My Inspiration for IGMC "Tiny Garden"
From Yoshi Crafted World to Animal Crossing New Horizons
The main reason why I chose to write the music for Tiny Garden, and not for the other demo video (much more interesting), was to try to compose something that was only tied to gameplay dynamics. No history, no setting, no lore, just tiny gardens, set in carillons, to be cultivated.
We want our game to be a relaxed experience. There are no game overs or pressure during a Tiny Garden gameplay, and the music should help players to immerse themselves into a flow state. It should be relaxed tunes, like those of the “lo-fi beats to study to” from Youtube. But the music should have some deep, some unexpected movements of melancholy. It should evolve with the gameplay, celebrating the player progression and creating emotional riffs that the player will whistle later, even unconsciously.
Lo-fi Beats... um... needless to say that as soon as I saw the video-demo of the game I didn't imagine lo-fi music, but in my mind the images of two recent Nintendo games immediately revealed themselves: Yoshi’s Crafted World and Animal Crossing New Horizons.
Yoshi’s Crafted World
The first is a 2019 game set entirely in a giant cardboard box. Everything is made of paper and the characters who live there are cute cloth puppets. Accompanying this 2.5D platform there is a very sweet soundtrack made with the help of many toy tools that contributes to increasing the general sense of virtual toy.
Few have seriously considered the work of Kafuzumi Umeda and his staff and this is a great shame as their work is almost unique within the video game landscape.
What struck me and that I studied and assimilated for Tiny Garden is the tone of voice of this soundtrack. Nothing is taken seriously, everything is written and made with the sole objective of drawing a smile on the players' faces and being extremely contextual with the world created. For the Tiny Garden demo video I looked for a similar experience, a sound identity that characterizes it very much in an attempt to differentiate it from other similar products already on the market. Of course, in my case it's just a tiny video section intended for a contest but the beauty of this contest is that it pushes you to think a lot about the sound identity of the entire game.
That's why I started my search from the stamp. Unfortunately I don't have any toy tools at home and the only good library I found didn't turn out to be very useful. However, I have a couple of instruments that have a sound similar to many toy instruments: the kalimba and the ocarina.. I recorded them badly, so as to accentuate the fake and playful timbre, and I started improvising something trying to find some good ideas... needless to say that the real turning point came with the search for the right harmonic field.
Animal Crossing New Horizons
Refuge for most of the world in the year 2020 Animal Crossing New Horizons is the fifth declination of the title created and developed by Nintendo back in 2001 on the then GameCube. In this title we are asked to relax on a heavenly island in the middle of the sea where to build a little house, decorate it, sunbathe, fish, collect insects and a whole similar series of hard and tiring activities.
The series has always had a very recognizable soundtrack built around sounds that we could call lounge/jazz, but lacking electronic club stamps... a kind of holiday chill jazz where the tonality is skillfully bypassed by ringing a succession of chordal situations without tension. Perfect situation for Tiny Garden but how to get it?
The solution was given to me by tuning a Mexican instrument that I have at home: the Jarana Huasteca. Five strings tuned respectively in Sol, S, Re, F# and A, or a major seventh on G with the ninth, which sound quite suspended and which, in my case, are completed in a chord of C major in second face (with the G on the bass) enriched by a second addition (the noted D). These two accord situations enclose the entire "harmonic" field of all the work done enriched, situation by situation, through different melodic lines and timbres.
