"Emerald City Confidential" announced! Finally!

[Thomas Regin]

Howdy guys,

Just thought I'd do a bit of shameless self promotion and tell you that one of the biggest games I've ever had the pleasure of writing the full score for, has been announced. We've been working on this for ages now, so it's a relief to finally say it'll be released in January 2009!

Emerald City Confidential
The magical land of Oz, as written by L. Frank Baum and visualized by MGM, is put through the gritty filter of 1940s film noir. Harsh city streets, grey rainy skies, femmes fatales, tough guys, trenchcoats, fedoras and plot twists. It's Oz, seen through the eyes of Raymond Chandler.

Read more on the official homepage: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/PF.htm

This game is published and sold by PlayFirst. (http://www.playfirst.com)

The music is mostly cinematic and adventurous and uses EWQLSO extensively. It's been a fun and very challenging task to write, because the format needs to fit both downloadable and retail versions, so I've had to deal with heavy time restrictions on my loops. I'm trying to get a few cues cleared by PlayFirst, so I can publish them here. In the meantime, have a look at the excellent screenshots by following the first link above! :)

/Tom.

[Andrew Sigler]

Congrats Thomas!

Betsy Bobbins is HAWT:D

[WoodIsGood]

Congrats, Thomas. Looking forward to hearing some cues!

[Jeff Hayat]

Congrats, and best of luck with the project.

If you have time, maybe you wouldn't mind sharing some of your "work habits" and give a little insight as to how you went about composing. Not asking for how you built your templates and things like that, but - did you compose anything to picture? Were you given specific times to fit the music into? Were you given direction on what to write, and did you know what you were writing for, or did you just write blindly? Yanno, things like that...;)

Thanks!

[Thomas Regin]

Hiya guys!

I appreciate your comments! :)

RiffWraith,

The process of scoring this game has been completely different and much more time-consuming than any other game or project I've ever written for. I joined the team during the initial writing process and decided to do a "late night jazz"-soundtrack. I even wrote a few cues. Not long after this, as the story developed and a few artist sketches were made, I realized that the game called for a much more mysterious score and trashed my jazz-cues. I started writing a few orchestral cues that blew the PlayFirst people away - they loved them (thank God). However, since the game will be released both as a downloadable version as well as a retail version, PlayFirst was very concerned about filesizes, so I had to cut back. A lot. A lot, lot, lot, lot, lot!! Going from 3-minute looping cues to 15-30 seconds. Now that we're approaching the release, I've probably written close to 100 looping 15-30-second cues where around a third of them have been selected for the game. I've never tried to write with these kind of restrictions before, so it was a major challenge and during the process I've been swearing and cursing. But I must admit that I'm really proud of the result. Especially after the music has been mastered by the good people at SomaTone sudios in San Francisco. It really makes a world of difference. :)

Thomas.