A game I was working on earlier this year got scrapped, but I'd already written over 20 minutes of music for it so I've decided to release a soundtrack anyway!

Unearthed: The Mines of Estra was a simple game where the player (represented by a low-poly medieval/viking sort of warrior with a pickax) must work their way through various rooms in a mine/cave system breaking rocks to complete different challenges. Early in development, I created an orchestral track for the first level (which was originally going to be the entirety of the game), however it was requested to make the sound a little more humorous and "dopey". As such, I sampled my voice using various techniques (plugging my nose, singing in falsetto, pitch shifting various recordings of me saying "doh", etc) and used those for lead instruments (replacing some of the woodwinds and brass I had previously been using). Later, the developer decided to start leaning a bit more "serious" with the tone of the game so the rest of the tracks are a bit more straight forward (albeit using a similar blend of electronic and acoustic sounds).

The form of the track is a little strange, but this was originally a loop that would repeat for the whole level (I’ve edited it slightly so it feels like it has more of an actual end). In the past, I’ve had problems with using more traditional compositional forms because the ebb and flow of sections got too predictable and looping ended up getting annoying. For this game I tried adding several places for the track to just kind of “cool down” which is why there are so many percussion breaks after big sections and then again right before the track would repeat.

I don't have a lot of games in my portfolio so it was a little disappointing to see this one cease development, but that's just the way things go sometimes.

The full album will be coming out on Wednesday, August 23rd, so I will be intermittently releasing all 5 tracks one a time here until then.

If you want to follow the release, use this link. More links will be added to that hyperfollow as they get processed by various streaming networks. Feel free to follow me on the various social media listed too (or don't. I'm not your dad).

Edit: Oops! I had meant to schedule the audio to publish tomorrow but thought I had to hit the "publish" button to lock that in. I guess this is live now. Oh well. Sunday release it is!