Video Game Music by Will Leamon

The Mechanic Runs

This was a good one for me as I did a lot of sound design for this.

All of the instruments are custom made by me myself and I. I relied on Splice to use industrial sounds for the drums. Other than a 808 kick sound, the rest is air ratchets, button toggles, compressor hisses and what not.

The other instruments, keys, bass and horns are all Reason Combinators I came up with and have / will post to the Instruments section of the site. Sadly I can't post the Ableton Drum rack for the drums as Splice would get pretty snitty about me giving away their stuff without a license.

(This "song" doesn't actually exist in the game. Instead as the player advances through the playfield, the component stems get more and more intense. So you'd have to be a pretty good player to hear all of the music. So I come up with these "stem songs" just to demonstrate the full effect. I use the "player loses" stem as the quick bridge in the middle and "player wins" stem for the end. I'll post a link to the game just as soon as the team posts it to Itch.io. Right now we still have a few hours left for tweaks.)

The Light In The Dark

The game was about a girl lost in the woods (Morphine song anyone?) at night. She's trying to find her way home but her lamp is running out of oil. She must keep it lit because it keeps the monster of the dark at bay. OK, so none of that actually happened but that was the motivation for this song. It's built on stems, but here you get an idea of what it would sound like if your lamp started full and you simply let it run out. 

Magic On The Dance Floor!

We had a lot of fun making Magic On The Dance Floor but the music was a challenge. It's a music based game but game players don't actually have time to really "listen" to the music. Instead the player experiences music more than listens to it. So you can't get all crazy detailed because no one's going to hear your awesome ghost notes and weird time signatures while trying to read falling arrows and time keyboard presses accurately. 

I think this is a healthy compromise of music that needs to be "front and center" in a game without overloading the player.  - Will.

Foodvana

I made this for a game about food that never saw the light of day which was sad because this is my first foray into a "Jazz" sound and I rather enjoyed it. I hope some day another game comes along that this fits for and I can keep developing it.

An Archer's Trial

Listen to "An Archer's Trial"

This was produced for an 8bit game that the dev insisted on Chiptune for. This is the project that taught me when devs say "Chiptune" they don't mean Chiptune, they just mean "old-timey" sounding but what to appear in the know. I would later re-develop this sound into 8bit Organa, a synth I designed in Reason to help me quickly produce "old-timey" whoops I mean "Chiptune" scores.

A Theme For Dying

Listen to "A Theme For Dying"

I've never actually used this in a video game, it was originally used in a poetry reading, but I think it's one of the more common necessities for most thriller / horror games. It's meant as a pad to underscore dialogue - so yeah I know how to do that too. 

Tiles of Doom Stem Song

Listen to "Tiles of Doom"

The first game jam I did was a game called Tiles of Doom. Here are all the stems for that game laid out in as close to a "song" format as I can get it. (I call it a stem-song).