This summer we have released the Strategic Mind Franchise Soundtrack that will contain all the music for the Strategic Mind series (with the exception of the majority of The Pacific tracks), and all the money we gain from selling it is going into the creation of new tracks.
Why no The Pacific tracks?
The issue with music in Strategic Mind: The Pacific is that we bought music with a 1 commercial product license, and it’s not unique. It may be great music and fit the game, but other projects can use it as well, and we can only use it in one product. There are only 4 tracks written by an individual composer that are available in the Strategic Mind Franchise Soundtrack.
Why create our own music?
After we realized the issue above, we found a group of composers united under the name of Daraba Studio, who are now in charge of composing and recording all the music for our projects. Starting from Blitzkrieg we own all commercial rights and therefore can release all tracks in a separate soundtrack etc. Additionally, we are always hard-pressed on budget, so creating a separate soundtrack is a great way to add more tracks into the game than originally planned. Finally, we have read a number of users’ requests for a soundtrack, and that is what finally tipped the balance in favor of this new approach.
How is our progress so far?
The community is quite supportive of the Soundtrack idea, and we thank you for that. So far, we have gathered enough funds from Soundtrack sales to order additional 3 tracks that will be added to the existing soundtrack along with all the Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism tracks that we created using our default budget. All community-funded tracks will have a [Community supported] tag in their name, so you could tell which tracks were added owing to your support.
What are our future plans?
We hope that more players will buy the soundtrack during the Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism release, and it will help us create more Community supported tracks for the next project. If the soundtrack sales would exceed our expectations, we could create some additional tracks for Spectre of Communism and add them to the project when they are ready with one of the updates.
Adding historical tracks
In Strategic Mind: Blitzkrieg we started experimenting with historical music. The problem with it is that there is no copyright on the old music composition (it expired), but there is copyright for the old music performance(recording). That means we have to record our own version of the old songs and music. We do not have the budget for the chorus, so we create only instrumentals. In Blitzkrieg we added 2 tracks to see how they fit the game:
Wenn die Soldaten:
White Army, Balck Baron (aka “The Red Army is the Strongest”):
We were satisfied with the result, so we decided to continue adding some percentage of the tracks of old times in the next titles.
Historical tracks in Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism
Here is the Soviet Air Force March:
We also plan to add “The Internationale” and “Korobeiniki”. Additionally, one of the three community-supported tracks will be “Oh Fields, My Fields”.
Cinematic tracks
We also create special cinematic tracks, that are usually up to 1 minute long and are used only in cinematics. Here are some new cinematic tracks from Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism.
Zhukov theme:
Battle theme:
Gameplay tracks
Gameplay tracks are played at random during the actual gameplay. We will use the tracks from Blitzkrieg and the new tracks. Additionally, this time we want to try and use some of the historic tracks in the gameplay tracks capacity and are eager to hear your feedback.
Soundtrack update
We will update the Strategic Mind Franchise Soundtrack on the Spectre of Communism release date so that all current and future owners will get access to new tracks as well.
Your feedback and support
Your feedback is very important to us. It is actually you who suggested creating a soundtrack as a separate entity, we just built on that idea. Your thoughts about music quality and its nature are invaluable to us, so make sure you do share your thoughts on our community hubs and in the comments below. Also, every soundtrack purchase makes us one step closer to adding yet another track into the series. So, we greatly appreciate your support.
We will post the next issue of the Developers’ Diaries as soon as we can, so stay tuned.
With best regards
Starni Games team