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Music for a casual puzzle mobile games like Candy Crush - any tips?

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Hi,
I've got a gig for this type of game as a Sound Designer, but I'll also have to make music from time to time. As the gig happened immediately, I didn't have much time to prepare.
I'm usually making either very slow or very energetic music in different genres, and this type of 'casual music' is something that I'm not that good at.
I'm looking for tips, like recommended scales or preferred instrument articulations. Any composer working on this kind of music can share a bit of knowledge? :)

Ps. Besides being a casual puzzle game, it has a detective motive and is set somewhere around the '30s (not specified).
Ps.2. I can't afford Swing! library (they don't pay that much ;) ) so I have to work with mostly Spitfire libraries, mostly free BBC Orchestra. Eventually, Composer Cloud if I find matching libraries there.
 
The most important thing is to define the music flow first and the so-called "core loop" of the gameplay which your music is going to accompany. When, how much, how long, which purpose and how the crossfades and possible adaptivity is going to happen. This will give you the idea how to approach the actual composition process.

Generally, for a casual puzzle game you want very light and sparse arrangements which can take a lot of endless repeating. Short notes preferred over longs, and avoid percussion as much as you can except for cymbal rolls and shakers if absolutely necessary. Bass (instrument) is also advisable to keep as absent as possible. Yes, you can have a lot of pizzicatos and marimbas. Please don't.

You're also going to have a lot to fight with the sound FX, so my first advice is to grab yourself a good (10+ minutes) video of the gameplay with the FX on and after you've design the music flow, keep the sound FX on top of your composition as much as possible to make sure you don't overcompose or mix competing with them. As both as a sound designer and the composer, you have a lot of options how to balance stuff, but for a game like this the sound FX should always be the top priority and unfortunately the music comes always as second.

The libraries you use don't matter as much as how you use them- just as long as you keep in mind that you're not composing music for the sake of music but to accompany the gameplay and set the mood.

Feel free to ask more questions if you need!
 
Awesome. Thank you for an extensive explanation.
About mixing with SFX: I already have to follow SFX and music created by previous sound designers. So from one side, I have to follow that route (I'm already analysing previous tracks in DAW), but from the other side, I can't do much to improve or change the current balance/mix (except if I would have to redo everything which I wouldn't even try to do ;) ). Fortunately, they did a good job.

Spawning pizzicato and marimbas are very tempting, like a ukulele in royalty-free music :grin: I will go with spiccato because I think that it's a bit less tiring than a lot of pizzicato in a loop.
Most SFX is already made out of marimba, celeste etc., instruments, so I try to avoid them in music.

Good tip about bass. I guess most users wouldn't even hear it while playing with the sound coming from a phone's speaker. Do people play such games with headphones? I don't think that sound is that important for casual players, but they may keep headphones because they travel, and they use them for calls and listen to Youtube/Spotify.

For the sake of not fighting with the mix, I'll go for Compose Cloud instead of dealing with libraries from different companies recorded in different places with different mic setups. In a different scenario, I could afford to spend time on mixing and matching different reverbs etc. Still, I want to focus on composition and implementation (which will give me headaches for the next few weeks or months because the project is huge already, and I had only 2 days of introduction).

Do you also do sound design/implementation or only music?
 
Nowadays I do music only, but my previous job until 2013 included both tasks. But back then we didn't use Wwise or anything like that, so I basically balanced everything on top of each other in Cubase and sent everything to the coder, hoping for the best. :P

I still do my last balancing and mastering on top of the sound FX and ambiences to make sure the sound is already very close to final when slapping the files into the Wwise mix engine. (Yet still I usually always want to strip some of the top end away and add a bit of reverb to the music at that point, hah!)

On people listening with headphones, you bet! We actually run rather comprehensive statistics and research on the matter in our company, and the amount of people using headphones is surprisingly high on some (less hypercasual) games.
 
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