Going Home

I have spent the last few days spamming just about everyone I know with the news, but hey, why not write about it here as well? It can't hurt, can it?

The big news is that I just released a new soundtrack. It's a quickie and also quite cheap (should you choose to buy it), but in this case it's more the principle of the thing. I put up my music far too seldom and my friends told me so over and over again. I decided to listen to them and this is the result.

So, what is Home? It's a very small and quite unfinished game that was made during the Nordic Game Jam 2013 get-together. If you didn't know this already, NGJ has quickly grown to become one of the biggest - if not the biggest - game jams out there. It's three days long, with about two days of active jamming, and the end results are always a blast to watch/play. Home was created by Number Twenty Five Entertainment and it's about going home. Well, since the theme of NGJ13 was "grotesque", it's a bit more about jumping into the ocean carrying a lantern and then slowly becoming something other than a human. It was more than slightly inspired by Lovecraft and his Mythos, and essentially the player will eventually turn into a fish. Of sorts. The idea is that he/she will go home - the bottom of the ocean - and add his/her lantern to the pile of lanterns that already clutters the ocean floor. Then there's a big fish carrying a lantern and - glompf - the adventure ends.

It's deep.

What inspired me the most about Home was Karin Bruér's very distinctive artwork, which for some reason immediately made me think of Tove Jansson's Moomin books. Now, don't laugh; I'm sure you're thinking of the cuddly Japanese variant. The original books were much more mature, much darker and at the same time much more heartwarming. I grew up with those books and the world the characters inhabit has always been firmly stuck in my mind. Something about Karin's art made me think of that world and its solemn, sometimes melancholy atmosphere. That said, I sat down and began to work.

Or, well, I didn't.

I was using my girlfriend's HP laptop and it really didn't want to use Cubase 5 so I was forced to find an alternative. I won't write what I ended up using because, well, I won't, but my MIDI keyboard refused to work in any capacity. I had lugged that beast with me all the way from Sweden and it just didn't want to work. I ended up giving it away in the end. However, after a few hours of despair, a really cool guy let me borrow his MIDI keyboard which worked flawlessly. Then I started working.

So, I'm very satisfied with the end result. I like how it sounds; I had to run it through some mixing and volume automation before it was good to go, and I also wrote a remix specifically for the soundtrack (I don't really feel comfortable releasing such a small soundtrack without any extra content). I'm quite proud of the end result.

If you want to check it out, you can do it right here. If you like what you hear, please, consider buying it. The lowest price is $2 and you can pay more if you want to. You don't have to, but you can. Also, please, send the link to as many people as possible. Yes, it does make a difference.

Anyway, I'm off to work on future stuff. I'll be back!