I am thrilled to announce that my very first video game music album is finally in stores! 

(っ◔◡◔)っ ❤︎ Listen here ❤︎

Spotify | Apple Music | iTunes | Amazon | YouTube

The album contains all of the current OST plus two bonus soundtracks to be featured in the upcoming 5th world. Anyway, please check out the soundtrack and let me know your feedback!

(I think I messed up the normalization so everything's too quiet; re-releasing in a month or so.)

TLDR: Classical musician learns game development, and makes a game to have something to showcase his music on.

Since I was young I've always known I wanted to someday write music for video games. I think it was Final Fantasy VII that first inspired me. I enjoyed the music of the Final Fantasy franchise so much that I would arrange and notate some of my favourite tunes by ear, just so I could enjoy it at the piano. (In fact, I have an old YouTube channel dedicated entirely to this nerdy hobby of mine ...)

As time went on, I learned that in reality, it is actually very difficult to gain visibility as a composer: for how does one exactly gain visibility in a non-visual art form? The last time I attended a video game conference, the top question that came up in conversation was "What games have you worked on?" and, of course, I had no answer. In order to gain any credibility, I was going to have to somehow get my music onto a game, or similar kind of project. But how? I entertained a bunch of ideas, some crazier than others:

• Creating my own game, composing/producing music and putting it on the game to show to others. Haha, yeah right—how am I going to find time for that?
• Collaborating with a visual artist to provide music for their speedpainting tutorial videos. This one I actually did try, and miraculously, I somehow connected with an artist across the world who liked the idea. So we tried this, and actually produced a few videos for YouTube. But in the end, it did not gain much traction, so we stopped.
• Creating an interactive portfolio that felt like a game. Basically, I was thinking of an interactive prototype that simulated the overworld experience of an RPG, where you could walk around and the music would change depending on what area you are in. But that's not very interesting. Why would someone roam about in an unfinished game when they could play an actual game that was complete?

As insane as it sounded, I eventually circled back to the first idea.

At the time, I was employed full-time, but it just so happened I was also in the process re-evaluating my career path, unsatisfied with my current company, and beginning to doubt the industry I was in (user experience design, by the way). So I took a risk and resigned, and went on a hiatus (that turned out to be 6 months long) to make time for my crazy impossible project.

After a short vacation to visit friends, I returned home and began studying game programming seriously. I settled on Game Maker Studio 2 because the language was closest to what I was familiar with (a fun mix of HTML/CSS, PHP, Java, and C++). Before long, I had my first prototype uploaded to itch.io that featured my very own music. It was exhilirating. I still took on various side projects to support myself financially, but now I had much more freedom in how I spend my time.

Fast forward a month or two, I have now created a few mini game projects, and one larger project that would eventually become "Nymble."

In case it isn't obvious, Both "Jack" and "Nymble" are inspired by a mix of pop culture, literature, and wordplay:

• "Nimble" means to be quick and agile, which is a pretty accurate description of the game's main hero
• "Jack" from the nursery rhyme "Jack be Nimble", which references jumping over a candle stick
• "Jack and the beanstalk", in which "Jack" literally climbs a beanstalk
• The physical exercise, "jumping jacks"; Jack sure does like to jump!
• "Nimbus" is the latin word for a type of cloud, and the game pretty much takes place among the clouds

Everything kinda just fell into place afterward.

Six months later, Nymble was up to 40 levels and 2 worlds—still not quite a full game, but long enough for a substantial demo. I decided I had enough of a hiatus and was ready to move back into a full-time job (steady income is nice), so I returned to the UX industry (I still wasn't fully passionate about the field due to various reasons, but that's another story lol). For the next year or so, with my full-time job, I didn't really have time to work on Nymble much.

Then in 2020, the pandemic hit, so we were all sent home to work remotely. It was a very sudden change, and took some getting used to. Of course, with everyone staying at home, hanging out with friends became less and less a thing. In a way, there was a silver lining in all of this, because I now find myself with so much more free time. So what did I do? I started working on Nymble again, of course! And so came all the winter levels.

It soon became routine. I would roll out of bed, work from home, then once work ended, I would switch over to my personal computer and work on game dev. At the time, Nymble was still only hosted on itch.io. As the months went on, incoming traffic seemed to dwindle. So, I looked to other indie game hosting platforms like Gamejolt and ... Newgrounds.

Bear in mind that the last time I logged into Newgrounds was probably over a decade ago (I'm old lol), so my then understanding of Newgrounds was based on what I remembered from my highschool days: I remembered it as a popular website for hosting fun little flash games and animations. I didn't know if Nymble would be appropriate for Newgrounds' audiences. But I uploaded it anyway out of curiosity.

It was probably one of the best decisions I made for Nymble. I was shocked at how vibrant and engaging the community had become. The quality of game reviews here on Newgrounds really sets a new standard for indie game feedback. I think a lot of it has to do with the way the website encourages people to provide justification for their ratings, whether high or low. In fact, If it weren't for the constructive criticism and encouraging feedback from the Newgrounds community, I don't think I would have pushed myself to work on the iOS mobile version and submit it to the App Store. So thank you all. :)

So it's now 3 years later and my music is finally on a commercial video game on the App Store. But there's still a lot I want to do. I plan to continue to add more levels to the mobile build and work on an Android release this year, but my focus will be on getting the word out there and (attempting to) promote myself as a video game composer. I have some exciting initiatives in the works, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Thank you for reading my long-winded retrospective. Hope you enjoy the soundtrack!

Cheers,

Xalezar