Creating The Original Soundtrack of ‘Mythic Garden’

A behind-the-scenes look at my creative process for scoring the videogame ‘Mythic Garden‘. Watch the trailer video, play the game online and listen to the original soundtrack below.

Spring Is In The Air

The weather has been getting nicer here, and for the soundtrack to this particular game I wanted to give the player that same feeling of excitement, hopefulness and opportunity that each spring brings along with it.

However, I also wanted to emphasize the chaos of players frantically scrambling around to water their burning plants with accompanying music that is almost ‘ironically’ optimistic. I feel like it gives it that ‘Always Sunny In Philadelphia‘ or ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm‘ effect, where even though madness is ensuing onscreen, the music remains calm and happy-go-lucky as if to drive the point home even further.

I was also inspired by games like Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, and SNES-era RPGs (specifically the town, castle and world map themes), as well as the upbeat and cheerful soundtrack of ‘The Great British Baking Show‘, which we happened to be watching quite a bit of at the time.

Sound Design

The happy ‘sigh’, ‘gasp’ and ‘WAAATER!’ sounds are recordings that my wife Marija did, and they were all completely improvised on the spot. I just hit record and said ‘close your eyes and pretend to be a thirsty plant’ (and she completely nailed it). The carnivorous plant sound is of course my doggo Falkor eating a crunchy treat. We’re thrilled that the sounds made it into the game and brought some smiles to people’s faces, and Marija’s also stoked to have her first official video game credit/cameo!

Live Instruments

Special shout out to Rickey Mindlin for the melodica, which is used for the melody on the main theme and is also what inspired the recurring motif that is used throughout the score.

Often associated with reggae music,  the melodica was popularized by Jamaican dub artist Augustus Pablo and more recently, virtuoso musician and fellow videogame music aficionado John Batiste (who can often be seen playing it on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert‘).

Conclusion

I learned a lot while working on this game and I look forward scoring more games and interactive media in the future. The feedback for the audio has been great (it was ranked in the Top 100 for Audio, 89th place out of 2900 games) and I want to give a special thanks to everyone who played and rated the game!

As a token of appreciation I’ve decided to release the original soundtrack along with a handful of other game OSTs, and remixes via my new videogame-inspired label imprint Retrograde Arcade.

Stream/download below on Bandcamp and be sure to check out my co-collaborators Enigma Dragons for other awesome games like this one.

*For inquiries about original music composition or sound design for your project, contact [email protected].