After finishing up that game jam from earlier, I partnered again with Wrong Way Games on a fangame project for Halloween: “Unown Message,” set in the Pokemon universe. Like the previous jam, it was built in GB Studio, meaning it is theoretically playable on a real Game Boy, so the music also had to be built using the tracker. It was quite a challenge to pull off a horror/ambient type of soundtrack using that hardware, especially when I am very inexperienced with the tracker. Hopefully it turned out alright. The game is a fangame and so is only available for free on itch.io, but all the music is entirely original and I will be releasing it everywhere I can. For the moment, it is available on Bandcamp.

Yes, this is a thing now. It’s the biggest and most robust of the fake soundtracks thus far. For this project, the goal was to create a fully cohesive soundtrack that stretched my compositional abilities. I wanted something that defied the typical JRPG music format, something with more adventurous harmonies, liberal melodies, ambient music, complex moods. It was going to be a one-of-a-kind thing. Turns out Dragon Quest IV already did all of this. Oops!

You can purchase the album on Bandcamp, but I’ve also made the score videos available on YouTube.

This is the soundtrack to the game “Love Always Runs Away.” It’s an entry for the GBJam10 over on itch.io, created by Wrong Way Games and composed by myself. The game was created in GB Studio so I had to export the audio into a format that was playable outside a ROM, which did slightly change playback but this is almost indistinguishable from the original game.

Every track is based on a singular chord progression, though I vary it after the first few bars. My primary inspirations here were the original Final Fantasy games and the Final Fantasy Legend Game Boy counterparts.

A musical adventure of epic proportions for piano and viola, for adventurous performers. Each of the five movement covers a different style, from modern and angular to pop piano.

The score is now available for purchase! However, I don’t have an official recording and don’t know when that could happen. Until then, there is a MIDI rendition available on YouTube if you want to get an idea of the piece.

Several years back now I worked on a board game called, well, “Congress: The Board Game.” It was a send-off of American politics, in particular the backstabbing, wheeling-and-dealing type of politics you needed to do to get anything done around here. When my brother first created the idea back in 2015, there was still a pretense to bipartisanship and a bit of fun to be had in roleplaying here. But this game is just impossible to play now, unfortunately. And it never got off the ground. But in making the advertising for it, I got to create this track, and now I make it available for you on SoundCloud. (Maybe I’ll upload it elsewhere someday.)

For 2022 I wanted to start focusing again on music creation for its own sake - writing pieces I wanted to write because I wanted to write them, unattached to another project. It took a while to get there due to the general chaos of the world right now, but I finally finished this piece.

I chose “Epic” as a title for a couple of reasons. One, it’s a very long piece, about 20 minutes, and moves through a lot of themes and moods throughout. I hesitate to say it tells a story, but it kind of does? As the titles of each movement show, the piece progresses through different times of the day, from dawn to night. I also wanted the title to be generic enough that I could use it for future piano pieces, so this would be epic no. 1.

This piece is available for purchase, both the sheet music and the recording!