How the organizer for Wolfskin's Curse looked in the early stages of the project.

<aside> 🎼 A breakdown of what's going on

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I look through the outline and try to determine what kind of music is needed. I try to be more general so that music can be re-used if necessary.

I leave the Title blank, and leave it up to the musicians to come up with titles for their tracks.

Inspirations links to music that is similar in tone or tempo to what I want, but writing down feelings, moods and descriptors can work well too, eg: foreboding, ominous, cheerful, melancholy, etc...

Progress for Wolfskin's Curse went like this:

In Progress → Needs Mixing and Mastering → Mixed → Mastered (DONE)

Depending on your resources and time, you may have a different way of recording progress! We were lucky enough to make use of a studio to do our mixing and mastering. That was reflected and accounted for in the process.

Prompts

When you're planning for music for a game jam visual novel, I kept three things in mind:

• The scene - where is the music going to be played? Is music required there?
• Emotions evoked - what are your characters feeling? How do you want your players to feel?
• Character themes - is a character going to make an entrance? Is there a scene focused on them?

If the music you envision satisfies at least two categories, you may want to put it in the Visual Novel.

For example: if you plan to have a character theme it should play when they enter, do something cool or during their moment. It may sound jarring to have the character theme show up a bit after or before their entrance.

You may also find that not every character needs to have a theme for the sake of having one. Use discretion for themes that would only occur once!

The next sections are co-written by my friend and composer, Luis "RunnerGuitar" Guerrero on his experiences as the lead composer. I hope any director or musician reading this will find it informative and helpful!

Finding inspirations