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thank you!!  yeah that first drop is fun lol

This was great! Love how you work your way through that long, beginning build.  Also, I'm always down for some vocaloid (or maybe just autotuned/processed vocals? regardless, those sorts of digital sounding vocal lines)

This was great!  I love how you used crash cymbals emulate that sound of crashing waves - it works flawlessly in this 8-bit context.  I also like your consistency with the theme, the songs felt connected beyond just pure vibes, something I'm always happy to see.

oh and you as well!  the level of detail you go into on every comment of yours I've come across is daunting.

This is great!!  I love all the different vibes you work your way through, and those super staccato piano arpeggios towards the end sound so cool.  Especially love how you mixed together live sounds with synths and outer-space-y effects.  well done!

This was nice!  I like the dissonant chords you went for in the first song, really gives it that solid classical orchestra vibe.

I like all of the chromatic stuff you did in this soundtrack!  I feel like it creates this particularly strong type of dissonance, not in the sense that it's harsh but in the sense that its begging to resolve more than sticking within a normal key/mode would, and I think that works very well here.  The variation from track to track is also great here.  good work overall!!

This was great!  The live vocals you recorded for that first track work really well, very much the star of the show for that particular piece.  I was very pleasantly surprised to hear what I heard in song 3 after the first two, as I read that it would be electronic in advance.  While it's still a pretty significant shift from the orchestral pieces, it feels like it's actually shifting, instead of just being abruptly thrown into something entirely different.  Very much gives off the vibes of something very normal and familiar suddenly morphing into something much less natural in front of your eyes.  I think that's honestly my biggest takeaway from your soundtrack - it gives off a very precise vibe of juxtaposing the natural against the unnatural, which I'm a big fan of.  great work overall!

A fellow connoisseur of the dramatic intro stab, you love to see it lol.  Are all of those strings VST's?? they sound way too realistic to not be but also the time constraints means that surely at least some of them are fake lol.  Regardless, I think that your mixing here does a lot of the work in making the ones that (presumably) aren't real sound real.  The mix here is both balanced and super dynamic, and even in the sections with huge layered instruments everything feels like it has a physical position that it slots into to contribute to the larger whole.  Your songs here are varied yet cohesive, which I am a big fan of, and your compositions are dynamic and driving, in a way that I feel like a lot of indie orchestral compositions lack.  great work overall!

This was pretty good!  I liked the simplicity of the bass as just a sine wave that would occasionally come in to push the energy of the song forward, and I feel like your other instrument selections worked well.  Your compositions here were super smooth and nice on the ears as well. great work!

Pico-8!!  That wave sound is really good if you made it from scratch in Pico-8.  It very much has that somber vibe you described and I feel like it's really amplified by the wave acting as like a sort of lilting, slow-attack metronome.  good work!

This was great!  I like how the snare sound you used sounds pretty similar to a small wave crashing.  There was nice variation from track to track and overall it was a rather relaxing listen.

This was nice!  Your composition here flows really nicely, and I like how the progression is shaped throughout the course of listening to the soundtrack.

This was great!  I like how varied you made that main theme - each song felt like it had a distinct rhythmic quality to it, with differences in tempo and background instrumentation.

This was really good!  I especially like your unique take on the theme - most people went for epic adventures, so having a calm, happy-go-lucky sound makes this submission really stand out.  Your compositions here are super smooth and appealing, and all the various soundfont instrument choices create such a great, chill, summers day vibe.  Very great soundtrack that somehow makes me feel both upbeat and relaxed at the same time.  good work!

This was pretty great!  I like your creative synth usage in this, all that wild automation makes for a fun listen.

This is pretty good stuff!  I love that driving groove you have going with the orchestral percussion sounds.

This is great!  That multi-instrument delay on wishing was a really weird but cool effect, especially with how everything was panned.  I like the varied use of instrumentation here, especially in the percussion!  There's a significant overall breadth here without sacrificing cohesion that I'm a fan of.

This was great!  I love how high energy the middle two tracks are!

I really wanna underline how impressive this soundtrack is.  You wrote 34 minutes of varied and quality music in 10 days.  Sure, the songs are a little on the simpler side, but that's pretty much negligible when compared to the scope of what you managed to achieve here.  Most of the soundtracks here, as they stand, would only be substantial enough for a 1-2 hour game.  Yours would go well beyond that threshold, and given the constraints of this jam, that's quite a feat.

thank you!!

I like the combo of live/orchestral sounds and edm beats here!  The way you worked contrast into 'when we align' by having the chords pulse in and out makes for such a fun driving force in that song, and the overall production quality of the whole soundtrack is quite good.  Great work!

