21 Apr Iwari
Before I started my composition course I had the chance to work again with Thundergryph for a few other projects.
The first one (to be delivered soon) is Iwari: a reimplementation of a 20-year-old board game named “Web of power” by Michael Schacht. I’m really attached to this game since I saw all the process of the project: from the first game played in Play (an Italian board game expo) in 2018 to the approval of the pre-production copy last winter. It’s been an incredible process and I really enjoyed going through all the steps.
Gonzalo first asked me if I could make the music for the upcoming kickstarter’s trailer: I had the chance to work together with Mateusz (one of Thundergryph illustrators) to perfectly sync the images with the sounds. It has been absolutely great! Here you can watch the final work:
The Thundergryph team loved the music so much that they suggested to transform it into a complete song for the soundtrack, so Human was born.
Since it’s a game about tribes that must conquer territories I wanted to make something very rhythmic to represent the fight, but I also wanted to express the other face of the tribe: women that sing for their babies and that work in the camp. “Human” seemed a nice title to portray all the beautiful aspects of ancestral human nature.
I started to work on other tracks using a lot of percussive elements and real African chants; I particularly like the sound of the marimba, which I find a perfect match with this afro-like tunes. Here is another track named Maasi, a Swahili word for “rebellion”.
One of the last tracks I made was used for a recent update that informed the backers about the shipping of the board game: it’s called “Orin” that means “chant” in Yoruba. I’m very happy about this track, since it was born as an assignment for my Composition class and turned out to be great for the Iwari project.
The soundtrack is not finished yet: my idea is to make 4 o 5 songs connected by long soundscape tracks, in order to make the game run smooth and so that the music is not too compelling. To be honest I find very difficult to focus if music is very powerful and engaging: i prefer to play or to read with little sounds. Maybe it’s because when I listen to music I use my whole brain, so there are not much neurones left for other tasks 😀