Hello everyone, welcome back to a post-launch devlog! It’s been exciting to see the response
and reviews for the game. Especially that Only Lead Can Stop Them was nominated for the Indie of the Year at IndieDB, so please help us by voting here.
As for today – let’s talk about the soundtrack!
During early development, the plan was to go for a musical style that included marching music
and mostly non-modern instruments, no electric guitars or basses. That was before I played any
of the current levels. I quickly realised that my plan would fall apart, and went back to planning.
Although, some of the very early concepts are still in the game, more specifically the start of
E2M1 and the victory fanfare.
Since we were working on a demo, some tracks need to be in it. The main menu, an intermission for the map, and of course stage music. The demo songs are strongly based on the concept ”Less is more!”, as old-school shooters depend on older software and hardware (I’ll talk more about that later on). At some point I felt that ”Less is more” might be... ”Less is less”. No offense against old soundtracks, those are a legacy and foundation to a bunch of boomer shooter games. I wanted to add some of my personal flair, and my main inspirations. Players will notice a stylistic change starting in E2. More melodic and occasionally partially chaotic, even an exploration of several genres ranging from house music to 70’s progressive rock. I wanted the music to take a 180o turn at some point. I do hope it enhances the experience.
I’d like to make some shoutouts to my main inspirations. As some have already pointed out, I’ve
taken inspiration from Rise of the Triad with music by Bobby Prince and Lee Jackson. Other
inspirational soundtracks are from games such as Golden Sun (Motoi Sakuraba) and the
Castlevania series (Michiru Yamane).
Before moving on to some more technical aspects, I should mention that there are a few
recurring musical melodies in the game. There should be 4 of them, try to recognise them all!
Let’s start off by showing this synth solo from E2M4. It looks like a bunch of data rather than
music. Well, that is the case. This is showing the MIDI-language which is short for Musical
Instrument Digital Interface. Without making it too complicated, MIDI tells the computer about
the pitch, lenght and volume of a tone.
This has to be done either manually, or with a keyboard (the music instrument) connected to the
computer. I used both methods, mainly playing the solos and chords. Even the drums have their
own key bindings. The finer details such as volume and note length had to be adjusted manually.
I mentioned hardware and software earlier. The music from DOS games usually used a sound
card, Sound Blaster being the standard model. The Sound Blaster had the function of using FM
synthesis, easier explained as waveforms. Id Software used their own audio format called IMF
which stands for either ”id music file” or "id's music format". That’s a very brief explanation.
There’s a lot of technical aspects regarding DOS-music, which definitely still has me confused.
For Only Lead Can Stop Them, I simply wanted to make it sound similar. Fortunately, composers and music producers aren’t limited to the old standards. Yet, I wanted to limit myself with two types of software. First one was the Roland Sound Canvas VA, a virtual version of a sound card.
Unfortunately, this software has been discontinued as of September 2024. The second program
was Sforzando created by Plogue. It has the ability to load SoundFonts. SoundFont is in fact a
brand, but is generally the word used for a bank with music samples. This software allowed me
to use sampled instruments from the 90’s. A lot of technical talk in the end, well done making it
through to the end.
If you’re still here - thank you for taking the time to read, and thanks for playing Only Lead Can
Stop Them!
Best regards, keep shootin’
Johan Bergström, music production