itch.io

My muse has commented on my submission- AAAAA THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! I am planning on releasing this on my YouTube channel as part of my comeback (I'm a VTuber (A bad one) that's on hiatus right now), but I didn't want to come back just for this only since I have many things in the works :d. Anyway, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR NOTICING THIS STUPID IDIOTIC DUMB PERSON AND COMPLIMENTING MY WORK AAAAAAAAAAAAA-

I still remember listening to "perhaps, in another life" and being completely motivated to finish my degree in music and picking up drawing again.

Thank you so much for listening through till the end 🥹🥹. As for the second track, it's divided into three parts, with the first being "elegant" and "clean" to describe his main line of work, which is assassination. Second part with the accordion is supposed to subtly represent his commoner upbringing while the orchestration is supposed to still represent his elegance, because the second part is supposed to be his conversation with the main character. The third part is fully about his commoner upbringing, where his mother used to sing the song "Bayu Bayushki" for him, which transitions to Elisheva, the adopted daughter of Malakor (The character behind Forced Freedom), being her main theme/motif, because Malakor truly cared for Eli and only wanted her to be what he used to be, just a normal kid. He'd always sing her to sleep with the only children song he knows from his mother, which is Bayu Bayushki.

As for the names, I'm actually very interested in linguistics and etymology! As someone who was born and had to follow the same religion as my parents, I grew interest in the arabic language as a whole and I tend to do a whole bunch of deep research for absolutely no reason. Raqis Allayl means something along the lines of dancer of the night, which is basically what Hariri Laylana is (The character). Hariri originated from harir which really just means "someone who works with silk" since she is a belly dancer as a side-job but works mainly as the leader of Corvus' "clean up" team. Laylana originated from the term "Layl" which means night, and the ana was just my addition to make it sound more feminine (though im pretty sure it also has some etymology behind it?). As for Elisheva, it is the old (original) form of the name "Elizabeth" from hebrew, meaning "God is my oath." Lore-wise, she was given the name due to her birth parents basically wanting their child to have powers so they could live good and made a pact with a deity and named their child "Devoted to God" and gave her powers before Malakor took her in and basically adopted her and gave her the nickname Eli. Malakor is where it gets interesting because it is derived from many languages. My main inspiration was latin, with Mal originating from "malus" meaning bad or ill or wrong, and Kor originating from "cor" which is heart. Combining the "Mal" and "Cor" makes Malakor mean something along the lines of "dark heart." While in reality, my baby's real name is actually Piomo (Literally just a name i found cute with no meaning), which was given by his biological mother, and he was just given the name Malakor by his biological father who was a tyrant king, after razing the city where his mother lived. Corvus is, well, crow or raven. It's latin but it is literally the genus name for the family of crows and ravens, "corvidae." NOWWWWW we getting to the good part. The Asian part which is what i am LMAOOO. Ah-Yue's original name was Xuan Yue. Xuan can mean multiple things, in which i chose two meanings of it, "elegant" and "mysterious." It's very much layered because Xuan can mean many different thing depending on the chinese characters. Hell, even in Vietnamese, it means an entirely different thing, being "spring." Yue mainly means moon, and "Ah" is just a term of endearment or a sign of closeness to said person, so "Ah-Yue" is literally just what he prefers to be called because he wants to be close to everyone despite having his heart closed off after Kana was taken away. Kana (Which is Japanese) has multiple meanings depending on written kanji, but i used the meaning "to play music" (奏) and "beautiful" (佳奈, common Japanese girl name). Kana was taken away by the Tyrant King, Dvinali (Dvi meaning two and Nali meaning channel or barrel, and together it literally means two channels or double-barreled, hinting at the way he rules his kingdom :3). Gu Shoushan was a very fun name to come up with. Gu by itself is often associated with the "Gu poison" from murim manhwas (and actual real life rituals) where essentially, multiple poisonous/venomous insects are put together in a jar and whatever is left in the jar has the strongest poison/venom. However, the Gu (顾) i took means "to look after" or "care for" because his character is essentially Ah-Yue's and Kana's father figure. The name Shoushan is actually a combination of "Shou" (壽) meaning longevity, and "Shan" (山) meaning mountain. Essentially, naming someone "Shoushan" is basically a wish for them to have an enduring, stable, and long life, and the "Gu" is a surname that gives him the loving uncle, father figure character.

