When I’m not writing a game or story, I love to write music. I’ve composed game soundtracks and led rock bands. Here’s some of my favorite work!
Heartspell: Horizon Academy (2025)
I wrote and produced half of the soundtrack for romantasy adventure game Heartspell, stepping in when the composer became unavailable. Stylistically, my goal was to match original composer Jonathan Warman‘s picturesque ambient soundscapes and fantasy orchestral palette, but incorporate my personal style with a bit more presence of carrying rhythm and hummable hooks.
Whereas Wintermoor had retro MIDI work with flat dynamics, Heartspell focused on naturalistic sounding instruments with subtle dynamics and expression. To accomplish this, I used virtual instruments from EastWest Sounds, primarily their Hollywood Fantasy and Hollywood Orchestra collections. Technical requirements mandated strictly looping one-minute tracks, so I had to use some compositional artifice to loop smoothly without the benefit of intros or tails.
Adventure Together
Heartspell is a romance game, so I wrote tracks to match many shades of love, friendship, and conflict. This track is a giddy and triumphant fanfare about finally finding love, and the promise of further adventure that comes with it.
Naturally Scandalous
Writing a sexy song can be a tough assignment, especially with an orchestral soundtrack. When you think of “sexy soundtrack,” you probably first think of something sleazy or cornball instead of, like, good. So I shot for playful and seductive while remaining classy, using flamenco instrumentation alongside some vocals (to represent the siren character whose theme this is). And of course I used the sexiest time signature, 11/4 shifting to 6/8.
Sleepytime Magic
The first track I wrote for Heartspell was to score cozy scenes that take place at night, with Animal Crossing as my main comparable. I tried to balance a warm and relaxing tone with just a dash of magical excitement, adding a guzheng and uilleann pipes to orchestral bells and strings.
Wintermoor Tactics Club (2020)
Though my role would shift to focus on narrative design and writing, I originally signed onto Wintermoor Tactics Club to provide the soundtrack. I ended up writing over an hour’s worth of music across 30+ looping tracks.
The team lead of Wintermoor described his dream soundtrack for the game as “Final Fantasy Tactics meets Wes Anderson.” Based on that description, I established a palette of sample-based orchestral music to evoke a PlayStation-era RPG. From there, I added whimsical homespun touches such as a glockenspiel, along with occasional sonic references to the game’s setting of an academy in 1981. In terms of tech, I mostly worked in Reason for its ease of working with samplers, but used Reaper for songs that needed live instrumentation or more fastidious production.
Here are a few notable tracks:
Dear World
The world map music. Warm and cozy, yet slightly wistful, to establish the overall tone of the game. Like a school marching band take on the gentleness of classic JRPG town music, joined by a lively “boom box” beat to celebrate 1981’s nascent use of drum machines in funk and pop.
Gate Crashers ~ We Are On Your Side
The final boss music. The vast majority of Wintermoor‘s music has a palette like “Dear World,” but since this literally takes place in another dimension, it justified mixing things up. Inspired by Shoji Meguro’s Persona soundtracks and symphonic rock, it has a driving and epic feel to underscore the otherworldly nature of the climactic encounter, with callbacks to previous musical themes.
Tell Her How You Feel
Full Credits: Samantha Vick (backing vocals), Matt Zapp (saxophone), Kyla Furey and Samantha Vick (lyric consultation)
Wintermoor is set in the 80s, so we of course needed an 80s-style power ballad for the end credits. In-game, this song is written by a character named Todd, a painfully shy kid who’s too awkward to tell the main character Alicia that he likes her. He grows up to write a song about her (and the games themes) that becomes a one-hit wonder. Because he’s dorky looking, I went for kind of an “surprisingly deep/soulful, like Rick Astley” vibe on the vocals. This features help from Samantha Vick on backing vocals and Matt Zapp on saxophone.
The Last Book Club (2020)
I’m also a songwriter/guitarist/vocalist in The Last Book Club, a rock band made up of Seattle-area game developers. We released our first EP, Prologue, as two singles in 2020 and 2022.
Full Credits (Prologue EP): Samantha Vick (vocals, bass), Sela Davis (keys, guitar, backing vocals), Ben Walker (drums). Produced by Jav. Engineered by Jav & Shawn Simmons at Studio Litho and End of Saints in Seattle, WA. Mixed by Jav at End of Saints. Mastered by Ed Brooks at Resonant Mastering in Seattle, WA.
Track List:
- “Book Club” (lyrics) – Bombastic garage pop with joyfully sesquipedalian lyrics, about an outlawed book club looking for a truth to save the world.
- “Important” (lyrics) – Guitar-driven anthem that wryly questions the value of creative work.
- “Paladin” (lyrics) – Slow-burning dramatic rock song about impostor syndrome.
- “The City” (lyrics) – A vivid allegory for the unease of existential wonder.
Game Jams
Here are some older tracks from game jams and other projects:
Theme from “Trichromatic” (2016)
A chill yet upbeat score for an abstract roguelike about exploration. The game was about shifting between three dimensions, so the soundtrack dynamically shifted as well. This demo shifts between the three instrumentation styles layered over a constant base.
“Jumpkick Extreme” from Jumpkick Justice (2011)
A short loop of hyperactive NES-style chiptunes rock for the winner of USC’s annual Game Jam, Jumpkick Justice.
“Maximum Best” from Cyclyc (2009):
Cyclyc was a game jam game where two players play separate yet linked action games on one screen. To reflect the choices of the two players, I made an upbeat song that could dynamically change the intensity of two musical styles. One of the players had a 8-bit graphics, and was represented in the song through the chiptunes. The other had more painterly graphics, and was represented through instrumental rock.