The Spiral

The Spiral

The Spiral is a first-person retro-3D roguelike dungeon crawler by Rob “Splagoon” — a solo developer, and a former coworker and buddy of mine. It’s available now on Steam.

This project was very interesting from start to finish. Rob originally commissioned me in 2024 to provide music for the trailer, because he was just then listing the upcoming game on Steam and wanted to have a polished presentation. What was most interesting was his vision for the game’s music: though the game is fantasy-themed and set in a dungeon, he didn’t want a classic (or stereotypical) modern-classical sound. Instead, he wanted something completely electronic, with eerie and abstract ambiences for walking around, tense rhythms for when enemies are close by, and intense rhythm-driven industrial for combat. Reference points for these sounds included the old Silent Hill games, Nine Inch Nails, and more.

The Trailer

The trailer music was intended to encompass all three of the main musical moods, as the video accompaniment would showcase the atmosphere first, weapons and navigation second, and combat third.

Right away, I knew I wanted to draw on retro synthesizer sounds, and in particular a style of sample-based synth called a ROMpler that was popular in the 90s and early 00s. I actually own a hardware Roland JV-880, the immediate predecessor to the much more famous JV-1080, but which has many of the same samples in its banks. Sadly I don’t (yet) own the other major ROMpler I knew I had to have, the Korg Triton, but luckily Korg sells their own faithful VST emulation — and, even more luckily, that includes all of the expansion sample packs they ever made for it!

I also almost immediately thought of a riff, but it took me a while to realize what instrument my brain had decided would be playing it: the Floppotron, a chorus of floppy disk drives modified to be able to play musical notes on their stepper motors! Again, luckily, there is a VST version of someone sampling a tuned floppy drive, which meant I didn’t have to buy and circuit-bend my own drive just for this project!

The final trailer music ended up turning out pretty well, I think. See for yourself:

The In-Game Music

The rest of the game music was its own challenge, particularly because I was still wrestling with how to provide a satisfying and melodic musical experience while delivering on the harsh electronic sounds the project required. Of particular note were the two layered tracks: you see, Rob wanted the music of walking around in the dungeon to seamlessly transition into a slightly more “tense” version of the same track when enemies were close to the player, and then again seamless transition to an intense combat theme when the player enters combat.

The layered tracks are where I’m honestly least satisfied with my work, and I hope to improve in the future, but for now I think they’re ok, if a bit boring to listen to straight through.

The rest of the work was in boss themes, specifically a mid-boss theme and a final boss theme. Those were far and away the most fun to work on, and for both I brought out an industrial and acid music classic: the 303 (or its Behringer equivalent :wink:).

MECHANOTRON

Mostly due to the nature of electronic music, and partly because Rob’s social media presence is largely under an alias, I felt it appropriate to release the music not under my name but under the name of MECHANOTRON. This is an alias I’ve been sitting on for several years but haven’t really done much with. It seemed perfectly suited for this, though, so I hope I can use it to channel my electronic music ideas into from now on.

The Music

The soundtrack is available on Bandcamp for a nominal fee. You can stream it before you buy it and see if you like it.