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Hi, this is the first of what I hope to be a small handful of ‘devlog’ posts about the Composeman game demo (prototype?) I made last year. According to my notes, I started the project in earnest near the end of June, with the design document started on the 30th. There are a couple of reasons why I’m writing this:
- 1. I haven’t given much thought to it for the whole year so far, so I figured I should start getting back into it, and I need a refresher.
- 2. I did do a post-mortem (or I tried) and I felt so embarrassed at the result that I privated the video straight away. Maybe writing it will be better?
- 3. Someone commented on the gameplay video after a silence of, like, 6 months, so it just got me thinking again. I started taking notes again a few days ago and here we are.
There’s a lot of stuff I want to share, but I don’t know how much is appropriate. I want to gush about the soundtrack, but I also had to be practically minded and scrutinise it, and the whole thing was a secret project that I didn’t ask permission for, so it’s kind of awkward.
Soundtrack
I don’t think I need to explain the context of the game again, but the first major thing to do was listen to the soundtrack and actually pick out the songs I needed and wanted. As part of the selection process, I had to figure out if they were actually appropriate for me to use.
But, what is “appropriate”? I can take care of audio engineering issues, like clipping, looping and volume, but there’s no game unless I look at the required songs and agree that it can fit in the labeled section, or find a substitute.
For example, password screens (track 4) are a cute idea for a retro fan album, but are completely redundant for a modern game with save files. Cutting it would be a waste, so can I reuse the song somewhere?
I don’t think I started by looking in a methodical order – I only checked the menu music, picked out the coolest sounding stage music and real-life biography, and the boss fight music. But, both the stage select and the boss fight music sounded “goofy” to me – “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” is also a nursery rhyme, and “Sabre Dance” is stereotypically associated with the circus. These were both critical songs, and I was able to find substitutes for both of these easily – the password music was perfect, and there were multiple boss fight songs. Sounds like a convenient happy ending, right?
But, things began to snowball when I began to research the songs more properly. I mean, for the scope of the game (concept?) I wanted to do my due diligence. I wanted to be as respectful and well-researched as I could possibly be to the source material, since I was working in a vacuum – but I also wanted be as professional as I could possibly be in its creation, and leave it open to future possibilities, including the idea of actually selling it for profit. Even if I don’t get to that stage, I wanted to make it a point in a portfolio item.
I started with loose notes, then reviewed it again on the transfer to the design document, then realised – well, I have like 3 or 4 songs with a red flag or note on them now… and I’m also discovering other issues with those two songs that weren’t immediately apparent. I should just check the rest of the album properly.
In general, there were two major types of problems I had with the flagged tracks, though there were other issues, too. The two issues were copyright, and not actually being classical music.
Not Actually Classical Music
This one threw me for a loop, since, like I said, the stage select song is a nursery rhyme. Was it really a piece of classical music? It’s not uncommon, really – a bunch of tunes are really pervasive and reused in the modern day as generic music, so a lot of people aren’t aware that “that 2001 Space Odyssey song” or “that wedding song” or “that circus song” was actually classical music.
The only option was to look everything up, and it turns out “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” is classified as a folk song. In fact, the “composer” claims to have only written the lyrics! Wrong attribution became another flag on my notes, but it’s not a deal breaker – just a research headache.
Having it not be classical music wasn’t a serious issue, but it meant that I would place it at the bottom of the pool of songs to draw from. Apparently, in both public perception and the music industry, a classical piece has a particular definition separate from folk songs, despite the crossover in time period. For the stage select song, I initially struck it off the list, but ended up making art for a ‘hard mode’ select screen that would use the song, if I implemented it. I liked the flower motif more, though.
The right image is a mockup. I was also thinking of adding angry eyes as a reference to JP/US box art differences.
In addition, growing up with English nursery rhymes made it obvious to me that Greensleeves was definitely a folk song, and research confirmed that Henry VIII didn’t compose it, either. It wouldn’t be a problem now, but that meant I had to check each boss later, since it wouldn’t be historically accurate to use him to represent classical composers. In order to create one full game, I’d have to use all the Composeman albums.
