I know that this is a bit late... But Haruka's Waltz is by far my favorite song to come out of this jam.
Play soundtrack
HARUKA's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Composition | #13 | 4.389 | 4.389 |
| Overall | #38 | 4.056 | 4.056 |
| Impression | #46 | 4.028 | 4.028 |
| Creativity | #82 | 3.944 | 3.944 |
| Quality | #86 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Correlation to theme | #109 | 3.917 | 3.917 |
Ranked from 36 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Description
The Game:
Imagine the worlds from Hayao Miyazaki's anime, but in the form of a game. The main character, a girl named Haruka, finds herself in such a world.
The game will take her through several main locations (spirit forest, sea, mountains, cloud kingdom). In each location, she will have to complete several quests in order to pass on.
The gameplay and graphics are similar to games like Genshin Impact and Sky: Children of the Light.
The game is mostly linear.
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Music:
I was mostly inspired by anime`s and some game`s (Genshin Impact and Sky: Children of the Light) music. To make it sound more "japaneese", I used some traditional instruments, such as koto, taiko and flute.
Most of the soundtracks are orchestral. During this project I used Abletone Live 12.
1. "Haruka`s Waltz"
The game has just begun. Haruka finds herself in a large flower meadow and explores the place. One of the main themes of the game sounds.
2. "Dark Ceremony"
Night. Haruka enters the Forest of Spirits and witnesses a mysterious ceremony. The girl has to free a dragon that has become a prisoner of the spirits, without being seen by anyone.
Inspired by traditional japaneese music.
3. "Catching Rabbits"
At the edge of the forest, Haruka meets a rabbit mother whose rabbit children have run away. Haruka decides to help her catch and bring them back home. In a limited time the player has to collect all the rabbits :)
The track was made in the last 4 hours of the Jam... Really wanted to include it.
4. "Playful Waves"
After the forest, Haruka comes to the sea, where she has to learn how to swim and catch a big magical but harmful carp to go further.
With the music, I tried to capture the waves of the sea as best as I could, playing with the rhythm patterns. Here I was inspired by the picture theme of the Jam.
5. "Temple"
The girl's path lies through the mountains. She stumbles upon an abandoned temple where she needs to solve puzzles to find her way further.
6. "Up To The Clouds"
Haruka climbs higher and higher and as the fog clears, the girl sees the Cloud Kingdom.
The theme of clouds plays (second part of the track)
7. "First Fly"
The girl's goal in the Cloud Kingdom is to learn to fly. I tried to write music that sounds like flying.
As in the "Playful Waves", I experimented with a rhythm, which reminds me a wind`s blowing.
8. "Escape To Reality"
Haruka realizes that she is being sucked into this world and needs to get out of it as soon as possible. The player needs to control the girl's flight to get back. This track accompanies this process.
Here you can notice that the main themes of the different locations are played in reverse order, as we move towards the beginning of our journey. First the clouds theme is played, then, the sea. Here (planned cutscene) Haruka starts to fall, but at the last moment she is picked up by the dragon she saved in the forest and carried forward (the triumphant theme from the waltz sounds).
9. "Kakusei" ( eng. "Awakening" )
Haruka wakes up in a school classroom. Her teacher comes up to her and says (in Japanese):
- Haruka! Are you sleeping in class again? Wake up!
The girl realizes that it was all a dream, in which she was traveling through worlds from her fantasies.
This is the end of the game.
Message from the artist
Many thanks for opportunity to participate, it was really fun and I have good experience. I wish you good luck and thanks to everyone who listens to my work! Would appreciate any feedback from you, guys!
Theme
Inside my world
Picture theme
How does it fit the theme?
At the end of the game, Haruka wakes up at school. It turned out that it was all a dream, and the world she was in was her own, inner fantasy world.
The picture theme is not the main theme of the whole game, but it inspired me to create the track "Playful Waves".
Link(s) of the submission on streaming services
https://soundcloud.com/tommy_max_brian/sets/haruka?si=aeae6dc3da4f4c87ba134ef556879ec7&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Number of tracks9
Genre
Orchestral
World/Ethnic
Soundtrack use permission
Yes (CC BY-NC)
Any non-commercial project
Comments
142 days ago(+1)
A huge huge huge thank you for your words. Was smiling joyfully for 5 mins after reading it ))
Really glad, that you liked it!
I loved the instrumentals so much in this track, the use of different instruments that fit the Japanese setting while keeping the fantasy elements. the Escape to Reality song is absolutely peak with it feeling like a climatic scene in a ghibli film.
Now about the protagonist Haruka, I don't know if you are inspired by the game or not but the character design for it looks so uncanny for the Touhou Project's main protagonist Reimu Hakurei if not for the red ribbon on her head:
I know its not intentional since Touhou's style goes entire different than yours but I'm just here to point that out since no one was talking about it, just saying.
No, unless you're into bullet hells and shoot'em ups like in Space Invaders, except absolutely harder.
The Touhou Project is an ongoing franchise that started as early as 1996. It's one of those arcade games you see where they get praised for its absurd difficulty and high scores. The game was created by one guy and managed to spawn in one of the biggest and loyal fanbases in the internet despite the gameplay being absurdly difficult and the Artstyle being very lacking.
One defining feature of Touhou is the music being one of the best kind of music for a game that mostly looks like this:
the songs itself are particularly high quality and mostly absolute bangers, here's an example for one of the theme song of the final boss in one of the more recent release 4 years ago:
Not only the songs in the main game is amazing, the remixes of every song by the fans is amazing. The amount of remixes for the music on this franchise is spectacular to quote a webpage (source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AwesomeMusic/TouhouProject):
"To put the sheer number of remix CDs in perspective, there is a torrent which weighs over one terabyte (specifically 1.8 TB or 1,817,738,246,162 bytes) of over 3000 Touhou remixes, and that only includes the ones that the (English-speaking) maintainers of the torrent have added. It would take over a decade to download it all, and it's getting bigger as more remixes come around."
151 days ago(+1)
thank you very much, Kevin!
btw i now understand that you are the author of Tsuya, the first work that i liked when i started listening to other’s entries. you made a great(!!!) job too, it sounds really like from a dramatic japaneese movie. so unique vibe
thank you for comment!
going to buy monitors soon and revise all the mix, so want to ask, if you can explain a lil bit (if have time ofc) more about loudness. you mean put some more lufs? i did -14 as for spotify and etc. should i increase it or just use some maximizers/compressors (but here i’m afraid everything could sound like there is no air).
151 days ago(+1)
ooooh, i’m a fan of FF music and also was inspired by it, but not a lot, so didn’t think should mention it. however, happy to hear that you have this association :)
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