Play soundtrack
_core:_:the_lost_city's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Execution | #1 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Overall Uniqueness/Creativity | #2 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Listenability | #3 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Overall | #4 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| Composing Quality | #11 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Sense of Atmosphere | #16 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| Correlation to Theme | #21 | 3.650 | 3.650 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Link to Streaming Service
http://soundcloud.com/nova-607800663/sets/core_the_lost_city
Description
So, a lost city theme! I had the idea to go for something fun (sonically speaking) and do a crunchy, arpeggio heavy take on 90s / 80s background music as the inspiration for this soundtrack. Hopefully it came through in the design of the ambience and the general atmosphere!
As far as the game idea, I would imagine this as a lidar/radar scanning game from a 1st person perspective where you play as a lil robot guy (with amnesia after a big crash in your drilling pod) exploring a few ancient and forgotten cities in a massive cave system beneath the surface of an alien plant. Yknow, think Journey to the Center of the Earth or something like that. The background percussive instruments are randomly determined using an LFO RNG thingy I learned how to make, leaning into the game having pseudorandom levels (like Darkwood) with monuments on your map being a way to orient yourself. No objective markers - you compare your map and your heading to find the way around using the monuments located on the primary map.
Not much more to it than that, hope you guys enjoy it! I forgot this jam was for one week so a lot of this is quick draft material, and I wanted 5 areas (not 3) but oh well XD.
Screenshot of DAW
in project
Description of Setup (Optional but recommended)
FL Studio 2024:
Vital - used for pulse bases, one or two pad presets, and a triple-wavetable macro-enabled pluck that I modified a tad for each song
LABS: Some choir samples from the celtic? choir - specifically the disharmony one with voices going crazy
DecentSampler: Pads from the Santa Monica, Organic Orchestra, Basic Piano, and many others. Fantastic tool!!! Too many inclusions to list.
A super grainy sample of a Yamaha bell preset, used in the Spectrobes video game and then hit with more destructor and lo-fi crunch till it sounds like a radar ping
A few samples of static or microphone clicks - lots of freely available percussive presets, either crunched or reversed or pitched up or down
An LFO randomizer generating random numbers for the songs - useful for random pitch assignment, L/R panning, arpeggiator percussion selection, honestly the list goes on and on. Got a lot of mileage out of that thing. Each render is unique with the background elements - sometimes I had to reroll to get a better one lol.
My voice - singing a few lines, occasionally in the background, ran through a vocoder with static constantly played over it - sometimes you hear the voice, sometimes you hear it vocoded through the background static.
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Comments
Interesting take on the theme, apreciated how you layed out the track, and I believe these were some of the best mixes in the jam honestly, well done!
Take care :)
Cool stuff, feel like on dystopian world.
Very interesting tracks, I would say my most favorite aspect is the mechanical-ness and bit-crushy texture prevalent in each track! Coherent and consistent with what you wanted to go for.
Masterpiece !!! Really impressed, one of my favorite for sure, thanks a lot for sharing <3 excited to hear more of your works !!!
Great work as always Nova!
Amazing work, melodic and catchy when it needs to be and so creative and ethereal aswell. I really like the bitcrushed section at the end of core_menu_theme, the individual textures mirror eachother really well.
Well... Time for one of the best composers of these jams!
First of all: I like the design of your publication very much! This kind of abandoned, ancient and cool futurism...
core_title_splash - I feel the atmosphere of subnautica... Huge amount of perfectly mixed effects, general synthetic melody and MEN'S VOICE OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHH
core_menu_theme - I'm starting to like this synthetic chaos more and more... And on this track I'm starting to feel... something beep . The beatcrash melody starting at 0:45 is perfect! (I'm a little bitcrush fan :> ).
core_basalt_plains - plants? I can hear nature... But this nature seems a bit synthetic (I use that word too often, lol)
core_fluorite_forest - Bubbles? I don't know why, but I get a strong association with bubbles.... Also jugs being knocked around with something Synthetic.
core_sodium_mountains-- Ohh. this track sounds like horror! Did we go down somewhere? Or need to explore something unsafe.....
...and it's awesome >:]
What can we say in general? Well... you have as usual a good mix, amazing combination of sounds, sfx and synths... in short, everything I love! During the whole soundtrack I felt the vibes of subnautica :>
Cool work! I love it!