Copyright
Upon actually researching “Sabre Dance” for real, instead of just going off my impression, I realised that it was written in 1942, which meant that aside from being associated with silly cartoon antics thanks to Warner Bros, it would be a hassle to include it in a commercial game.
This is the qualifier that definitely struck some songs off my list. (There’s also a Star Wars bonus track at the end that I dare not touch for obvious reasons.) Since I already had a substitute song this wasn’t an issue, but it did mean that when I got around to making a full list, I had to check all of it.
That list of songs happens to be the exact notes I’ve been taking over the last few days. Three out of eight bosses in the first album were considered a no-go, but there are three more Composeman albums: 2, 3, and 3.5. (de Senneville and Coates are the other two composers in the first album that were still in copyright.) Having 4 albums meant that I had a lot of options and backup songs available, so marking off songs due to my high caution for copyright would hopefully not be a problem. Instead of 35 tracks to explore, I had 156.
Personality Rights
As an aside, while it’s not something I actually thought about originally, the YouTube comment asked about what I had planned for “de Senneville Man”, so I looked up his biography to see what was usable. It turns out he died in June 2023, so a couple weeks ago from this writing. The fact that he was still alive when I was originally making this meant that personality rights would have applied, too. This would have also applied to John Williams and Joe Hisaishi, who is in later albums. (Also, Copyright terms are longer than personality rights, so copyright also applies anyway since a stage would use both the person and their song.)
In any case, making a fan album for fun is one thing, but making an interactable game where they’re fightable as an enemy is a little too far for me.
Anyway, a lot of this stuff is future-proofing for the next stage of the project, and I didn’t need to go this deep if I only wanted to make one stage. Like I said, I wanted to be thorough and treat it seriously – after all, when’s the last time I made a game prototype? 2011? I don’t count the Space Invaders clone.
Stats
Anyway, while the spreadsheet I have now can probably still use some improvements, I’ve now done preliminary reviews on all 156 tracks. Here are some stats:
Out of 156 songs,
- 53 are covers of songs probably under active copyright (at first glance)
- 20 are marked as “uncertain” or “probably won’t use” – either it’s not Classical or there’s something I don’t like about it
- 23 composer bosses are usable
- 47 stage songs are usable – There are many Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky songs, and doubles/triples of Bach, Vivaldi, and several others.
I really want to point out that it is really, really, painful to mark some of the cooler songs as still under copyright, though it’s also important to research it carefully. For example, after hearing Cecile Chaminade’s Arabesque, I actually put this on the top of my desired list. Then, I discovered she died in 1944, so it’s under copyright… And then, right as I was writing this paragraph I looked it up to double check, and it turns out the score was published in 1892. So it’s okay!
Yeah, I stopped writing this to double check if I actually wrote all the years down properly. Did I mention it could still use improvements?
Copyright expiry isn’t one of those things that live in my head, but it is something I’m fairly aware of due to being a content creator trying to stay above board, and just having a background of interacting with licensing on the regular. I was a little embarrassed to realise my math was mentally off by 10 years when thinking of the expiry year – it’s 1953, not 1943!
The terms of copyright expiry actually depend on the country, but the majority of them expire 70 years after the author died. However, US copyright law is a big mess, since the grandfather clause sometimes applies when it’s changed.
Going back to the original stream-of-thought when writing, here is an image of a small portion of the spreadsheet I made shortly before writing this:
The ones marked as “uncertain” are a mixed bag, and has fluctuated a lot. Some are songs that didn’t give me the right vibe. In some cases, it sounds good but is too long, or too short.
23 bosses is slightly off from 24, though I had to do a couple of recounts so it might change. This gives me a pretty good pool to work with, but I think it’s unrealistic to think I can use all of it in 3 games, or one giant one. Regardless, despite marking an entire one-third for copyright, this is a lot.
The stage songs, however, are quite interesting, because I’ve also marked some non-stage songs as being too good to not use in a stage – so the number might be a bit higher. On the other hand, I made some notes on stage songs that might be better somewhere else, since there are way, way too many Mozart tracks.
However, do keep in mind that this is all planning, and I haven’t applied any of it yet.
Anyway, that’s just about three pages now and to go into more detail would have me comment on individual tracks. If you’d like another post about this, I’ll talk about my NES graphics research.
Eiri Sanada 