Cubiceye
We are reaching Planet "Cool Music"
This page shows everything I did musically, sorted by year, including some smaller or more detailed commentarys to all of my tracks.
Some tracks might be missing for not fitting in, like smaller demos. You can find those on my YouTube Channel:
Cubiceye
The Miserable Life of FedoraMan (GameJam 2017)
This was my introduction to real instrumental music production in 2017. This happened during a 48 Hour-GameJam in Friedberg, Hessen and we were suppose to make a Game somewhere in the direction of a "Deep Message". So we made a Point & Click Adventure about a dystopic city financed by casinos. You were playing a depressed unnamed person with a gambling addiction. Your goal of the game was to get from your hotel room to the casino and win a certain amount of money. The Soundtrack of this game was fully created only by sound samples from a Yamaha beginner keyboard. Unlike every other future project of mine this one had a pretty unique production history. I was (and still am) not very experienced with keyboard playing but I had a bit of knowledge from music theory. So I made notes on my keys for a lot of songs. While I simply recorded the samples and placed it on the Timeline of my DAW (like the drum tracks) some pieces were played live for a couple seconds. Most of the Songs were inspired by Pink Floyd and The Residents.
Tracklist
| Home | The very first song should start of by already telling the mood of this game: Sad, depressed, black and white, dystopic, with the main melody played on a plain piano. My team thought this sounded a bit like the Lavender Town Theme from Pokémon. The first idea for this song was pretty much a cover of The Resident's Sinister Exaggerator but dropped due to not really being fitting for this setting, and also maybe of fear of coypright. This was one of the last produced tracks for the game and the longest of them all. | WAV |
| City Theme | A jazzy, big city like track showing the cold reality of the streets. Inspired by the funky dung part of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. | WAV |
| Casino Theme | Very joyful and dopamine gaining music for a place that distracts from said hurting reality. This one had some Residents inspiration but I can't really recall from which song...I'd say I got the idea for this from The Booker Tease. | WAV |
| Minigame Theme | A small flying minigame theme made very spontaneously. I personally didn't liked it that much but my team loved it, so there it is. | WAV |
| Ending Theme | Pretty much a remixed home theme representing of a never ending loop of addiction and depression. Yeah, this was a sad game. | WAV |
How About Spikes
How About Spikes was the very first big Project I was making music for. This game was created and programmed completly by SoulPixel and sprite art with the album cover
for the Soundtrack by SpoonDee. It was released on Steam, along with the Soundtrack on Bandcamp on November 9th 2018. The music production for this project took around
5 months to complete and made me change from sample-based production to VSTs and MIDI production. Most of the soundtrack was created with many different free
VST-Plugins including Dexxit and magical8bit. The idea for the soundtrack was to compliment the 16-bit like artstyle with several boundary-breaking sounds
for what I was able to do at the time. How about Spikes shows itself a more magical, "cartoony" aesthetic for why this soundtrack is more laybacked and happier
than my earlier project but with still darker elements for being a pretty tough plattformer. At the end I was very satisfied with the creation of the soundtrack
while I could improve some tracks now several years later.
You can find the How About Spikes Soundtrack Album on Bandcamp here.
Tracklist
| Main Menu Theme | This was ironically the last track I made for this game. Before this main menu theme existed [Composer Name] created a simple main menu theme that was used throughout the making. SoulPixel and I were discussing about keeping this already-made theme until the very end of production just to avoid complications with it's original creator and also to make the main menu theme more fitting with the coming first level. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Garden Valley | Like I said before: A follow up from the main menu into the actual game that starts with Garden Valley, a jolly, quite theme for a level that teaches you the rules of the game. This theme was the defining sound-direction we wanted to go with this game. The chord progression and sound of the e-organ was inspired from Space Song by Beach House and the main melody came from the part between the chorus and the bridge of Gila, also by Beach House. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Unkown Forest Pt.1 & Pt.2 | The very first track I made for this project and longest of them all. The very first demo I sent to SoulPixel sounded very diffrently from this final version. The first demo was created with the sample-based method I used for Point & Click 2017 GameJam and was intentionally for Underground City. It had a much more ambient sound to it and SoulPixel pointed out it sounded much more tropical for where I dropped the first version completly and learned the VST/MIDI for the rest of the soundtrack. The reason why the album version of the soundtrack is seperated in two parts is that the in-game used version is around 7 minutes long and consists of both versions combined. While creating the final version of the track I made two versions: One with a simple, one-noted melody (part 1) and one with a slightly more advance melody (part 2). We were struggling about which version we should take for the final game until we decided to just take both while I seperated both in the album version. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp (Pt. 1)Direct Listen on Bandcamp (Pt. 2) |
