The land is plagued by drought! Dance for us, dance and bring the clouds and the rain.

Here's a little post about how I made the music in Pom Planet!

If you haven't checked it out, it's an action puzzle game where you have to guide tiny creatures. (ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/pom-planet)

Right away I knew I wanted to make the music more ambient than melodic, but I didn't want the ambient noises to be random.

I concluded that I would make a unique track for each of the game mechanics, inspired by the music in Pikmin 4. (Scruffy has a great video about it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAeYosWbXPc)

Making a track for every element is a lot of work, so I decided to make them all relatively short. The original plan was to make the music in 5/4 for an uncanny feeling, but I was struggling to figure out a drum beat that I liked, so I reverted to old reliable 4/4.

I tried to make each track match the feeling of the given mechanic. Some feedback I got from team members was that they wanted stronger melodies, and less sound effect type tracks. Later elements I tried to focus on making them oddly melodic and atonal.

Here’s a 2nd post about how I made the music in Pom Planet!

You can read part one here: ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/pom-planet/$405620

If you haven’t checked it out, Pom Planet is an action puzzle game where you have to guide tiny creatures. (ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/pom-planet)

Having a unique track for all of the elements in the game, I knew I had to have some track for the Poms themselves. However, the Poms are in every level, visible at almost all times, so I had a difficult time deciding what I wanted to do.

Initially, I wrote a calm percussion track and a fast paced percussion track. The idea was for the calm track to play once all of the tiny creatures were born, and for the fast paced one to play when you completed a stage.

Both of these ideas didn't really work. From the player's perspective, the calm track started playing at an arbitrary time and was invasive on the ambient, cerebral mood. The fast paced track generally only played for a couple seconds before the player moved on to the next level.

My conclusion was to remove the calm track from the game. The ambient music could set the mood on its own, I didn't need a track representing the Poms at all times just for the sake of it.

For the fast paced track, I made it play when you scored the first Pom in a level. This infused the levels with a 3 act structure. The music is ambient and scary when the level is unknown and you haven't achieved any success yet. It becomes triumphant when you score your first Pom, and remains that way until finally you complete the stage.