This is genuinely one of my favorites of the jam so far!  I feel like the majority of people who write music that uses chiptune/soundfonts (or that is inspired by that sort of sound) struggle to find a unique voice for their music, and so I really appreciate how your style of composition feels like it sticks out without losing that sort of retro identity.  Your work here is varied yet cohesive, which in my eyes is the biggest staple of writing a good soundtrack, and all of your melodies are super catchy, making for a great listening experience - I can tell that the additional effort you put in to focus on composing first and production second paid off.  great work overall!

Hello!

I think it would be a good idea to add a sorting option on the game jam submission page that sorts based on how I personally rated them.  This could mean having unique sorting options for each rating category, but it probably would be less obtuse to just have one option that sorts based on the average number of stars in each category.  The rationale here is that, when I'm rating a large number of submissions, it's hard to be sure I'm rating things consistently, and being able to go back and see if there are any particular submissions that seem to be out of place relative to the others would be super nice.

Also, I'd like to say that the sorting functions on jam pages are already phenomenal as is - this is just a pretty small quality of life thing that I think would work well.

Thanks! - Aidan

thank you!!

Thank you for the kind words!!  And I'm glad you like the synths!  They're almost all homemade using Vital, with the big exception being some leads that use the square wave from magical8bit.

This is great!  Correct me if I'm wrong but I feel like I hear a decent amount of influence from in love with a ghost?  Big fan of that sort of brighter sounding lo-fi.  I like your instrumentation in this, though, a much more live-recorded vibe than what you'd typically expect out of lo-fi, which I think works well, especially given the theme.  A great listen overall!

Wow!  Your chord progressions here are really adventurous.  I feel like a lot of the time when I go for those sorts of dense chords in the higher register that you're using here I struggle to get things to flow well, so the fact these all feel perfectly clean and natural is seriously impressive.  And that sort of compositional complexity doesn't come at the cost of production quality, something that I've found common across the jam.  That isn't to suggest it isn't for good reason - it's much more manageable to focus on making one aspect good given the time constraints.  However, the fact that you managed both makes your submission all the more impressive.  Both of those things, along with the breadth of moods and energy levels from song to song, makes this a top submission in my eyes.  Good work!!

Lovely song!  Obviously lyrics are kind of rare within the scope of this jam so it's a nice breath of fresh air to hear something like this.  The melodies in this are super cute as well!  That happy and nostalgic chord progression combined with the bounciness of the melodies makes for an especially cheery yet relaxing sort of vibe, very much akin to the mood of the character in the cover photo.  Great stuff!

I like your day and night versions of that first piece!  It helps really define this as a game soundtrack, and although it's a bit simple in concept, it's not so easy to do well in execution.  I think you really nailed it here!  I also think that your melodies here are really defined and resounding, something that I've been a bit surprised to find has been a tad bit rare in this jam.  Great work!

Not bad!  I like the chord progression you used in the pads here.

This was great!!  I love how designed the progression through this song is, carrying you from moment with the changes in instrumentation and rhythmic flow.  I feel like you have a really good grasp on how to wield the natural ADSR of all of these instruments to your favor to build the palette you're aiming for at each individual moment.  good work!

I really like the bassline in this - especially for this sort of softer, unassuming lo-fi, having a just slightly buzzy bassline that's rather meandering and often drops away really completes the vibe.  Big fan of the chords and ear candies that are in here as well.  great work!!!

This is great!  I'm a fan of the melancholy and nostalgic vibes that your chord progressions give off.  They also fit really well with the soft chiptune sounds you used. good work!

The one you created programmatically is really cool!  That's something that interests me but that I've never really dove into.  Very nice collection of soft synth choices too.  good work!

great soundtrack!  I think obstruction was my favorite piece.

This was great!  You found a really good balance of making everything feel cohesive while also letting each song seem unique, through a lot of sonic similarities but a breadth of rhythms from song to song.  That breadth makes it feel especially like a proper soundtrack, as you created a breadth of moods and intensity levels, something that's integral for the progression of any game.  great work!

omg 🥲 thank you so much for the kind words!!  I'm so glad the thematic intention of each piece came across so well - you're pretty much spot on for what I was hoping each piece would convey!  The whole movie score comparison for Will of the Wind is pretty spot on - there are a lot of cases in movie scores where during a part that seems particularly hopeless, the diegetic sound gets faded out or becomes muffled as a somber string number plays over top of it, and that was vaguely the vibe that I was shooting for.