So yeah. Uhm. TL;DR: I'm a huge nerd about language :D

I remember around 2 years ago, I joined my first ever composing Jam. Was feeling very excited and inspired by all the amazing music that came out of it, and Carrot's music was no exception. Back then and now, your music remains exceptional to my ears. Imagine my surprise, after being burnt out on music due to majoring in it in university, finally getting on my feet, joined the composing jam again, and saw that the same artist who inspired me also joined again. Now imagine my surprise again, when the same artist who inspired me, who made orchestral sort of oriental music last time i joined, suddenly made ambiance-trance electronic music for the first time ever and that it sounds flawless to my 4 years of music univ ears. Genuinely, I cannot begin to fathom the amount of hard work and effort you've put in into learning art. You've genuinely inspired me to learn to draw, to learn to love music again, and to just, appreciate art.  Maybe I'm biased towards the person who inspired me to push through univ, but I genuinely wish you win this one!!! I wish you the best of luck on this jam and life in general :D

I like the overall vibe of what you're trying to set up, however i do feel that challenging yourself to a single synth severely limited the sonic landscape of your tracks making them all sound similar to each other, and while it can be a good thing in certain scenarios, i think with the story you've provided, it doesn't bode well. Another thing I would like to mention is to not be afraid to experiment with more chords! Chords give the melody a home to settle into, so you could make it sound more complex just by adding chords. Not only the melody, you'll also be able to see what countermelodies can be used, which notes should fill the lower end as a bass, and create harmony and fullness to the composition! It does require music theory, but I assure you, just learning major and minor chords and using them accordingly will already broaden your space by a lot!

I adore the composition that was done in the songs you made! And I absolutely love that your mind went to contrapuntal baroque when you saw the picture. However, while I enjoyed the composition in general, it does sound very stiff since Dorico is, imo, as a past user, a midi player disguised as a score writer haha. A critique i have would probably be how the character's themes don't really feel like "themes" in the sense that, a motif was introduced, but the entire song itself doesn't feel like it was built around the motif. The composition of the songs definitely represents the feeling its going for, however, for me, if i were playing this game, i would probably fail to recognize that it's a character's theme. For example, Locke's theme had his motif played twice in the song, but it felt like the second round of his motif was just a loop of the first time the motif was played. If you listen to other game soundtracks, for example, Lace from Silksong by Christopher Larkin, Lace's melodic motif doesn't even start until halfway through the song, but the entire rhythm was already building up its own motif, and it builds up to the melodic motif and it continues to play around the rhythm motif and melodic motif. Though that's probably just me being nitpicky and maybe it is due to the limitations of contrapuntal baroque compositions and lack of dynamic control from Dorico. If it were polished more to sound like actual instruments and not midi, i would enjoy the composition way more, so as a fellow Cubase user, I can't wait until you learn how to use it :D

Also, I don't know if this'll help, but the entirety of the Hollow Knight franchise's OST is a masterclass in of itself just by critically listening to it and see how and why things work composition wise, in game wise, thematic wise, etc. Best of luck to your musical journey friend!

I love every single foley knick-knack sounds in the song. It scratches every itch in my brain. That being said, I love it even more when it starts to build up and the melodies start to fire up and play. The combination of all the sounds and simple but memorable melody creates this sort of liberating feeling, and i think that matches with your interpretation of the story and inspiration. The way it ended with a ritardando and the echo pitches down alongside the final click really sells off the puzzle being finished. Absolute cinema :thumbsup:

I'd like to begin by saying I absolutely LOVE your composition. Your usage of every instruments feels tailored towards the specific story the titles tell and the melody and harmony is absolutely pleasing to listen to. The piano with the filter in the intro song (or is it an E-Piano?) really sets the whole location of where the story takes place and the vibe of it. I don't know if my ears are deceiving me, but i think the piano in the intro are slightly detuned? And then it was just detuned to hell at the end. Sort of gives me the creeps honestly, kinda makes me feel the vibes kf an alzheimers patient forgetting and forgetting and suddenly they forget how to live type shi. ALSO! I love the fact that it like, starts with forgetting, and then at an all time low starts to build up with the second track giving a sort of "wandering aimlessly" then castle chaser gives a "wandering with purpose" and finally giving, well, an ending to that purpose with a bang. Absolutely love that not only each songs' dynamics were never the same, but also the whole soundtrack, as in each song, has different dynamic feel to it! I feel the storytelling, even if up to interpretation, has a clear direction with how it was composed and structured!

