This is the soundtrack of another academic game project that I also programmed and co-designed at the Games Academy all the way back in 2012.

Thief of Passion was a little puzzle game inspired by Lemmings and The Incredible Machine. Like in Lemmings a guy who is moving on his own had to get to the exit but like in The Incredible Machine there was only player agency before the player actually launches the action.

This was important for the music: we wanted the transition between the planning and execution phase to be visually and acoustically as seamless as possible since the player would often switch back and forth between both modes. As such two of the tracks, starting at ~0:44 and ~2:48 respectively, are in fact two variations of the same track with the "planning" track being rather calm and the "action" track being obviously more energetic.

As for the music itself: while visually the game was more inspired by the 80s, with the music I was drawn to the archetypical spy themes of the 60s and 70s with a funky bass, some strings and a vibraphone. I tried to capture the 80s by adding percussions that sound a bit like something that would come out of a primitive sampler. Also, Moby's rendition of the James Bond theme was a big influence on me here.

Sadly the soundtrack is only five minutes long as our time and resources on this project were extremely limited, partially because we basically had to start over halfway through the project.

Thief of Passion Complete Soundtrack

This is the complete soundtrack I made for Match Two, a simple mobile game that I also programmed during my brief stint with the short-lived German indie studio The Brathering back in 2013.

It was a very basic game where you had to tap pairs of objects as they float around the screen. Musically it was an interesting project because the game had a ton of unlockable level themes which changed the graphics, sounds and music and some of the game's behaviour. Each game session was rather brief, however, lasting 1-2 minutes so my job here was to compose a very diverse set of short musical themes. 

Additionally development was quite rushed so I had to create each theme very quickly and some of them are shorter than they should have been or depended too much on prefabricated loops or synth presets as a result.

Still, some of these I am very happy with, particularly the Western (5:11), Cats (4:11) and Zombie (7:01) themes which also ended up being used by numerous YouTubers after I originally uploaded the soundtrack to Newgrounds shortly after the game's release.

Match Two Soundtrack

Match Two Complete Soundtrack

This is one of the first tracks I made for Star Admiral by Hardscore Games back in 2014. The game was a trading card game about space battles for mobile devices. At the time I was still a bit obsessed with the early style of music that mixed symphonic sounds with electronica, like Rob Dougan's Furious Angels and some of Jesper Kyd's early works, and I think it shows.

This particular track ended up not actually being used in the game on the grounds that it sounded a bit too "fantasy" and I guess romantic for the developer's taste. As such this track remained a somewhat rough demo.

Void Fleet

This is another track that I composed for mobile trading card game Star Admiral back in 2014. This one would play while the player was waiting in the matchmaking queue. I think this was my fourth approach to the matchmaking music and the one that finally stuck.

The idea here was to use some repetitive sounds with that "computery" synthesizer as the base (which is admittedly some barely altered preset from what I recall) to convey that this is a sort of waiting period while some complex system is doing its thing but then build an increasingly epic and heroic orchestral arrangement around it so the player just gets more pumped rather than frustrated if they are stuck in the queue a little bit longer.

Star Admiral - Ready For Action

This is the main theme I made for Ship Storm, a 2014 Android game I made with a friend. I was going for something cute and friendly with mild Caribbean or Latin vibes that would go well with the game's colourful and childish cardboard look. I was probably a bit influenced by the main theme of Rayman Origins which my buddy and I played a lot at the time. We were in quite a rush and I think I made this one in just a few hours.

Ship Storm

Ship Storm Title

This is a track I made in late 2019 for a video game that sadly ended up getting cancelled soon after. The only thing the developers were sure about was that they wanted rock music. I don't usually make this kind of music but this song is what we arrived at after a long search for the right style.

Sadly all instruments here are virtual. The plan was to involve a gifted guitarist friend of mine once we had agreed on a style, alas, we never got that far due to the project's cancellation.

Still Dark

This is the title music I made for the trading card game Star Admiral back in 2013. The developers wanted the game to stand out in the highly casual mobile game market as something big and "hardcore", so I treated the game's music as seriously as I could.

I decided to let the game start musically with a bang. I wanted the music to make it instantly clear that this is a "real" game with production value in the same league as many desktop or console games (this was back in 2013, mind you!). Rather than warfare I wanted to convey competition as I felt that this better describes the game as a product, though there are obviously strong militaristic and milder sci-fi undertones.

Star Admiral Original Soundtrack

Star Admiral Title

This is a little theme I composed for an app called Masters of the Endless Sea in 2017, which was a training app stylised as a trading game about the East India Company.

For the intro text that provides context to the user, the developers wanted a short piece of music that sets the mood. I decided to go with a cute but heroic call to adventure that focuses on the seafaring aspect and greatly romanticizes the player's role.

Adventure

This is the soundtrack I composed for Lumber Jack, an academic game project which I also programmed and co-designed all the way back in 2011 when I was a student of the Games Academy in Berlin.

The game is a pretty blatant Super Mario Bros clone with a few original features. I decided to use guitars as the main instrument throughout the soundtrack as I felt that some country elements were a decent way to deliver the humorous North American wilderness setting casually and then I added respective twists in each track. E.g.  a house beat to make the main theme really fun and energetic and some heroic brass in the third level theme to give the player a little morale boost during the final and most challenging stage.

The final track is actually a "bonus track": it was the first thing I created for the game while exploring the style and it ended up being used in some unlockable bonus levels.

Lumber Jack Full Soundtrack

Lumber Jack Complete Soundtrack

Hi, my name's Jan and I'm a game developer and musician based in Poland. 

I've been passionate about video game music almost my entire life and started making my own music for video games when I joined the GameMaker community in 2005 where I provided original music to fellow hobby developers. 

A few years later I began commercially making music and also sound effects for Flash games and later mobile and indie games and also got an education in audio design from the Games Academy in Berlin.

These days I am primarily a game designer but still love making music in my free time and continue to take on contracts whenever something promising comes up.

JanRaw

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