Friendsim BOPS

soft

Homestuck/Hiveswap

dis my shizz lol :o)

troll call kids

My favorite Friendsim tracks

Breeding Duties

SPIDER DANCE FROM UNDERTALE BUT ITS SKA I GUESS (YIKES!!!!!)

Catch me at the Bluebird this Friday opening for Said the Sky!!

Shamisen

La canción de Steven Universe aún sin salir, cantada por Rebecca Sugar en el final 1 temporada de los podcasts

Escapism (LEAKED/Rebecca Sugar) - Steven Universe

(Cirava's theme)

originally this was called Ｍ Ｏ Ｉ Ｓ Ｔ but w/e program trace was using didnt interpret them right but it was so much funnier to just leave it as boxes LMAO

anyway i said somethin ages ago about some of the trolls having themes i didnt get to finish all of them but ciravas is just a re-purposed early WIP of a grubbles song (get the horns) that i made vapor/moisturewave by slowing it down in the right way because thats literally all vaporwave is.

M O I S T

i wrote this for tagora. i do these for free so if you liked it consider sending me some cash https://ko-fi.com/jamesroach

Call Me Gor-Gor

i suggested this name as a joke and they did it the absolute madmen

>tfw another james roach track

once again i did not expect to get away with this name thanks for playing hiveswap friendly simulation i am gonna be gone all day so im just gonna post it now spoiler alert she's pirate themed if you couldn't guess

anyway i wrote this song when i was in like 7th grade because we could do something 'creative' instead of a book report. the book was sylvia plaths "the bell jar"

Piwates ',:^]

heres the "album version" of the loop from todays upcoming friendsim

it be like that sometimes

a little over three years ago i was in a sweaty conference room in manhattan visiting the now defunct WP NYC studio (which was in a shared space sort of... tech venture situation??) sitting in on what was usually a remote meeting. I nervously stood in front of andrew and my director at the time (whos name was also james come to think of it) as well as a handful of other people. Toby was conference calling in like we both usually did.

They said since i was visiting from out of town I didn't have to present anything at this weeks meeting like i usually did. I said I had something to show them anyway, since I didn't like to sit around idly and wanted to make the most of my studio visit. I stood there half-moist with gross air-dampness only new york in summer can really provide knowing I had one opportunity to wow them in person.

"alright. remember all those sound effects for that highblood minigame? like... seltzer water? light bulb? honks? squeaks? ok well, I made them into a beat and added some airhorns and tuba-"

"more tuba?" said toby over the call

"hell yeah brother more tuba"

anyway this was that song. It was going to be for a minigame sequence but i wanted to use it here. originally it didn't have a melody so i wrote a melody on banjo since you should definitely be reading all of chahuts lines in a very slow, methodical louisiana genteel southern accent. "SANGLE and ready tuh MANGLE"

take me to clown church

this track presented a unique problem in that i didn't want to write it at the time. I had written a really somber and melancholic track for the area outside the hive (the farm in the concept art) and changing it into something a little goofier and weird presented a unique difficulty for me. I just didn't know what to do for the first time in like actual YEARS i had no idea where to even start. I kept at it for a very long time and eventually just muscled through it with sheer force of will. People often ask me the hardest track or my least favorite to work on. it was this one. silver lining: its also become one of my favorites. i love how it came out. thats the power of determination. did you know you can't say determination anymore.

this was written for, yes, the fabled beekeeper troll that nobody will talk about. its become some sort of myth as to what happened to her but the truth isn't that exciting. in early hiveswap days each member of the crew got to "pick" a character that they could choose one design element of. The person who picked beekeeper just had a fantroll based off of herself. they also just... drew micro/macro porn of themselves? a power move, honestly. I met them in person and they offered me weed within literal minutes of meeting so i mean i guess they seemed nice. when they no longer worked for the company it was just simpler to redesign the character than deal with literally any of that. mystewy sowved :)

at the point in production where they were figuring out names/personalities/traits they kinda thrust this one on me because it "would make the most people angry." beekeeper troll was beloved by a very specific kind of horny dude. you know the kind that regularly says "lewds" or w/e. nothin wrong with that i guess. chase your bliss. but in an effort by my SO CALLED FRIENDS to antagonize me, they were like "heh h h e h he  e e he h what if we make this cute girl character that hornyboys love into a dumpy little round dude and then say we based him off james who they already do not like."

thanks guys.

anyway zebede's bullet points and even his name are references to me but thats kinda where it ends. st. james son of zebedee is also known as santiago, which is my birthname. the tongva were "maybe" the indigenous people of long beach, where i live, which is "too far to visit" which is a joke about The Greater Los Angeles Area. I live 20 minutes away. cowards.

beekeeper who? i dont know her.

