Rollin' Bonez

For Ludum Dare #44, I joined a small team to produce music and sound for a craps game. Players bet their bones to roll the dice in a Spanish gothic casino (which is incidentally all the direction I was given for the music!) The sounds for the game were pretty simple. First, we needed dice sounds, which I recorded in my home studio. I used a nice pair of heavy metal dice and my planner notebook with a sheet of felt on top to simulate a casino table. I rolled the dice several times while recording with my StudioPro mic, then selected the three best takes to clean up and send to the team. Other sounds included dice clacking together (also recorded in my studio), bones clacking for dialogue, and a crunchy damage sound for when the player bets their bones. I used some sounds from a library for the last two, chopping up some recordings of vegetables snapping or being crushed and layering them together. The team ultimately used one dice roll and one damage crunch sound.

The music direction was simply, "Spanish gothic casino," so as always my first step was to do a lot of listening and take some notes. My palette consisted of guitar, drums, claps, güiro, music box, piano, pipe organ, and vibraphone. I intentionally chose instruments that were either shared between two of the three genres (piano for gothic and casino, guitar and drums for Spanish and casino) or that are quintessential to their genre (guiro for Spanish music, pipe organ and music box for gothic, and vibraphone for casino.) Since I was working on a limited time frame, I stuck to percussive instruments to limit the amount of time I'd need to spend polishing the samples. I chose a minor chord progression that fit into all three genres, and wrote a loop of a little over a minute with three sections. It was challenging and a ton of fun!

I won't lie, I don't understand how to play craps at all - but I'm proud of the game and of the music I wrote for it! You can play the game for free here, and listen to the Rollin' Bonez score on its own on my SoundCloud!