Game 1: Aseum

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Brief: Menu music with a Deep and ominous choir singing as well as a "tempo jump" to a battle theme with the sense that an enemy army has arrived.

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I had spent a few hours looking at free "currently in development" games within a variety of places including gamejolt.com as well as within Reddit. With the ones I had found, I then asked the developers of said games if they required my services as a composer. I didn't receive feedback and was determined to find 5 games I could begin composing for as a means to kickstart my professional portfolio. After some online discussions and some failed attempts due to language barriers and miscommunication, I felt dejected and began speaking to people within the Discord server "Game Dev League's" voice chat channels. I met a man who had begun work on an MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online game) involving the entire player community completing quests to further the entire game's main story. He listened to my request to find work and said that he hadn't even begun thinking about artistic elements for his game, and if I chose to do so, I could create a song for him, and once his funding is secured and operations for the game including making a team and legitimizing the project, are complete, he could then hire me as a composer if he thought my work was appropriate.  

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So I began composing and immediately thought of 2 discerning factors, the instrumentation and the chord pattern. The client had used the phrase "as if the enemies' army were at the top of the hill descending onto the player on horses" which was quite a vivid description which definitely helped with the composing process. I thought of using the sample pack of "orchestral devices: BATTALION" a flurries collection of pompous brass with dramatic tones, perfect for the sound of battles as well as "emergence audio viola textures" with expressive strings which added a prominent dramatic undertone to the composition. For added tension, I used Spitfire Audio's Apterture orchestra to display violins and stringed elements as well as a prominent string pluck sound named "col lagne" which provided an excellent percussive backdrop to the piece. I sampled a note from this instrument at a lower velocity than a loud prominent pluck and multiplied the signal and clustered them together to create the impression of horse gallops or armoured marching in the piece. As well as this I explored old gregorian recordings and replicated the tone as well as the male presence and note pattern with plenty of wet hall reverb. 

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I finished the song and sent it to the client, who returned with a phone call almost immediately with the feedback that a section was too loud but that the song was "everything he had hoped for in a menu theme". He had also requested to loop the tense and rhythmically accelerated portion of the song as a means to loop after the introductory portion of the song, below is my alteration of the track which includes the possibility of the loop without the ending of the song and fade-ins and fade-outs which satisfied the clients wishes. 

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This project taught me the importance of research as the entire project could not have been made possible if I hadn't examined existing games with a medieval war setting such as Skyrim: Oblivion or For Honor as well as the existing music for the Lord of the Rings film, I wouldn't have been capable of delivering a product with the ambitious energy the client requested. Asking the client for references too was important as they at first seemed reluctant and misunderstood the compositional process and simply stated to "do what feels best", after some clarification they informed me of the sources of inspiration as mentioned above and I was able to compose a song for them that fit their demands.