Bronya's Theme

theres a channel that just re-uploads homestuck/hiveswap and now friendsim music to youtube so i named the track this so that a lot of confused kids show up in the comments. there isnt really anything i can do about people re-uploading music (and if it brings in a few more sales, then hell yeah) since if you take one down 9 others pop up and then people call you an asshole On-Line. at least we can both have a bit of a laugh when like fragman22 shows up in the comment section calling this song and whoever "james roach" is gay. well you got me there, kid. i am. i am gay.

for this one i really wanted to capture that LAD atmosphere. idk if mallek is a lad exactly... but he's got lad energy. maybe im just projecting. I have been saying saying "boyo" a lot lately. oh god is the lad.... me??? no probably not.

this song started off as a track for my best friend at the time Lexxy's fantroll very creatively named "Lexxer" back before homestuck fantrolls were "post-ironic" and still "sincere." I also put the melody to "nuclear" in here as a throwback to my old fantroll "Carcha." I have said fantroll more times today than I have in the last year. Fantroll.

this is the closest to ska that friendsim has got just because in its original iteration this is a weird like... electronica ska song.

anyway i say it "started off" as that but i literally wrote this track on like.. monday. thats how ya boy do. I borrowed from a song i wrote for a fantroll album i did. theres a whole fantroll album that... hasn't really stood up to the passing of time so I've mostly purged it from existence. I guess some chuckleheads found it but have been kind enough not to repost it.

FFM episode 413

here it is folks.

this was going to be in act 3, then i made it the EOA2 cutscene but it still cut off too early to be a full release and i just really liked it so i wanted you guys to hear it now instead of later.

i used it for boldir because it fit her whole aesthetic, but this song was originally wrote for a scene where joey and xefros are on the run. having been hardened by their journey they hit the streets. it was meant to be a really sort of somber realization.

I LOVE the mood of the transistor soundtrack and you might notice this drum beat and title are a very obvious nod to the song "Old Friends" (though someone else named it, years ago) I was specifically instructed "make it sound like this song" but since then I have worked to make it sound like more my own thing. you can see the influence of that soundtrack on all my work, though. the slow driving half-time beat. the airy reverb on chordal tones. the dirty bass. originally meant as a placeholder i never got over how the beat drops the backbeat on every other 4. I could dweeb out about this for hours.

Old Secret

(AN ASCII IMAGE OF BOWSETTE) (KARAKO's THEME)

friendsim spoilers:

karako is a very young and very small child juggalo. on twitter i described karako as "the one clown you are not allowed to be horny for" and a bunch of chuckleheads tried to be funny and say like "hueuhuhe is that a challenge" and its like one why don't you just listen to me when i say things, two stop trying to one up me you will never ever win, and three i am eagerly waiting your apologies. my inbox is open.

i mean i get it. i was just on a podcast this morning talking about how the one thing that binds us all together is that we've all engaged in some clownery. i think i talk about regrettably hooking up with a juggalo as a teen for a solid 10 minutes. its hard being me.

i just moved and gave my old electric bass away to a friend who was interested in learning. i recorded this before giving it away. goodbye electric bass. dozens of children will miss how i used to just go ham on the bass in a bunch of songs for no reason. oh also im beatboxing for two seconds in this one. i ran it through a filter so it sounds less like "james roach making some sounds."

all in all, i wanted to make this one sound a little more whimsical so i borrowed the synth i made for my friends dnd character theme... where they're also a clown? its a really good synth. ok marsti is up next.

