As some of you may know, for the past year and a half or so I've been composing music and writing text for an RPG. Said RPG recently had some serious investor trouble (i.e.: there is no money to pay me for my work) and I have left the project, taking my work with me. Some people on IRC were interested in hearing/reading some of the stuff I had produced, particularly Snupes and Saddam, so I have now uploaded a selection of music to YouTube. The lore books will have to wait a little while for public release, as I would like to write some additional explanatory articles which will hopefully give people an idea of what I wanted to achieve in terms of worldbuilding in this project.
Last month I posted the "Symphonic Overture" for the game. I had proposed it as a main theme/main menu music, but it was rejected as being "too Star Wars"—a criticism I don't really understand, but go ahead and listen for yourself and see what you think. Now I'm posting stuff that was not rejected, that would have been heard in game, and particularly in the major cities of the game, of which there were to be roughly eight. I had intended to compose around 20 minutes of music per city, which would essentially form little playlists reinforcing the characters of the places and their people. Originally I was asked to compose generic ambient music for pretty much everything, but I argued for a more interesting approach to depicting in musical form the lives of the cities, and when I presented my prototypes I was able to win that argument. I had also intended that themes from the city music would appear in variations in the music for the open world areas surrounding each city, but unfortunately I was not able to progress to that stage of my plan.
Basically, I wanted to use part of the soundtrack as a worldbuilding tool, as a means of complementing NPC dialogues, lore books, the architectural designs of the cities etc. and all these elements would come together to form a complete experience with the gameplay that was more than the sum of its parts, a kind of immersion that, as far as I'm aware, had not been previously attempted in an RPG. Alas!
Anyway, I've posted up music from four cities, and I haven't done any additional work on them. They are not all exactly "final product", I intended to go back later and clean up some of the details, but ain't gonna happen now, so whatever. I have more to post (including something I actually do want to do extra work on, for reasons which will become clear when I post it), and I will eventually, but this should be more than enough for the time being. See the descriptions for each video for more detailed info on the individual doodads.
The Arch Thorian PrototypeMusick from the Lutenists' Guild of ThadwyckAccordion Music from OleandThe Tocane Wind Quintet