Hi I’m Lucas! This is the third and last entrance to the Dev log of our game, Take Care of Her. If you want to play our game, just click on this link This dev log is going to stay Spoiler FREE, don’t worry!

For Take Care of Her, I used LogicPro 9 on Mac to record my acoustic guitar, also used the built-in amps and synth that you can use on LogicPro. I'll dive about my way of writing the songs.

Each song was about 30 seconds / 1-minute length, except the end of the game. We didn’t want the music to loop because we felt it would be boring for people since it’s a textual game. Sometimes reading can get annoying if you are trying to focus on the music at the same time. Which is why we decided to use a little bit of music for each memory (= screen), as a way to introduce the mood. It was definitely a moody game, yeah. I’ll just go about three ways of thinking music that I used to compose them.

1 – Diegetic music ###

• A sound is diegetic whether it’s part of the action. If you are looking at a movie, you hear a phone rings, and the character in the movie picks up the phone, then the sound is diegetic because it’s directly in the action.

In Take care of Her, I tried to reproduce this process with some songs I wrote. First memory, “Sacrifice”, tells the reader that Eva is playing the guitar, lazily lying in the grass. Thus, I wrote a guitar part that would feel nonchalant and also very smooth. It’s the end of the year, your friend is pinching some strings on their guitar: you know exactly what’s the tone of what he’s playing. Nostalgic and chill.

This is the same in “Intimity”, where the characters are listening to a music with piano, drums, and guitar in the text. This is a “fake diegetic music”, because I composed something with these three instruments. The player can then hear what the characters are listening to, but not hear what’s happening in the woods where they are taking a walk.

2 – Moody music

• Moody music doesn’t exist, don’t use this in anything you’d say :D I just feel like this is the correct word for what I tried to do ; also this is what you’ll often encounter in most of today’s games’ OST. Moody musics are songs that try to create an emotional connection between what’s happening and what you are listening to. They try to depict an emotion, a feeling for what is going on in a particular scene and try to convey this feeling with instruments.

I wrote some songs with this process in mind in Take Care of Her. This can be the case for “Shooting Stars”, “Different” or “Moving In”. All three songs use some instruments or rhythms that try to convey emotions. In "Shooting Stars", I’m using a very “crystal” sound that I felt like as pure as the shooting stars dashing in the sky. "Different" use a combination of distorted drums and a very light guitar to represent the loneliness of the character trying to escape from the high drums (ie the city). "Moving In", last, use a fast rhythm and the classic pentatonic / blues scale to create a jumpy song. I moved out recently, and oh boy, you need to have a fast rhythm :D !

3 – Symbolism music

• Symbolism music also doesn’t exist – but you get the idea. This last part is especially about the idea behind the songs you can hear at the end of the game. Each memory is then represented with a single chord played for 10 seconds.

The idea behind this process is to associate a chord for each character that is mentioned. *It’s like in *Peter and the wolf, an old fairy tale for children, **where each character is associated to an orchestra instrument.

In the last part of our game, the player is presented with screens with very little text, but strong meaning, since it’s a choice game: you keep a memory but choose to erase one for it. Each screen comes with a chord (“Eva”, ”Dad”, ”Rose”, ”Mother”), all part of a 4 chords progression I wrote for a song. Thus, each character is portrayed by a mood and a chord, part of the same “song” , thus the same life, Daniel’s life. The very last song keeps playing and keeps spinning between your right and left ear, as to say that you can’t really escape it – your choices, nor their consequences.

Thanks you for reading this very long bit of text, I hope you had some fun (and learned some stuff!) Please give me some feedbacks, and, please, Take Care of Her