Music for The Lost Card

When I was working on my game, The Lost Card, this summer, I had never planned on having sound effects, let alone music. But as the game’s final touches came together, I found the time to do both. I wanted to write a little about the process.

The sound effects came together pretty quickly, thanks to some assets I purchased from Minifantasy. But once I had those in place, something suddenly felt wrong about playing the game which had never been there before. I realized that having sound at all made the lack of background music feel deliberate and strange. I had to add something.

This was easier said than done. I was determined to finish the game by the end of August, and that left me only one week to figure out what to do with music. I could buy some backing tracks from other folks, but this project had always been about learning game dev, and one thing I’d always wanted to do was make music on my own. Opportunity! On the other hand, I’ve never been a musician. Well, I figured there was only one way to find out if I could do it.

I needed advice. To Youtube!

Thanks to numerous videos, I learned I mainly needed two things: a midi controller and software to use it.

Fortunately, I already had a midi controller keyboard laying around as an artifact of a prior aspiration to turn key presses into music (an Akai MPK Mini). That just meant I needed a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation; the software folks use to make music on a computer). While the internet seemed to consider Ableton Live as the best option, I decided to start with something I already had: Garageband.

I was very impressed by the number and variety of instruments available for free in the app. I was able to quickly find some beats that matched the vibe I was looking for and put some melodies on top. I didn’t even resort to using the built-in loops, which felt a little too much like cheating if I could avoid them.

I decided I wanted to make six tracks, one for each of the six regions of the game. I ended up making seven including one for the final boss. I tried my best to keep them all to about 1-2 minutes to keep the size down since the game is meant to be played inside a web page, and of course they had to be loopable.

Here they are. Not bad for a complete beginner, I think. It turns out you don’t need fantastic music if it’s just going to be the background for something else. You might enjoy them better if you play the game.

Mountain Kingdom

Ice Kingdom

Fire Kingdom

Cloud Kingdom

Plant Kingdom

Spirit Kingdom

Final Boss