My friend Eric (@kitasuna) is working on a new PICO-8 game called XCB, and I wrote the music for it! XCB is a game about snowboarding, inspired by the mechanics in Excitebike. Your goal is to dodge the rough spots on the slopes, land sweet jumps, and use your boost power to carve your way down the mountain within the time limit. You can check out his devlog channel, radicalslice, over on YouTube.
I wrote two pieces of music for XCB, Downhill Dash and Sunshine on the Mountain. The second one is the one used in the game, though I’m sure I’ll get a chance to reuse Downhill Dash in a future game. I’ll write about both so you can see how my thought process developed over time by comparing the two.
Downhill Dash
I was thinking about racing game music when writing for XCB. It’s not not a racing game in the sense of going head-to-head against other snowboarders, but it’s still about going fast. The first thing I wrote was the intro to Downhill Dash, which kicks off with a “3… 2… 1… Let’s Go!” kind of phrase.
If the gameplay of XCB is Excitebike, the music is at it’s heart Super Mario Kart.
For the rest of the piece, I essentially looked for as many opportunities as I could to reuse the intro motif to build out a short melody. There’s not any completely new material until the B-section. Then to bring it back to the A-section, I reused a similar “rhythm blast” figure to the one in the intro (ba-BUP ba-BUP ba-BUP!). Re-using material is a good approach to songwriting, both in terms of effort and in terms of creating memorable music.
Sunshine on the Mountain
I went in a different direction with the second song, but you can still hear some of their shared “DNA”: the groovy little bass-fills at the ends of phrases, the B-section harmony, the song form. Some key differences though, are the intro and the rhythm.
Instead of the lengthy “3… 2… 1… Let’s Go!” opening, I started Sunshine on the Mountain off with a short drum-fill. I think it turned out to be a better gameplay fit. Get right to the action!
Rhythmically, one big difference between the two songs is that I traded the son-clave rhythm in Downhill Dash for it’s little brother, the half-clave in Sunshine on the Mountain. One way think about half-clave is that it divides the bar into three groups, where the third group is cut short (count “ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, ONE-two”). Half-clave sounds like it’s always going forward, which makes it a good fit for this kind of game.
Dynamic music
When I write for video games, I always look for opportunities to make the music react to what’s happening in the game. There are a couple such spots in XCB.
I added a layer of arpeggiated chords over the main song for when the player boosts that I think can best be described as “chirpy”. It’s a little tough to layer tracks like this in PICO-8 while keeping the everything synced, but the cool frame stop effect makes for a good opportunity to get the start of the music to sync with the start of the boost.
I also wrote a little fanfare for when you reach the end of a run. It’s got an “extra” bar in it to build anticipation for the final note. I’m not sure what Eric has in mind for scoring yet, but I thought this would make room for the results screen to dramatically “tally up” your final score.