We're jamming, jamming...

Or so goes the song. It’s January 27, 2021. I joined my first Global Game Jam with some good friends from college as a game designer. The theme was “Lost and Found”, and we decided to go with a local multiplayer adventure where explorers face each other in a dungeon while searching for a lost relic. As is usually the case with game design, after figuring out the core loop, you end up having some spare time before the programmers do their black magic and you can go back to working on gameplay stuff. So I decided to spend those few hours attempting to compose a song.

The cool thing about game jams for us crazy people who are never satisfied with our work is that there isn’t much time to question things. You mostly go with the flow and try to finish "whatever" before the deadline. Thinking about it now, this probably even extends to the name of the game, which ended up being “Relic, Found Is Not Stolen”, a saying taken directly from Brazilian Portuguese that would be better translated as “Relic, Finders Keepers”. During the jam though… Who cares what it’s called? It’s all jazz.

There was a single rule that we made sure to follow during development. Only use free assets and stuff we made ourselves. So I decided to give the BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover from Spitfire a try since I had gotten it for free a few days before the jam. While I don’t consider myself a skilled musician, I do think I have developed a somewhat good ear to sound, being the son of a musician. My father, Carlos Lucena, is a Brazilian singer-songwriter who recorded several albums. He would always bring me and my sisters to watch the shows, and, eventually, we started playing at concerts, singing, and recording with him.

For Relic, I wanted the theme to sound both epic and funny. When I want to work fast, I always start with a single motif. I recorded a few notes on my DAW and sent them to the team. I was lucky to get some positive responses, so I started adding percussion, something that Hollywood made me believe is an instant way to make something sound more epic. After that, I just exploited the power of MIDI and started trying out different instruments from the plugin until I found something that I liked. The end result is the following music, made in around 5 hours. I hope you enjoy it!