The Game Composer’s Blog

Today, PassionFruit Games announced the project they’ve been working on for the past couple of months. And by “they” I mean “we” as I am a member of the new company along with my wife and the rest of the team that did such good work on the Nancy Drew Dossier games.

…quick digression before moving on… I should mention that Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting to Danger took home Yahoo Games’ 2009 Hidden Object Game of the Year award and was nominated for their overall Casual Game of the Year, losing out to a little game called Plants vs. Zombies. So that’s a nice little feather under our cap and we feel very good about our new project… which I’m getting back to now…

Today we announced that we have the extremely good fortune of being able to adapt Marjorie M. Liu’s book Tiger Eye to video game form. More specifically, it will be a hidden object casual game with plenty of other puzzles to take you from exciting location to exciting location. The book is in the “paranormal romance” genre, and there are almost no other games of this genre in the US today. We are excited to bring the game to romance readers and casual game players alike.

So what’s this got to do with my GAME MUSIC blog? Well, I am positively giddy about working on this game. All shackles have been removed and I have free reign to make a soundtrack worthy of Marjorie’s story. All told, the game will have between 50 and 60 minutes of music. Every cut scene requiring music will have its own unique music, as will each hidden object scene. The puzzle games will also have their own music. Bye bye, minute loops! I am genuinely excited that this game will be able to avoid the aural repetition so prevalent in even the best of today’s casual games. The size of Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box’s soundtrack would consume too much budget for most casual game companies, but this being our own company, we can do what we want! The main menu music alone is over 7 minutes long. Many casual games are lucky to have 7 minutes of music in the entire game.

The game’s entire soundtrack will be available to buy as a bundle with the game in April when it is released. And if you preorder the game now you can get the 7-minute “Tiger Eye Suite” instantly, a good sneak peek at what the rest of the soundtrack will sound like. Here are two short samples:

Riddle Box theme:

Love theme:

The 7-minute main menu suite takes us through three musical themes. The first is the “riddle box” itself and serves as the overall theme of the game. The player will hear it in many incarnations as they play through the game. The second is the love theme between the two main characters, Dela and Hari. The third musical theme is based on the Magi… a very very bad guy indeed. The suite wraps up with the riddle box theme again presented in a much more positive setting (minor to major of course).

The flute is played by an excellent local professional musician, Dane Andersen. His playing instantly added so much life to the music and is once again proof that you should bring in live players as often as time and budget will allow.

I should also add that over the past week I’ve been editing (and finally finished yesterday) the game’s voice files. Voice actors really help bring the characters to life, and having voice is probably even more important in a romance game. Marjorie was integral in the selection of the voice actors so hopefully we’re getting something very near to what she intended her characters to sound and behave like.

I will keep you posted as we continue working on this game. This really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as we have our dream team together and a dream license to work on. Maybe I don’t have absolute free reign, as the music of course needs to complement the game, but it is coming together already as something very special. You can expect a full post-natal on this once it’s been released.