You might remember me from the first devlog as one of the co-founders of Strangers. But today, I want to introduce you to another side of me: Vincent the composer and musician. For Trailblazers: Into the March, I handle both the business side (a fancy way of saying I mostly deal with accounting and contracts) and the music composition. Since the start of the project, I’ve had very little time to focus on music—but that’s finally changing. So let’s talk about it.
How it all began (with a piano)
Let me take you through my journey of how I discovered composition and made it an essential part of who I am. It didn't really start as a passion to be honest. More like a chore. I started learning piano at the age of 7. I didn’t really have a choice—it was that or suffer humiliation on a football field. I wasn’t a great student. I didn’t practice, I didn’t enjoy lessons… until one day, a teacher introduced me to basic improvisation.
That changed everything. Suddenly, I could create something. I quickly began exploring composition on my own. For a couple of years, I filled floppy disks with music written on the 5-track sequencer of our Technics digital piano. I still remember the process perfectly… and the endless amount of bad music I produced. I had to hit the “Song Clear” button so many times—but it was a great learning experience.
Should I delete what I just did or keep it?
At 15, I took the next big step and bought a SoundBlaster sound card. Suddenly, I was spending all my time between Cubase and the Internet—family PC quickly became my PC and the telephone line became a dedicated line for the slow and painful transfer of internet data. From there, I never really stopped. I went through all sorts of musical phases: rock, experimental music, techno, an obsession with synths and drum machines, endless plugin collecting, spending more time wiring gear than actually playing, live music, drums or singing.
Incantations for Trailblazers
Composing for a game was new territory for me. To shape the musical world of Trailblazers: Into the March, I first needed to understand the March itself: its people, technology, culture. Did they have instruments? Music notation? Was music ritualistic? Entertainment? Both?
I dreamed of inventing a world with its own rules. In this case: its own music. I dug through books on trance music, ritual music, and more. I spent a long time in the realm of ideas before writing a single note, trying to invent musical “rules” for this world. In the end… only fragments remained: the atmosphere, the instrumentation. But that was enough.
Trailblazers and the company kept me busy in many other areas, so real work on the music didn’t start until 2025. It all began in January, during a mountain trip. I brought a small MIDI keyboard and a notebook and worked at night after everyone was asleep. That week, I wrote five incantations - as I have decided to call them. My goal was to write music that could be sung by the crew members around the heart of the ship - in a kind of magical act of healing the heart.
Early Heart Key Art
The location of this trip was fitting: the Swiss Prealps are home to faiseurs de secret—local healers said to stop bleeding, cure warts, even help find lost objects. I think every composer secretly dreams their music will feel like magic. That it will do something. Move people. Transform them. But most of the time… the magic doesn’t happen. That’s our curse. Nevertheless, here is the first version that came out of this initial short work session.
In this first version, you can already hear the tuba in the bass and the intertwining voices (Su, YuWe, Nana). Jen, our Narrative Designer—you can read her post—imagined this as music for a calm moment.
I didn’t touch the track for months. When I finally reopened the project in August 2025, it grew from 2:40 to 9:50. But honestly, not much changed—just longer sections, a different progression. I posted it on our community Discord… and someone said the tuba got boring after five minutes. Ouch. The magic didn’t work. Back to work. I reworked the track, adding more variation in the bass and tweaking other elements along the way. Here’s the updated version—I hope you enjoy it.
Is this the final version? Probably not - Magic is a learning process.
Vincent