Reminds me a lot of when i was still in music univ and how they made us listen and understand basically every form of music, including "noise" music. In my opinion, storytelling through such music is incredibly hard due to how open to interpretation it is, so I can't fully judge it on that part. However, I can definitely say that the designed sound was incredible and the songs that has musical composition was also incredibly made! The additional of the vocals to some of the songs that also uses simple instrumentation makes it feel as though a bard is telling us the story and i absolutely adore it. Though I must admit, half of it do feel more like ambience of the areas in the game, and without a proper visual to help, I couldn't grasp much of the storytelling, though that could entirely just be me lacking the imagination to fill in the gaps. Overall, I enjoyed it a lot!

it's in my profile but i can share with you on discord if you'd like. add me on @nitorino if you'd like!

hullo, im nito, a composer, producer, foley artist, and very amateur voice actor, looking to join a project for the otome jam 2025 community
i personally enjoy working on collaborative projects since it really helps me with the feedback given by my team as well as because i get to bring something to life through my music :D

i can offer custom music in a variety of styles, sound effects (foley, ambience), voice acting, as well as friendly communications :D
(my va demo as well as my music can be found on my profile, unless i messed up sumn and forgor to put sumn there :p)

let me know if you're in need of help with audio stuff, would love to help out!

This goes h a r d. It feels like to me, this boss is like something of an inevitability that the players will always come back to. Maybe something like a roguelike game where the boss is aware that they're stuck in a time loop but so is the player, so the boss is all like, "Out of all the infinite paths you can choose from, it'll all still lead to me."

Very Thanos-esque but i think ish pretty cool :o

I feel it really encapsulates the essence of fighting grief. There's a motif where the notes were played repeatedly, then the same notes but played in reverse, i feel that part catches the feeling of confusion and denial of losing someone. The use of (what sounded like to me) diminished and augmented chords really sells the "What do i do now?" feeling after losing someone.  The tempo slowing down and going fast again i think also describes how time feels when you're dealing with grief. Time feels like it's slowing down and suddenly it catches up to us 2x the speed. Very well made <3

The overall feel reminds me of the game Celeste (and after upon further research, the soundtrack for Celeste is made by Lena Raine, which is your main inspiration and now i feel dumb haha) and honestly i really vibe with it. I really love the jazzy feel in Shopping Time with the syncopations. It sounds simple yet intricate at the same time? I'm not sure how to describe it, all i know is Shopping Time is my favorite one :D

I really love chill vibes like these. Feels like something I'd listen to while snuggling in the warmth of a blanket next to my boyfriend while enjoying some matcha.

Beautiful music for beautiful art. Honestly i teared up from Recollections, got immense chills on The Thousand Year War, and then cried for In Another Life. I would not be surprised if this were actually used in a movie or something along the lines of it. I'm putting this in my playlist for sure. Words legit cannot describe just how much I'm in love with this piece. God, I'm tearing up again just from thinking about it :')))

Edit: Just realized it reminded me of Boku Ga Shinou To Omottanowa which made me cry as well

While i may not be a big fan of 8bit stuff, i find this one personally to be really cool :o  I also wanted to ask what the software you used in the screenshots? I've honestly never seen it, but i have received jobs to make 8bit songs before and i had to google how to create that distinct 8bit sound, but that software looks like it's made for 8bit stuff and could be handy to have under my belt.

Loooooved the 7/4 rhythms. Only qualm i have would be that i feel like the snare felt overused? Iunno, that's my take on it i guess, but honestly even with that it's still really good imo, definitely would put in one of my playlists since i really love funky instrumentals.

I adore the bassline, was it recorded live? If yes, please teach me how to get that tone haha. Love the Percussion as well, really captured the old school RPG vibe.

Thank you so much!! If i could i would've added a bass solo as well, since I'm mainly a bassist, but i didn't want to make the song too long and i wanted the structure to still maintain the palindrome theme so i decided to scrap that idea.

Thank you!!! Almost all of the midi sequence i used were played live, then manually fixed the rhythm. The parts that didn't use a midi keyboard was because i got so mad that the recording keeps stopping because my audio interface is broken :') Other instruments i played live were the bass and guitar. I streamed it live if you're curious to see my thought process, but be warned, it's mostly just me complaining that the recording keeps stopping halfway haha. This is the link if you're still interested: 

i'm a streamer (defo not a big one lmao, i just do it for fun) and i was wondering if i could stream my process of making the song? i did see that you can post to youtube a screen recording of evidence of you working on your daw of choice, but nothing about streaming it. i'd love to make the song while interacting with my viewers but i have no idea if it's allowed or not because i can see it as being problematic if maybe my viewers were helping me with the song. although the best they can probably do is give feedback or suggestions, i was worried if this might be deemed problematic and not allowed so i thought it'd be best to just ask here first before and if i do it. thank you!

Hiya! I'm pretty new to this whole game jam thing but i like to think I'm experienced enough in the music industry. I've dabbled in music since i was in kindergarten and developed my skills throughout the years. I'm currently in my third year of music college specializing in sound design and music production but i have dabbled in composition and done some game music projects with a friend that's majoring in programing. If you're interested in working with me my @ in discord is "nitorino"
I've tried adding you to ask about that but i thought I'd leave a reply here as well just in case. Thank you!