How the theme song of LUNA was born

By  WangQian

When I started to compose for LUNA, things didn't go well in the beginning. We had to contact each other online, since Betty lived in London and I was in Shanghai. And that caused some communication issues, such as my failed attempt at making a song based on what I felt about the game demo before I even knew anything about the background story of LUNA. However the subject I wanna talk about here is how the music originally sounded like and how it became the music you hear in the game now.

The first try I made was actually not the theme song, which may be strange because usually people tend to compose a theme song based on the story at the beginning. However I made a song just based on what I felt after playing the first level of the demo. (see image on the left) And actually that doesn’t sound like LUNA at all if we listen to it now. Well, this is also part of music composition and I should accept it. As a result, that pushed me to talk to Betty about the background story of LUNA.
 

As you can see it is totally different from what LUNA sounds like now, because it doesn’t match the world of LUNA. So I learned more information about LUNA after I talked to Betty. In this game, the deeper the player explores, the more mysteries begin to unfold themselves, and the world of LUNA seems to start to reveal more of the dark side along with the magical atmosphere. And only when the player gets deep into the story, the true relationship between the characters can be truly realized. Without revealing too much about the story, I have to say, it was really the emotion and relationship between the characters, the trust and the conflict, that touched me. Along with this information, I made the first piano version of a theme song that matched the game more than the former one. Here it is.

Well, this sounds like Debussy, is it? Yes, I thought the story happened not so long ago, more like something that is magical and dreamlike. However Betty told me that this story should happen much earlier than this, even before everything. As for that, she gave me a suggestion that the music theme could just start from 29’’, which matched the game feeling very well and I definitely agreed with that. Later on Betty sent me a very early stage of a trailer video for me to compose with. I started  working on this video immediately without even finishing the theme song at that time. And that caused another problem as follows.

Thank God this is not the final version of the trailer. This is another exact example of composition for the whole video without finishing a theme song. Very wrong move. Since I just allowed the video to lead me without knowing what kind of song I wanted to compose. That, of course, was not approved. After many meetings and lots of discussions with Betty, we agreed that there should be a theme song representing LUNA. It should tell a story about this magical world. It should happen in a very early time, almost ancient, where magic would exist. It should pass the emotion of the close bond between the characters to the audience. So I slowed down, took a very careful thought about what I really wanted to express to the players about LUNA. And then a demo of piano version came out.

After that, things were getting better and better. Everything just took place naturally step by step. We decided to use this theme song in the trailer video. And finally here comes the real birth of the theme song.

It was born with rather cautious considerations than a glimpse of light. I never believed that compositions could burst out of inspiration. It never worked that way at least for me. It must always come out of hard thinking and long processes of polishing. The deeper you think, the more work you put on, and the better the composition will be. And please never make anything before having many very clear discussions with the creator! Or you would make something that you would rather bury at the bottom of the darkness until the end of the world.

Devlog #9 Unity Event, Sound Design & Game Reconstruction Updates

One year ago, we launched our game  campaign. Since then, both LUNA and Lantern Studio have grown so much and became something more than we thought we could be! We surely could not have reached where we are now without all our lovely supporters. As we will be continuously working hard on LUNA, we’d like to say thank you again for being incredibly patient and understanding. Thank you for all the warm support we've received during the past year!

It has been a while since our last update, so here are the things we’ve been working on during these days.

Unity - Unite 2017 Shanghai

This month our team attended this great event where more than 4000 game developers could gather together, to meet up with the Unity experts and industry leaders to explore some of the new creative potential of the Unity engine.

We also met a lot of other local indie game teams during the event, shared our experiences and the challenges faced during the game development process and, last but not least, had a good peek at what other great new indie games are under development at the moment, and hopefully in the future we could give each other more help and support.

We have been introduced to a lot of exciting new technologies for the Unity engine by the Unity dev team, don’t wanna bore everyone with too much tech terms, but for example we’re thinking about using the new Unity Analytics tools for our upcoming Alpha demo, which could help us get the best of all the feedback and data received from the players in order to bring out the best gameplay experience.

Sound Design

It’s time for sound FX to be professionally designed and modified into our game. Together with our game reconstruction, we are now switching to a more effective way for our sound designer to work more closely with the level development. By using the FMOD sound engine, now the interactive parts of the level and its sound design / editing can synchronise much better than before.

Game Reconstruction Updates

Half of the existing levels’ reconstruction work have been completed. According to the plan, there will be 7 levels which is about 25-30% of the whole game content included in our Alpha release. We should be able to give a bit more information about it in our next update, so stay tuned guys!
 

Some thoughts on modern days game music composition

By Wang Qian

Usually my normal work and life is reasonable and boring, but there are still a few things that can change my emotions like a roller coaster. Especially something like non-academic composition, just like LUNA. Sometimes I was so touched by the music, sometimes I couldn’t sleep because I had no inspiration, sometimes I got crazy due to lack of patience but still had to pay attention to the details. However, this made my life feel fulfilled and interesting. This composition work was not only just a work project, but it also provided me with lots of new knowledge after I overcame some hardships and challenges.

For example, in the level “Guardian’s Room” there are several different paintings, where every painting is a story that has a logical connection between each other. When I made the music for this level, I could not just develop a music as simple as a straight line, but should show some logical connection between the music pieces. For this interactive music, I met some technical problems which were not regular music composition problems, but instead were related to the interactive and unpredictable nature of a game.

Screenshot from Level "Guardian's Room"

Screenshot from Level "Guardian's Room"

Note: the text below is technical and boring. If you want to jump straight to the conclusion, here it is:
I don’t want to make cliché music, but interesting and unique music.

During the development of contemporary academic music, there was a bloom of new concepts and ideas about how music should be composed. I didn’t intend to compose any hard-to-understand music for the game (unless the game is avant-garde), but instead try to apply some of the new thoughts and ideas that I got from contemporary academic music concepts.

Here are some thoughts:

  1. About the music composition for the whole game, the music motive should shift logically according to the game scene. The whole game music album should not be a “risotto” with no logical connection with each other. And this logical connection is not only the similarity of the instruments and feeling of the music, but also the connection of theme A to theme B when you develop the motive of the theme.
     
  2. The music has four elements: melody, harmony, rhythm and tone color. In the long music development history, melody was always the priority. With the evolution of music, the harmony and rhythm are always fulfilling the music development no matter if it’s simple heterophony music or colorful romantic music, or even modern jazz. So nowadays, is it a step backwards if we emphasize mostly on the melody and not the other elements when we compose?
     
  3. Should we follow the trends of the market when it comes to music taste? Or should we also lead the progress of music according to the games themselves? Movies, as a big part of the entertainment industry, frequently come up with new and innovative ideas for music, so why not games too?

When I composed music for games before LUNA, these thoughts didn’t come to me. I used to think that game music which suits a game was good enough. However, with the composition of LUNA, I began to think more about how game music should be composed. Although we cannot foresee how game music trend will developed, but one thing we are certain, which is that as long as it has the fun and uniqueness, we know we are doing fine.

About how to create nice but not cliché music, I’m still trying to work on it. Maybe when you listen to this music, you’ll feel like: “Hey, that’s cliché, it’s just so so!”. Yes, I also don’t think I’m doing a perfect job, but these are my personal goals and demands for my compositions, which will hopefully turn into some unique and interesting music as follows. If this composition can inspire and help you to connect more with the game, then it would be even better!

You can click Here to listen to the LUNA game music demo.