person or a computer controlled opponent. I’m 75% of the way done with the content for the playtest, and then have a few bugs and issues to work through. This is where I could really use your help!

Please take a second to vote in the following poll. This will help me gauge interest in participating in the playtest and which platform(s) to focus on for the initial launch. There will eventually be a way to play on each of the platforms, but I would like to prioritize my remaining work so I can deliver the playtest as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading and listening to my music! I welcome feedback on the initial songs I’ve shared and would also love to hear if you have any favorite video game music, so please leave a comment letting me know what you think! Until next time, enjoy the NFL Playoffs!