(an ascii image of bowsette)

I think Toby actually named this one. The idea here is that you start with a normal song and slowly work your way to the weird clown shit. this is meant to reflect the real life struggle of finding someone hot and slowly but surely acclimating to the fact that they are a clown. we all been there. extremely relatable.

i got that weird laugh from toby as an mp3 and i THINK its from a spiderman game. it could just be toby's own impish laughter but probably not. toby has a hearty joy-filled laugh with exactly 0% in the vein of clownery department. i love toby so much.

so here we are. friendsim friday and i have to act like clownfuckery is just another aspect of my life akin to say a sweet tooth or psoriasis. like "yeah man we all done fugged a clown once am i right fellas" over here grasping at straws, desperation in my voice "r-right??? fellas???"

his name was daniel and he really loved ICP and i think now he works as a manager at a taco bell. yeah thats right daniel. i'm callin you out you nasty juggalo. my inherited army of teens are comin into your taco bell and taking all your fuego sauce. dont call me. that felt good. i feel better. what were we talkin about?

CLOWNFUCKER (By James Roach and Toby Fox)

this is literally the first track i wrote for the game. this piano motif a melody had been something i was kicking around back in like 2012 as a song for rose i think. when andrew originally talked to toby and i he gave us very specific marching orders about what songs to write. it was two songs. a haunted mansion and a "subway full of juggalos"

i mentioned before we went through a handful of "haunted mansion" ideas for HARLEHOUSE that were like too spooky and not campy enough. this was one of those spooky takes. we ended up using this theme for something of more... significance.

--

I will talk about this more once the route is available, the rest is spoilers.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT (PLAY THE ROUTE AND THEN TWEET @hamesatron ABOUT HOW GOOD THIS TITLE IS)

i started streaming my work now since its less of a surprise who the characters are. i went through like... five different versions of this track. this was gonna be disco i dont know what i was thinking.

we ended up going with this one which is actually meant for a different part of ACT 2. In ACT 1, the song "Keep your head down" has a rhythmic motif that I use in the climax of this song. I wont tell you what its for but... think of whats happening during that song in ACT 1, and know that it will be a much bigger deal when you eventually see it. i don't have any information wrt "when" that would be helpful to you. its barely even helpful to me. a real "buddy, they dont even let ME fuck the flag" situation. this is a reference to a popular tweet. im not an insane person i swear.

anyway nihkees sprite is absolutely fucking ripped. the size of this lad. the A in LGBTQA+ stands for ABSOLUTE UNIT apparently. 

I know it does not please do not @ me i am so fucking tired.

lmao i still dont know if its nicky or nike (like the shoe, not like.. the name mike)

▲trollkind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. to obtain something of equal value must be lost. that is alchemys first law of equivalent exchange. in those days, we really believed that to be the worlds one, and only, truth.▼

i wrote the original track when i was a teenager in a shitty band called "the isotopes" which is a reference to the baseball team on the simpsons. yikes. i played drums. bigger yikes. i fixed it up for this because we... just didn't have anything that fit. the idea is that its.. a jade blood who is trying very hard not to be one. 

you still have all the trappings of jade blood music: piano, bells, harps, arpeggios, some sort of.. ethereal moments.. but its like this weird bad rockabilly nonsense. you can hear how a like 11 year old me wrote what i considered to be "stride piano" there was a point this was gonna be a grubbles song but its like... well theres only two of them. so i kinda went buckwild on the drums a bit. remember dammek? i wonder what that guys up to. probably some stupid shit LMAO.

anyway a lot of you are wondering why trace put fucking lapras in the preview image and i guess the burden falls upon me to explain. on twitter there is an artist who predicted every single time it was gonna be daraya whether they had evidence or not and theres a whole like in-joke comic about daraya bringing a lapras plush (named SLAPRAS) to jade blood show and tell... look man i dont make this shit up theres a lot of lore. if you arent on homestuck twitter its about a thousand times better than anywhere else for that sort of... golden-age-homestuck fandom feel. nothing will ever come close to that but this feels very nostalgic to just joke and laugh with friends and shit. you guys have been really good to me. thanks.

▲trollkind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. to obtain something of equal value must be lost. that is alchemys first law of equivalent exchange. in those days, we really believed that to be the worlds one, and only, truth.▼

lmao i still dont know if its nicky or nike (like the shoe, not like.. the name mike)

jrmusic