Allan Zax has struck again! He’s already made music for the galaxy map, solar systems, combat, and cities, and now he’s followed up with some music for the ice planets.
I had a feeling Allan’s style would fit well with ice planets, as he normally makes ‘cold’-sounding electronic music and he’s made some atmospheric ambient tracks before. I was also eager to give him a few pieces of music I cared about to help guide him. I remembered the music in the crystal cave in the mountains of King’s Quest V, but also Phendrana Drifts from Metroid Prime. He seemed to understand what I was going for and had something similar to these tracks in mind. One of the thrills of being a game director like this is that I can take things I’ve loved from my past and use aspects of them to make my own games.
Another aspect I wanted in the track was the sound of icy wind. It’s something I considered adding as a sound effect before, but it led to too much complication. Would you even be able to hear the wind from inside your ship? If your ship went faster, would you hear the wind rush past you faster as well? Would its pitch be higher? I suggested including cold wind sounds into the music instead and it seems to have worked.
The ice planets are quite desolate, having only snow and ice-formations in them. Even so, I hope they’ll be fun for you to explore. I have fond memories of exploring ski slopes on the mountain by myself while I was growing up, so I suppose I still associate snowy landscapes with being able to get away and contemplate things. That feeling of being by yourself and free to explore is something I wanted to recreate in Super Space Galaxy, though it’ll be all the planets, not just the icy ones, that give you that.
Allan has uploaded the music to his YouTube page and you can listen to it below. I was looking forward to whatever graphics he’d make for the video, and sure enough the icy landscape looks particularly amazing. Maybe a future 3D entry in the Super Space series will look like this?
This music is another thing that will be in the 3rd playable demo of Super Space Galaxy. I plan to release it soon, so subscribe to the blog and you’ll know when it arrives!
Thanks for reading,
Kenneth Dunlop
Kenneth Dunlop's Game Dev Blog 