Return to Wesnoth

[Mattias Westlund]

I realized I never posted this track here for some reason.

A few months ago I was asked by the Battle for Wesnoth developers to compose a new main menu track for the game. As I was still working on the FFL soundtrack at the time I wasn't able to get very far, but I've returned to it over the last week and now it's largely finished except for polish and tweaks.



For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, Wesnoth is an open source turn-based strategy game that has been around for ages. It was Wesnoth that got me started doing game music in earnest back in 2006, and this new tune is an overture based on various tracks I did for the game, plus a couple of themes (or, well, interpretations of themes) by Aleksi Aubry-Carlson and Doug Kaufman.

Again I used my old orchestral template for this one, as the rest of the Wesnoth music is getting kind of long in the tooth by now and I felt that the sound of the old template would blend in better.

I'm curious to hear what you think, especially if you've played the game in the past and have some familiarity with the music.

[bigcat1969]

I really liked it once it got going, I wanted to invade Westeros and then toward the end settle down and plow a field, it just seemed like the intro kind of went a bit long. Of course you know my skillz, so take that with a grain of salt.

[Mattias Westlund]

(08-17-2017, 03:31 AM)bigcat1969 Wrote: I really liked it once it got going, I wanted to invade Westeros and then toward the end settle down and plow a field, it just seemed like the intro kind of went a bit long. Of course you know my skillz, so take that with a grain of salt.

Yes, normally this would be too long for main menu music -- like, who spends four minutes in the main menu? -- but I was specifically asked to compose a track that was between 3 and 5 minutes so that it could potentially be used in-game as well. That being said, the timp/cymbal crescendo at the beginning needs to be shortened, and there's a few seconds of silence there as well that I forgot to edit out before uploading it.

[Paul Battersby]

It sounds really good. I'm not familiar with the type of music that might typically accompany a game menu, but I wonder if this composition might be distracting during the louder more active sections of the composition? Also, wouldn't it be necessary for the music to loop, or would it simply start over if the user is spending too much time with the main menu?

[Tod]

As usual, it sounded good to me Mattias, and I did noticed the silence on the intro you mentioned.  About the only criticism I might make is that during some of the parts where higher instruments were used, I tended to reach over and turn the volume down.  This was in the 2:30 to 2:54 area I think.  It just got a little piercing to me but it could just be me and/or my system.