Feral Flowers's sound design has been oddly free of hassle so far. Hopefully it actually sounds good regardless - in our minds, though, the game's ridiculous premise affords it some cartoonishly maximal theming, and while this has certainly come across in its sound effects, the background music (BGM) has been rather more reserved.

However, world 2's BGM was finished today, and this goes a bit harder. We thought it might be fun to talk about that, and about how musical dynamism is (kind of) implemented in the game.

Making a vague plan

We don't profess to be great producers (never mind musicians), so we only ever draw up a rough brief for what we want a piece to sound like before going into FL Studio and, well, seeing what happens. For this reason - and to make sure we don't get under the player's feet (ears?) - the music is pretty simple.

Quite often, we can't quite reach the aesthetic we had in mind - but end up stumbling across something really different, which happens to work well; the final product may well be born mostly of randomness. Talent!

For worlds 0 and 1 - which you might've played in the demo - the brief was simple: something that sounds jazzy and bumbling, suitable as a comedic underlay to the player being knocked about the screen by giant balls of pollen. This was also informed by the original (game jam entry's) BGM, Swing Time, a free piece of music by a chap called Pedro. Thank you very much mate.

However, there's more to be done to make the music work with the game. To explain this, we're going to have to travel way down the pipeline to discuss how Feral Flowers plays music.

DJ Godot (feat. MC Observer)

This is where the 'dynamic' bit comes into play. Some games have complex systems which contextually add and remove layers of the soundtrack as you play - Jak 2 and SSX 3 were very good at this, and heck, even Super Mario World did it - but alas, Feral Flowers is not quite that clever. It is, however, sneaky.

The game's soundtrack is mainly made up of 8-bar loops; look at the above screenshot and that's what you'll see. They can be longer or shorter, but 8 bars is ubiquitous.

Generally, when you're playing the game, some music (or background ambience of some sort) is playing all the time. When you arrive at a new level, the game checks whether the level introduces some new music - and that's pretty much it! The choice of background music, for the most part, is only dependant on how far you've progressed.

There is one more thing, though: if there is new music to play, the old music doesn't just stop dead; this'd be jarring. Instead, the outgoing track is set to stop looping - and once it signals that it's done playing, the incoming track is played ASAP. For the most part, the switch isn't noticeable, and you get a smooth transition.

This is why most of the loops are only 8 bars long; otherwise, it could take a bit longer than we'd like to start playing the next one. On their own, they can get boring pretty quickly - but generally that's fine, because as you may be aware, your average Feral Flowers level is very short - and a loop will only be played over a maximum of 5 sequential levels.

Of course, there are some exceptions: bosses do a traditional fade-out of the music that was playing before introducing their own, which can in turn change throughout the fight.

Putting it together for world 2

With all of this in mind, it's not uncommon for us to fiddle with the music while designing the bunch of levels it'll accompany. Sometimes, we just want to bring in or take out instruments as a matter of course, but it's far more fun to design the music around the levels.

In 1-1's case (above), the player gets their first powerup and has reached the milestone of being halfway to the boss. This felt like the perfect opportunity to bring in some thicc half-time percussion, and so that's what happened.

In world 2's case, though, there are a rather different set of things to signify: the first boss has been defeated, the sun is setting, you've got an opportunity to catch your breath before things start getting a fair bit harder. Unfortunately, we don't have any images of this to show you yet - but if you give the BGM a listen, keeping in mind that it's not one 2-minute track, but actually six separate loops that we've stuck together - hopefully this'll give you an idea of how it'll feel.

That is, if we can just make the graphics feel the same way. 【星川】