Nigel

The Mad Composer

Summary

Nigel is a 2D platformer video game that features a little mouse named Nigel. As a composer, he must find inspiration for his music. Traverse the dangerous and puzzling world and fight the Big Toxic Cheese in the end.

Role

Soundtrack composer

Challenge

Because of a short time constraint of one semester, I couldn’t make tracks as long as I had hoped to. It was hard to come up with themes and have all the songs intertwine as I had hoped to at the beginning of the semester.

Overview of the game

The game features two levels and a boss fight. Songs determine how the environment reacts around Nigel, so players have to manipulate soundtracks in order to continue to other levels. There’s a halftime mode that slows platforms down, making it easier to move along. There’s also a madness mode that makes additional platforms appear.

Inspiration

Precedents

A lot of the soundtracks I’m inspired by are video games like Dark Souls, Legend of Zelda, and the Ori series. I wanted to do something of that sense

Design

Because this game is about a composer, I wanted to have a classical aspect for the soundtrack. The main instrument in all songs is the piano, and the harmony usually features strings or brass. The game is fast-paced, so drums are essential to keep the pace.

We initially wanted the first few scenes of the game to be more happy and uplifting, so the first song I made was in A major. We wanted to use this as a menu screen soundtrack, but did not have enough time to make a menu.

The second soundtrack I made was for the first level. This is where the game got a little darker, so I composed the track in E minor, but switched in an out of its relative major, G major.

The third soundtrack I made was for level two. This is where Nigel goes under the bed and into a “cave”. I’m a huge fan of arpeggios, so I incorporated mostly that flare in this piece.

Finally, the last soundtrack was for the boss fight. This one was especially fun to make because of the fast pace and loud chords. Finding inspiration for boss music is easy because there are so many games that have a final boss fight. I wanted to make something heavy, fast, and fit the theme of fighting a toxic cheese.

Creating halftime tracks

Because a main feature of our game is switching the tracks into half-time mode, I had to also edit the soundtracks into their halftime counter parts. The level two song had a bpm of 140, so I had to change it to 70. It would be boring keeping the same drums and harmony, so I changed the drums up a bit and added some extra flares to all halftime pieces.

Improving at using Ableton’s features

A main goal of mine was to improve at Ableton. Ableton is a Digital Audio Workstation that I composed all my tracks on. The program is massive and there’s a lot to cover, so I wanted to be able to close that gap and gain some skills at it. With this capstone, I’ve learned a lot more about audio effects, mixing and mastering, and sound composition.

If we had more time...

We only had one more semester but there was a lot we wanted to accomplish. Personally, I would have wanted to do more sound effect design, but it was hard to add because other team members were busy with their side of the game. I would’ve also liked to extend each song to be at least 2 minutes long, that way the track wouldn’t have looped as often leading to repetitiveness.