Music is a funny thing. I feel like my whole game dev journey has just been me trying to find ways to cram my favourite music into games.

Desert Child is, naturally, no exception.

Youtuber/Musician NakeyJakey did a great video where he breaks down how different creating videogame music is to regular music.

He makes some good points, and I love his examples, but there’s a few things he mentions that sort of fly in the face of what I’m doing with Desert Child. I think it’s really a case by case type thing.

Also, check out his other videos, he’s a fucking gun.

In Desert Child, the music is kind of on the borderline between diegetic and not. Diegetic means something exists in the world (“a part of the story”), whereas something non-diegetic is a tool used by the narrator to tell the storyl (“a part of the storytelling”). Basically, radios vs. credits music.

The music in the Desert Child has to be purchased by the player at the Record Store. After that, those tracks are placed in rotation as the player wanders around the city. Is it just playing on his iPod? Or in his head? Or can only we, the player hear it?

I really like when developers make music a kind of commodity in games. It gives it a trophy value that music in real life is slowly losing. Watch Dogs 2 turned it’s songs into collectables that you had to Shazam from places in the open world. AC: Black Flag has sea shanties that had to be collected and taught to your crew. So cool (coincidentally, two of the best Ubisoft games…)

In Desert Child, players will hopefully appreciate a song all the more if they had to save up their winnings, walk to the store, choose that particular song over all the others, then once they’ve bought the song, it’s just put into the shuffle playlist and they’ll just have to listen out for it.

The idea is then that you’re rewarded for exploring the city by hearing more and more of the music that you’ve picked out.

The style of music is pretty eclectic. I’m writing a lot of it myself, but I’m trying to experiment as much as I can. A lot of it is quite melancholic, which probably comes from the fact that the city is a ghost town with no NPCs right now.

I haven’t decided yet, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll list the songs in the game as all being by different artists from around the solar system. I think this would be kinda cool, because then I can write a tonne of kinda archetypal tunes, like a country song and a straight drum solo song. The problem with that idea is that people might want to actually look up those bands and not realise they’re fictitious.

If you’re interested, I have a public Spotify playlist of things I’m listening to and getting inspiration from.

It’s a bit all over the place, but there’s some good stuff in there (and a lot of impulsive additions that I should cull).

There’s a few songs that aren’t on Spotify, too. I’ll just drop song links here.

During races, there’s actually a cool practical use for music. Every race runs for roughly 65 seconds, but the specific length of a race is defined by the length of the music playing. If you do a few races, and start to learn the structure of the songs, you will have an inherent advantage, as you’ll know that when that second bass riff comes in, you have 3 seconds before the race ends.

Whenever I’m demoing Desert Child in public, people do one or two races and always say “man, I never know when the finish line is coming up.” Well, trust me, after an hour in the full game, you’ll know.

There was a cool thing I noticed while listening to music while playing the game, too. If a track has a BPM of 120, and a fairly regular 4/4 beat, if the drums occasionally dropped a beat, I would subconsciously shoot my gun. It was so weird. It was like I was drumming along with the game. That’s just a dumb little thing I noticed.

Actually, there’s an incredible game called Thumper that basically used this as the basis for it’s entire gameplay loop.

Go play Thumper

Oh, and let’s do a poll on whether to name all the artists fictional names, or call them all things that people can find easily outside of the game.