Case Study
Unshine Arcade
33 minutes of orginial score · full FMOD implementation · released on Steam
Unshine Arcade is a story-driven horror game built around an arcade shooter. The player moves between a run in the cabinet and the world outside it, so the score had to hold two registers that never share a room: bright, fast arcade music, and the dread waiting when the run ends.
Unshine.exe
Not a cue but a system. A distorted, unstable drone that responds to the distance between the cursor and the executable, swelling as the player moves closer. Nothing tells you what to feel. The file just sounds like it is breathing, and like it knows you are there.
Sunshine Arcade / The Staff Room
This is where you land after every run, so I had to write something you don’t want to mute. Drafty hollow sustains, high strings scraped thin, metal synths with nothing warm in them. Nothing holds still. It drifts between loud enough to notice and almost gone, so the room never settles into background.
The Staff Room fades in over the top, bringing rhythm and melody into a cue that has neither. Near the exit it tightens everything. Under dialogue it does the opposite, because the room is not empty anymore when someone is standing in it.
Space Frog Theme / Showdown
Stealth sections usually get sparse and tense. This one gets drum and bass, Commodore 64 and Game Boy chiptune, and quirky sci-fi synths. The cabinet is the only happy place in Unshine Arcade. When the chase starts it moves into Space Frog Showdown.
VP Theme
A Shepard tone over a hemiola-based Risset rhythm: pitch and tempo both climb endlessly without arriving. It runs under the climax and pushes the player towards the end.
Services
Most teams hire a composer and then find out they still need someone to cut, loop, name and wire the audio into the game. I do all of it, so audio arrives in the build working.
Testimonials
If you ever need music, I highly recommend Daniel.
I was working on a weird, hard to explain video game called Unshine Arcade and gave him the most vague request for a soundtrack and he came back with what I can only describe as the best soundtrack I could have ever imagined for this game.
He really goes above and beyond for everything, adding details and whole new instrumental solos deep into development when I thought the soundtrack was already at it’s peak.
Give him a chance and you won’t regret it.
Mardt
How I work
Audio is usually the last thing a team budgets and the first thing that gets vague. Here is how I keep it from becoming that: you know the scope, the price and the delivery dates before I write a note.
1. Scope
A call about the game, the build, the audio you need and when you need it. I come back with a fixed project fee and a delivery schedule.
2. Direction
Before writing a full score I deliver two or three short cues to settle tone, palette and instrumentation, This is where we decide if we are heading towards the right direction, on twenty seconds of music instead of forty minutes.
3. Production
Music and sound design are produced in batches, with a check-in at each batch. Two rounds of revisions per cue are included. Anything that changes because the game changed is a scope conversation, not a free redo.
4. Implementation and handover
I build the events in FMOD, test them against a playable build and hand over a session your team can read. Fixes to my own implementation stay free after handover.
5. What you get
Project fee, paid in three parts: 30% to start, 40% halfway, 30% on delivery. For implementation work on its own I bill per day.
Daniel Veld
I write interactive music and build adaptive audio systems for horror and dark fantasy games.
After graduating as a composer for film and games at ArtEZ Conservatory in the Netherlands, I spent six months interning with a working AAA game composer.
I work in a hybrid orchestral and electronic palette. The score should not sit on top of the game but move with it, amplifying and foreshadowing where things are heading.
Music, sound design and FMOD implementation come in one scope, built and tested in the project, not handed over as a folder of loops for someone else to figure out.
Based in the Netherlands, working remotely with teams in Europe and North America. My evenings cover most of the North American working day.
