#amare dev

14 New Secrets/Variations to Discover, 25 New Trinkets to collect, 9 New Sidequests, 4 New Achievements!

6 New Character Traits, 12 New Ancestry Passives, 2 New Phobias, 4 New Status Effects!

Revamped Heritage Passives!

Retcon the narrative and your choices with the new Narrativium Points mechanic!

Revamped Health & Intimidation Stats, Traits and EXP System!

Revamped Chapter 1 Twin Fight Scene!

Added new Sleepover Branch!

Updated bestfriend scenes!

Crush sidequests can now be declined!

You can now change what your MC calls certain characters via the diary!

Added more backstory details about MC's dad, and you can now choose his home country if MC is Half-Filipino!

Increased save slots to 20!

New and improved gender and pronoun options!

Updated diary entries!

Updated content warnings to include themes that will appear in future chapters!

Fixed missing background music!

Tons of new choices, edits, adjustments, and additional flavor text/variations/characterization details!

Roselyna is now approximately 20% more huggable!

The Trinkets & Secrets Guide has also been updated!

I regard music as a crucial part of the storytelling body: if the overall narrative comprises the heart and mind—dialogue the mouth, art the eyes, and sound design the ears—then what is music, if not the nervous system? That which prompts us to share in the experience of a character's feelings: pain, pleasure, fear, hope, connection. Music is the wordless cue to feel, and a well-considered soundtrack gives a story backbone.

Music was the backbone of several first loves of mine. “First love" is a funny sort of title, because it can be applied at will across a spectrum of individuals both real and imagined, from celebrities to blorbos to friends to near-strangers. One of my own earliest childhood “crushes" was on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—or rather, the figure I imagined was behind the music I was dutifully learning at my weekly piano lessons (spoiler: pretty well nothing like the documented historical figure, as evidenced by my rejection of Beethoven at the time as too mercurial a personality). And as I grew, I learned I could weather any social event, so long as there was a piano to befriend: I could dutifully play Gershwin and Rogers and Kenton and Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky and Debussy—but I couldn't compose.

I used to perceive that as a shortcoming. I’ve since learned that it served to whet a different skill: after all, I am intimately familiar with my own feelings, the shape and perimeters they create—figuring out how that ought to sound is merely a vocabulary to be honed over years.

And introspection has taught me well that songs are spells which carry the rare magic of time travel.

Memories are fossils encased in sensory experience: for me, near-drowning tastes like salt and fear and strawberry ice cream, escaping death and embracing the sweetness of summer and survival. And in a world where mighty quests exist in literature alone, hearing a song that meant something to me at a fixed point in time served as a save-state for that emotion, as well as a quest prompt.

The Cure. Track 8. Follows Friday I’m in Love. Tastes like late summer, and a love you know won’t work out—an earnest emotion, where failure feels like tragedy, even if it is inevitable.

It took me two years to find the right song, the right album. And to this day, I smile whenever I hear The Cure, and I remember that absurd, self-imposed quest. The one that tastes like the sun filtering through eucalyptus trees during the fleeting months of summer break, and lukewarm, oversweetened boba tea, and secondhand clove smoke, and first loves; and while I do not have the same hair-trigger sentimentality I did as a teenager first hearing it--now, now I have a story around it, which includes all those elements, and that setting, and it amounts to time travel.

That absurd, drawn-out process is a cornerstone shaping how I think of songs in storytelling. It's one piece of many--for example, learning that while I loathe Shostakovich in recordings, I also cry listening to Shostakovich's work live--but the practical application and experience of music is one that guides me.

I am myself, of course, An Old Elder Fae, and will show my years in stating this, but: I believe music being more effortless to find makes people more inclined to second-guess their own connection to it--the mechanization / sterilization of the human experience can sometimes make us feel so terribly alone and disconnected, when the reality is, a ten year old can definitely still harbor a (awfully misguided) crush on Mozart; bad songs can still carry good memories by association; and however annoying it may be when the mix tape or cd you were given has a flaw or scratch in the recording, it can transform into part of the music--and the clean version becomes apostasy.

I think I kept my core values intact when it came to commissioning tracks for Bright Oak; I believe what the intervening years have taught me is how I want implement music in my games as an active aspect of the storytelling, rather than treating it as a sort of omnipresent, passive wallpaper. Because in life, it isn't. In the same way that scent can transport us back to a childhood memory, specific songs, and even musical genres, can immediately form a channel taking us back years, even decades.

And thanks to those bittersweet, fondly remembered, inevitably doomed first loves of mine--I've learned to actively think about how music informs my personal storytelling. Just as I furiously memorized the mood, the instrumentation, the context, and the follow-up to Trust, game music is most impactful in context.

Because soundtracks tell the story as much as backgrounds or character sprites do, and deserve equal consideration.

Music has memory association, and by extension, it is full to the brim of stories.

That ill-advised kiss under a supposedly haunted bridge, the one that lead to calamity? Will always sound like Miles Davis, at his most plaintive.

The first time playing hooky on a field trip because a friend could drive, stopping to get coffee during school hours? Will always sound like New Order. Rebellious, a generation older; safe-rebellious.

High school prom, college road trips, interstate moves, traumas, joys, COVID--all of them have distinct soundscapes and fingerprints for me.

Let us take up space in our soundtracks, be it as devs or as listeners; let us get personal. Let's be specific and considerate in how our stories sound: let's cultivate our moods, and also cultivate where there is silence.

It doesn't require being able to read music to recognize the emotional language of mood and memory which music commands and speaks with fluency. And harnessing my understanding of it has reshaped and enriched how I think of game dev.