Before you read the next few paragraphs, I want you to listen to the whole thing in its entirety. It's a very strange thing to ask but I feel it's important that you form your own opinion of the piece first before you hear what I personally have to say.

I'm not a gamedev student and my friends just asked me to make music for them so I was pretty hands off during the whole creative process. I was just given some prompts and some sneak peeks at whatever build they had going on. It was a week or so before the deadline so the team was already cutting corners trying to get their first thesis out. I was told there was going to be 2 boss fights in the game and that they needed a boss theme. I was already a bit pressured since time was very important. Not to rag on my friends or the team or anything, it's just a fact that it happens sometimes.

I think this was one of the few instances where I was already in a "negative" mindset when making music. Unlike writing music for your own grade where you can make it as good or as shit as you want, this was being made for someone else and they would have to deal with whatever output I gave. I WANTED to make this sound exactly how I want it to because I always want to deliver properly when it comes to stuff like this. Because of the time constraint and just general art block it was a very difficult time.

I expressed that I was very angry writing this piece along with the prologue theme and part of me feels like that shows in the music itself especially this one.

Much like the prologue theme, it's just a re-use of the existing music already. A section of the overworld theme (FireCat) turned into a minor key and the B section of level 2 (Eruption). There wasn't a lot of originality I feel when it came to stapling these parts together since I barely did anything with the melodies, the instrumentation is very "bland" I feel and there isn't really any sense of development in the overall piece.

The mixing too is so off. The bass is way to loud and annoying while the drums are a bit too in your face for my liking. Unlike some of the other more complex songs I've made where it had effects, panning etc. This one was clearly just lightly touched up on and submitted without even thinking.

A boss theme should be something exciting to the player where it gets them hyped up to face the next challenge but with this it just felt like I was relying on every crutch I had to just get something out there. ADMITTEDLY it's not that bad. It's very much better than most of my early garbage and fully trashed songs that will never see the light of day.

I'm sure that some of you, maybe even most of you would probably agree that it's fine. Only with hindsight can you really see a piece of music for what it is and it's very important to take a few steps back and just look and LISTEN to what's IN front of you. This is why I wanted you to form your own opinion first before knowing how this track was even made.

An important lesson to learn is to know when to accept situations like this where there really wasn't anything I could have done to make this better given situation. I still don't think very highly of this track in particular. It's my weakest track on FireCat game but I feel it's very important to show and express why I feel that way because it's all part of the creative process and growing as a musician.

Man if I only I had like a separate place to upload all of my actual garbage. It would be a very fun time to just go through all of my incomplete stinkers just to point and laugh. I have most of every piece of sheet music and FL file that was saved since the start of my college up to now. It would probably shed some light on the very slow learning process over a few years. While I do feel that most of them are completely worthless, I still hold a teeny tiny bit of sentimentality since it's the equivalent of looking through an old photo album in musical format.