Thank you so much!!!
Having take stock change dynamically based on party member is such a cool idea! I wish I had thought of that before because that would have been so fun to do!
I knew right away that I wanted instruments to represent specific people. In my first OST jam, Crunch time 3, I did that with a dragon and piccolo, but it didn't really work. It needs multiple characters so that they can mix and match rather than just be present or not.
With the hollow feeling, I wanted to avoid crowding the low end for fear of making the songs too muddy. I had a bass pizzicato and a second quieter and different sounding bass pizzicato to give it more depth, but besides that, a lot of my instruments worked better in mid to high ranges.
I used what I learned from Pix in the overtime jam about percussion samples and loops and had a ton of world percussion loops I wanted to use. They were complex though, and when I sped them up too much they became annoying. Most of the tracks play in double time at like 80 bpm, so it feels like 160. But the percussion I used for the citadel beckons worked best at a tempo somewhere in the low 100s so it was still fast, but it had a different feel.
Either way, thank you so much for your feedback!