| Overcast Peak | Ironically this track wasn't even meant to be for Overcast Peak. This was supposed to be a failed demo for Skullcoin Bay I sent to SoulPixel. He said it fitted much more to Overcast Peak and so I saved a bit of work by accident. It was the only track that featured a real guitar. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Underground City | For me it's a bit of a "meme song" for being very popular around the, let's say "How about Spikes Community". It changes the direction from a melancholic tune to a industrial synthwave song. It featured laser soundeffects because I thought they were fun to add and also features a sample from the Sigur Rós' Brennisteinn. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Underground Station | I didn't even knew this level existed until I sent SoulPixel a demo for a Kraftwerk-like Synthpop Song that I made for fun. And now it's in the game. Great Success! | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Boss Theme | Honestly a track I would rather remake completly from the start. I didn't like it and it was low-effort for me personally. This was made while SoulPixel was actually present at the making of this. I was messing with a Syntheziser until a cool sound melody came out of it. Adding drums to it and adding a sample from a needledrop Album Review slowed down, and voilà: A Boss Theme. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Demon's Keep | A very cool and badass sounding theme for the lava world. While making it I wasn't sure about how the track should feel like. At the beginning I wanted to make a theme with a main xylophone sound very similiar to how for example New Super Mario Bros. made a lava theme. I couldn't find a working xylophone VST for now so I used a bass syntheziser as a placeholder and accidentally made the main bass melody that was kept for the final version. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Sentinel Graves | I experimented with this a little bit more. A dark horror track with weird sounding syntheziser and tempo, including the scrapped xylophon-like skeleton sound I wanted for Demon's Keep. It includes a cursed choir and, in my eyes, a weird chord progression to make it extra spooky. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Skullcoin Bay | Easily my favourite of them all. This was the final level before the final boss fight and represnts older sounding melodys to look back at all the archivments you made throughout the game and now the determination for the most important fight. It was also the longest to make. I was struggling a bit creating this since my only information I had for this level was "beach bay" and "last level before boss". So I made various attempts to a theme for a beach level with a huge portal that goes to the underworld of this world (like in Elder Scrolls IV) but I've been told it wouldn't fit. So I finally saw a screenshot of the level and then knew exactly what I needed to that, and so this track happened. | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Endboss Theme | Easily my most laziest and most unlikable track. This was created on the same time as I was making Skullcoin Bay and most of my engery went all on it. I usually don't make two full tracks on the same day. But hey, at least the boss itself is not the only exciting challenge to this, right? | Direct Listen on Bandcamp |
| Annom | This Track is not included in the game. I made this for the first anniversary of this game. It uses slightly different Synthesizers since I couldn't recollect everything I used in the main game. The intention was to make an alternative track to the Garden Valley theme. | WAV |
Untitled Racing Game (GameJam 2018)
This project was intented for the second GameJam I participated. The topic of this GameJam was to make something about "repeating" things, so we made a racing game where you avoid objects on the street and chose a direction at every crossroad. This GameJam took place at the same time as I was making the How About Spikes Soundtrack and It reperesents a small creative break from it. I was also experminenting a bit more with that one since well, I was also exercising. The car for this game is a 2005 Mazda 3 which is my actual car.
Tracklist
| Titlescreen/Titlescreen (Reverb Version) | A simple 8-bit tune for the menu. I always thought that while making this game it looked like a small Atari 2600/early NES game that you play for like 5-10 minutes and try to beat the highest score. For this reason it's very short, like the main menu themes used to be back in this era. The reverb version was used in the game due to being a more fitting optic on the main menu. | WAVWAV (Reverb Ver.) |
| Options/Crash Menu | A much shorter options/garage theme including a guitar. The guitar melody was inspired from the Nickelodeon Doug Theme. And it sounded wonky so it was also used as a game over theme. | WAV |
| Race Track | A fun and fast 90's techno inspired racing track. While making it I was also thinking a bit about electronic j-pop music often being mapped for Osu!. The Alternative Version of the race track was the first, original theme but I tweaked to make it slightly shorter and more listenable to a wider range of people. | WAV |
| Winning Track | Simple 8-bit winning track. Same principle as with the titlescreen theme. You might have heard similiar themes like this before. | WAV |
Miscellaneous
This section includes every smaller Project I was working on, mostly consists of 1 song per project.
Tracklist
| Spacing in Space | A small track I made for "Spacing in Space", a 2019 GameJam game. Because of preperations for my future exam I couldn't do a lot for this GameJam except this theme. A little bit more experimental and electronic than anything I did before. | WAV |
| Keep on Quakin' | I made this for "APF: Assualt at the Present Factory", a shooting game for the 2020 YogsCast Christmas GameJam. A more higher produced track I made throughout the year. While I was still using VST/MIDI, this one focuses much more on the guitar playing. The idea was to make a arena shooter similar to quake and therefore I made this kind of industrial metalish track for the game. And yes, this music doesn't fit to the game aesthetic .I also made the voices used in the game. | WAV (SoundCloud Ver.)MP3 (In-Game Ver.) |
You can find my SoundCloud Account here.