So that's my first jam completed and submitted!

Overall, it was a really fun experience! I didn't have too much time since I had to prepare for my partner's birthday, our anniversary, and working on top of it all, but I'm pretty pleased with the pieces I've created, though I do have a bit of sleep debt to repay now haha. 

The things I did right: not pressure myself too much for my first jam.  I already had other major tasks on my plate that week, so this was a great way to experience the jam without it consuming my life.  Compositionally, I tend to get caught up looping phrases over and over again, so this time, before I put anything in my DAW, I walked around my neighborhood with my phone voice memo app recording me humming phrases I thought might work well.  Then I had to just transcribe everything to my computer when I was done.  I might be doing this from now on since it was such a helpful technique.

Things I did wrong: I really didn't put much effort at all into the optional parts of this jam that would've fleshed it out a bit more, namely a custom cover photo, a better description that I didn't write after a couple sleepless nights, and interacting with the community discord at all prior to submission.  Next Jam I submit to, now that I know what the submission process and optional assets are, I'll be sure to keep those in mind. 

This jam was for composers to create a soundtrack for an imaginary game (https://itch.io/jam/ost-composing-jam-7)

The type of game I had in my head while composing was some sort of "HD-2D" type aesthetic since there's a lot of blending of traditional SNES-era sounds as well as more complex virtual instruments. I draw a lot of inspiration from traditional RPGs and I figured this would be a similar kind of game, but in space. 

I composed The One Who Swims in the Stars first since I was coming up with a ton of ideas and thought it would work well as a sort of "title sequence" type piece. The other two pieces took themes from the original piece as a starting point to try to flesh out a new situation or environment. 

For Meteor Shower, the working idea was "battle theme", but it eventually, after adding more twinkly arpeggios, it started bringing up mental images of traveling quickly through a meteor shower. The piece isn't all stressful though; I tried to convey the mix of emotions someone might feel as they surf through the meteors- dangerous but beautiful. 

For Moonlight, I used the first melody of The One Who Swims in the Stars to create a slower, more reflective piece. 


DAW: Logic Pro X

Instruments: Plogue Chipsounds, Native Instruments Kontakt 7