As fun as games can be, it has to stop somewhere. You ever get that feeling when a game just ends PERFECTLY? The game felt like it explored a lot of its mechanics, the story ended conclusively and you personally feel satisfied? It's very rare to find games like that since you usually end up wanting just a little bit more. Sometimes a game is waaaaay too long and you just want to get it over with which is understandable.

Between you and me, this was supposed to be the title screen but it sounded bitter sweet and they didn't want that for a first impression kinda deal so I had to scrap it. I was super against scrapping it because it sounded really nice so I convinced them to turn it into the end screen song. I'm glad a compromise was reached because I really like this one too.

In terms of composition, this wasn't really anything special. I forget how it went in my head but I really wanted a descending bass so I just slapped on whatever worked. I feel like this piece really shines because of it's arrangement and mixing though.

While working with SNES style sounds I try to avoid adding effects other than reverb just to keep it in that style of music. For this one though I decided to just try and see what would come out. Delay, EQ filters and reverb all mash together to create this very soft atmosphere to the whole track. Listening to this again I couldn't really recognize what instruments were what. I opened the FL Studio file and the main instruments are all SNES synths which adds to the dreamy atmosphere.

The arpeggio kinda sound you hear about half way through is actually an ocarina fiddled with to make it sound like a sine wave I think. I surprised myself that that's actually the ocarina patch. As I inspect my mixer I realized that I botched an effect I was trying to do with it. In school my mixing professor taught us how you can have an instrument sound "wider" than it really is by having two channels with opposite polarities cancel each other out while panning in the middle. What I failed to do here was have two channels for left and right and the middle two channels were panned the opposite sides so reversing the polarity did literally nothing. Lesson learned waaaay later I suppose. Still sounds nice though...

Speaking of synths, I can never understand how electronic musicians create such interesting textures with synthesizers. I don't particularly listen to that style of music myself but when I see snippets of it being made like on twitter or youtube I just wonder "what the fuck how". Is it their synth plugin? Is it how it's mixed? Is it the several layers of synths to create one specific sound? Years of experience? ALL OF IT COMBINED? I'll never know. I've dabbled a bit but it really only ends up sounding very amateurish. The stuff I make always sounds too thin I think? Not quite sure how to explain it without really showing. Maybe next time.

My only hope was that when my friends' professors play the game they actually sat on the end screen to listen to the song. They gave a perfect score on sound design and music which was my work even though I'm not in that class but how do I know they really sat down and appreciated it? Nah just kidding, I know that most people won't probably sit and listen to the music unless they REALLY like it. I think as long as they don't call it bad then it's good on my book haha.