Making the Music for the The Broadside Express

This is a guest blog post from Anton Riehl, who is an incredible composer, and is responsible for the live flutes in the Overgrowth main theme.

Last weekend I teamed up with Wolfire games to be a part of the Humble Mojam Bundle, in which we had 60 hours to create a new game from scratch to raise money for charity. I was a little late to join in the fun, but still had some time to write some music, which was very invigorating!

I really enjoyed the feeling of creating something fun for a worthy cause, with a group of people cheering us on. Live-streaming music creation wasn’t something I was immediately comfortable with, but after the initial stages, I had a lot of pleasure interacting with the viewers. Sadly, the broadcasts were deleted very quickly from Justin.tv (where I had my live-stream), so I am not able to show you any time-lapses. Instead, I made a video for you in which I discuss what I did, and show you the end results as much as possible.

The process was very intriguing for me, as I felt a great amount of collaboration with the team, even though we all live very far away from each other. We set out on our tasks, but were able to see what the others were up to by tuning in to their streams. I really enjoyed Aubrey’s art (watching him work was outstanding) and David’s stream was informative and useful for me to see how the music was feeling in game. I had both their streams running almost all the time so I could see what they were up to.

I’m hoping that more opportunities like these present themselves in the future, and if they do, I’ll be a little more prepared with my time. If you were to watch a live stream of music creation, what else would you like to see?