Sortlandia: crafting loops for games
- roonskaiver
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Last year, I had the pleasure of working on a little iPad puzzle game called Sortlandia by R2R games. It's a great game and I think you should try it out! It is not as easy it may look, but the challenge is fair.
Speaking of challenge, despite experience writing short bits of incidental music for theatre in the past, I realized that a different approach was necessary to ensure that not only the music held up as interesting and not too repetitive after multiple listens, but that the loop-back moments did not seem forced or awkward (I was going for seamless, like old school video game stuff, so no using fades, for example).
I think the end product works well. As it is a puzzle game, I opted against percussion to keep things sparse and unobtrusive, and I pretty much stuck to a three part ensemble: bass, lead, and harmony. I felt the bass and harmony instruments did a good job of setting and keeping the rhythm. This process cemented in my mind something about my composition style: I am not usually a minimalist, but rather a 'minimalizer', if I can use the term that way. What I mean is that I don't want elements in my music just for the sake of having them there. So the limitations I set for myself, added to the limitation on song duration, actually proved to be quite conducive to making what quickly became a fruitful and fun creative process.
Now about the topic of this post: loops. It's easy to see how dance music takes a simple 4 bar loop and adds and subtracts elements over time to achieve variety, tension, release, and so on. Game music, especially music as short as in Sortlandia, does not have that luxury of time to bring elements in and out of the mix. To me, short-form game music needs to pretty much start saying what it wants to say, so to speak, as soon as possible. There's no time for an 8-bar introduction to set the mood as I've already wasted ten to fifteen seconds if I do that. Practically speaking, that intro will only become more awkward and unwieldy once the music loops, as the one minute length of the piece is hardly enough time to warrant hearing a lead-in to the main theme every single time it repeats (imagine a one minute loop of I Feel Fine by the Beatles where you play that opening guitar lick and rhythm pick up before each hearing of the first verse).
So, more or less, game music of the looping variety (especially the kind like mine that is emulating music of older game consoles) needs to be all gas, no brakes, or close to that. Get the main theme out there. So what did I do in the end? Listen to a few clips below. In each one, I basically present an A section, then a B section that contrasts it, and then a C section that develops either section idea more, but also sets things up to return logically to the chord progression of the A section. You get three parts that are coherent enough to flow together but just varied enough to not feel repetitious within a single loop.
Note: If you start wondering about the notation as you watch: yes, that's what happens when natural playing (with a bit of tempo variation between measures) is recorded in MIDI. In the mix it sounds fine, but, obviously when looking at it, I play a fraction too fast or slow, or sometimes I simply 'roll a chord' - and all of it will look odd in the notation. Chopin would have trouble with this too, given his penchant for rubato playing.
One final item to share. I actually found the short nature made variations easier to compose, so the game features four distinct tracks that all make use of the basic theme for that level to some extent. This decision to compose individual tracks for each zone had the byproduct of making it easier and very enjoyable for me to imagine a symphonic rendition of some of the music from the game, as the variations are all similar enough to mesh well together. If you have played the game, you might recognize in the symphonic version when each variation makes an appearance, almost like you're hearing a medley.
You can view that video here, or on the landing page.
Obviously, I think the best way to enjoy these tunes is while trying your hardest to actually concentrate on clicking the right buttons and levers in the game. That way, the looping nature of the music is not foregrounded. And yes, this will be a shameless plug for the game, which you can download for a reasonable price for either iPad via Apple Store or for PC/Mac via Steam.
On the Apple Store:
On Steam:
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