Thrive Soundtrack Completion Tracker

Sound
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With 1.0 on the horizon, it’s time we take stock of the state of the game’s soundtrack, and what is needed for future stages.

What We Have

The soundtrack of the Microbe stage is complete. The best place to find the compiled Microbe stage soundtrack is this Steam release:

And the definitive list of the game’s soundtrack (all stages) is this playlist by Oliveriver:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1xZFxatUbjMxJ746nEKkvjVuNfSrQT7D

To give the sound team direction on where to focus our efforts, I’ve created a spreadsheet tracking all themes completed for the game. (The embed says it is private, but it isn’t)

Here is a screenshot:

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I’ve made several decisions on how to classify the game’s soundtrack for the purposes of this tracker. I’ve firstly divided them by game stage, counting how many we have for each. This pretty starkly highlights where we need work, as Macroscopic through Awakening stage have a cumulative 2 themes to Microbe’s 18. Late stages (Society onwards) also have lots of themes, and considering they’re currently far off, we don’t need more work there.

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The ‘Other’ category includes themes that are not specific to one stage, such as the Main Theme, as well as biome themes (such as ‘Desert’) which are not stage-specific. Microbe stage’s biome themes are specific to the Microbe stage (at least according to what I remember being discussed), so those count towards Microbe’s tracks.

In total, we have 77 tracks on this spreadsheet, which is quite a lot. I remember Oliver mentioning in discord that we want to be mindful of adding too many tracks, as sounds can quickly balloon a game’s filesize. I personally think there’s plenty of places for more soundtrack work, but we should be considerate with what we score.

I’ve further classified the tracks based on gameplay contexts, or the gameplay experience a theme corresponds to. I’ve defined several for the purposes of this tracker:

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Thinking in terms of these contexts is very useful to find out what we’re missing. Let’s take a look at the next few stages after Microbe.

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The Multicellular stage has 4 generic Stage Themes, which is plenty. In my opinion, these would also serve well for the Macroscopic stage, but perhaps not the Aware and Awakening stage.

There are 0 dedicated tracks for the Macroscopic stage, which isn’t surprising, as the distinction between Multicellular and Macroscopic was made very recently in Thrive’s history.

Aware and Awakening stage each have a Stage Theme. More wouldn’t be detrimental, but are not needed right now.

Taking a look at Multi-stage themes, we have multiple that easily apply to the next few stages.

These include:

  • Biome: Ice Ocean
  • Biome: Polar
  • Locale: Alien World
  • Locale: Beach
  • Locale: Cave
  • Locale: Ocean/Underwater (3 themes)
  • Locale: Shallow Sea
  • Locale: Young World
    Totaling 8 tracks.

What We’re Missing

As you can see in the screenshot above, Multicellular through Aware stages have no Editor themes, and Macroscopic stage has no Stage Theme. These are pretty obvious areas where we can work.

Determining what other game contexts we could use themes for is a somewhat complicated. To spark discussion on this, I’d like know your thoughts on a few questions:

  • Does the Macroscopic stage warrant its own Theme? Do the Multicellular themes suffice?
  • Do the Multicellular and Macroscopic stage Organism Editors warrant their own themes? Since it’s my understanding that Macroscopic will be the first with a 3d editor, maybe Multicell editor uses the Microbe editor themes, and Macro editor gets its own?
  • What are some unique gameplay contexts we expect players to encounter in the Multicellular and Macroscopic stages which could benefit from soundtracks? Combat, milestones, world events, interactions, special biomes?

Side Note

Finally, I’d like to point out that earlier this year, I and Oliver reached out to multiple former Thrive composers who made approved submissions, but have not signed the CLA. We were able to reach several, but we were not able to reach cphilpot153 and LIonGraphiK. I have not included tracks by these composers in the spreadsheet, even though they are in the Approved Submissions playlist, as their tracks currently cannot be included in the game.

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I would definitely argue in favour of Macroscopic having its own theme separate from Multicellular. If anything, Aware stage is just “advanced Macroscopic”, so some overlap would make more sense there.

Here it’s the same thing. Macroscopic and Aware editors will probably be quite similar, with the latter just having more options. Multicellular editor is more related to the Microbe editor, though it has more fundamental difference than the other editor pair.

But I would say at least Microbe/Multicellular editors feel sufficiently different that it would be nice for them to have a different soundscape?

This is a prediction: Once their are competing organisms in the Multicellular Stage, there is the potential for much more drawn-out combat between organisms, that might be something to keep in mind.

For Macroscopic/Aware: If we end up (and I hope we do) having an event where a large asteroid slams into your planet, creating an enormous tsunami, possibly a global firestorm, then followed by acid rain and years of darkened skies and freezing temperatures… Then I figure that might warrant some musical flair.

For the idea of milestones in general: Maybe instead of full tracks what fits here better is short (~30 seconds?) musical flair pieces? Something like moving onto land for the first time might warrant some attention, but not necessarily needs to determine your music for the next several minutes. I am reminded of the Millennia soundtrack, which has “regular” music tracks of about 3 minutes for normal gameplay and ~50 second music pieces as short intros when you enter a specific Age.

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I agree. If any editors share a theme it should be macroscopic and aware editors sharing a theme, they are both so different from multicellular editor that, I don’t see it as reasonable to bundle them together.

And multicellular editor already has at least one special theme for it so it doesn’t have to share all microbe editor themes.

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I missed that there’s a multicellular editor theme already, it must not have been labelled that way in the youtube playlist. Is it a generic multicellular theme that ended up being used for the editor?

Good points. I’ll consider Macroscopic and Aware as needing their own editor themes, and I suppose we already have one for Multicellular. That leaves only Macroscopic as needing a Stage Theme, and whatever further gameplay contexts we decide on.

I like the idea of short musical flairs / motifs at certain milestones, I’ll think about this. It would make sense to add a “Milestone” context to the spreadsheet for this purpose. They could even have recurring motifs within them that call back to stage themes or to the main Thrive theme. Perhaps inspired by the piano version of the theme used in the game’s trailers? Extra symbolism there, since that theme is used every time there’s a new release milestone in the game’s evolution.

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Okay, I looked at the trailers again, and I’m not sure what I was remembering, but this rendition of the main theme has never been used in a trailer, lol. Still, it’s a cool idea.

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It’s called Multicellular Editor Theme by @Narotiza

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Ah, it wasn’t in the youtube playlist, which explains it.