Tales of Allula: Crystal Spirits - Looking for volenteer Composer

[Jaden]

Hello everyone, first off let me express my gratitude to everyone for the amazing work you do. I've been following OCremix since it launched, albeit quietly, and I'm always blown away with what everyone can do with a piece of music.

15 years ago, a game was created. Small scale, nothing fancy like today's games. This one was a chat based RPG. It had massive following at the time and it was building more and more as we went. As we continued on we started to advance the way we told our story and developed an actual graphical game through the innovated technology that PHP gave the world.

Disaster struck us while we were in the process of planning a new project and myself and the other writer were coordinating a script for this project. We had been hacked by a rival group and we lost all our databases which contained well over ten years of work, concept and planning. This was something we never completely recovered from, and the project went onto the back-burner because neither of us felt like redoing all of it.

After a few years I decided on my own to try and organize a new project. One that not only would get this story that had stuck with me out in the open, but give everyone involved a shot at their own dreams. This was a full featured, old school style RPG Game. I've noticed over recent years that the old turn-based RPG that everyone loved has kind of fallen out with the developers. I want to resurrect that old style with some new takes on old concepts. Battle system, Musical Score, Storyline.

That's where OCremix comes in. Since this projects inception it's been a kind of desire of mine to get these people with amazing talent involved, and have the game scored by people that have really taken the time to listen to the music of the games we love, like FF7, Xenogears and so on, and turn it from Amazing, into mind blowing. I didn't want a big name composer like Hans Zimmer (amazing music though) Because I felt that I couldn't give him a track, have him hear it and produce the kind of sound I'm looking for, mainly because I'm not isolating to a single genre of music. I want to utilize multiple Genre's of music for this game.

That being said I'd like to extend the offer for Remixers here at OCremix to join us, not just because of your amazing talent, but because I know that everyone here can appreciate that Music can make or break a game. The right song at the right time can hook a player forever.

Our objective for now is to recruit our team, get our working tech demo and Documents in order, and bring that to a developer, and keep that team with whatever that developer wants to add to it. I've got a few "In's" in the industry that can help us out there, but everything has to be right in order to make it all work and get the financing and everything lined up and approved.

It's a long project, and we don't expect easy. We're not looking for fast, we just are looking for people that can donate some time here and there to the project and help us get moving along and in the right direction. Terry (The co-writer) and I can handle the administrative stuff with rights and whatnot, it'll all depend on what we decide to do.

To give you an idea of what we want to do with the music score, we want to take a core theme, and mold the games music around it. Using this core theme, most other music critical to the story will be using the same melody. For example, if you look at some of the earlier Final Fantasy games, you'll find that alot of the music there, say for example a love theme, was based on the games Title, or opening theme. that's a concept that's been missing from games for some time now, and a concept we want to bring back to the Genre.

If anyone is interested in this undertaking, feel free to Reply or PM me and I'll be happy to answer any questions or address any concerns.

Thank you for your time in reading this post.

Dustin

Senior Writer

Tales of allula

[Calum]

It is lovely to hear people actively looking for this community to find composers and i am one of those but there are a few issues with this post. I certainly do not wish to come off as overly negative and definitely not for the sake of pure negativity. But, these things came across as a little strange:

You're looking for a volunteer composer (assuming you will not pay this person) and yet you say quite tangibly that you decided against getting Hans Zimmer to score this game, who presumably, you would have to pay an awful lot - this is very misleading.

Your stance on payment is very unclear. I would assume, for an original game wishing to make money, you would at least offer a percentage of profits made to the composer. Yet, it seems you wish for someone to be a pure volunteer with no offer of the reward that other members of the team may be getting.

Big long projects with no pay are a few disaster words to hear for a composer or really anyone willing to join a project. I myself have been involved in a few projects that were over a year in dev and maybe about halfway and inevitably enthusiasm drops and people magically disappear! Of course it can be done but it is a very very big risk.

After a quick google of Tales of Allula i find nothing that seems to be relevant to this project. This makes me question the "massive following" it used to have and also wonder how much work on the new version has been done prior to sending this message. Do you have any screens/videos/assets you can share with us?

Please correct me if any of these are incorrect assumptions to make.

[Jaden]

Yeah I kind of had a feeling these things would come up.

Payment - I'm sorry I didn't clarify this. Sadly, myself like most, fight to get by, so I can't offer payment. I am looking for Volunteers for 2-3 tracks for the Tech Demo. My hope is that once all the Proposal material is done and we start getting the idea pitched that the people involved in making the Tech demo are brought on for the long haul of development. Meaning that it's a way to break into the industry and hopefully be kept there. As far as a percentage of Game sales, that would have to be something that comes up in negotiation of Royalties with the developer, and I haven't hit the numbers real hard in the GDD yet so unfortunately that's the kind of question I really can't answer at the moment.

As for the game material, Terry has a good chunk of it, he's the original Creator. As I said we lost our original Databases and everything that went with those. On top of that, this game was in it's prime around 2003. That's nearly 10 years ago. Once we lost those databases and content, that was everything we had from the previous ten years of work.

I have some concept work up, such as it is at deviantart and continually working on more. I also have about half of the GDD done, but no one outside of our team is seeing that. But being a one man development team it's taking time for just a few concept images.

Yes, it's risky. Really Risky. But what we're doing right now is a fraction of the grand design, Not the whole project. Right now we're just looking at building a Demo. Something tangible that we can throw at a developer. There's alot of avenues we can use to get the Proposal up the chain, such as sundance, Hitting GDC among other things. Once that material is done and ready to go up, we negotiate keeping on who has done the existing work, which developers aren't opposed to in the slightest, especially the Composer, artists and writers, because they have the original vision in mind.

I can understand the hesitance and worry, believe me I know how it all sounds. We've got nothing backing us in the least. We're going on pure hope at the moment that we can find volunteers that are willing to take on something like this and "Hope for the best" But as long as I live this isn't something I'm going to give up on. Allula became a big part of my life and I'm not letting it die any further than it already has. But that's why I'm not asking for the huge long term volunteers. That's why we're trying to keep the scope of things to a demo and some documentation. Getting things like the art bible completed, at least some material into the sound bible like a core theme and things like that.

As of right now I'm working on the technical Back-end of things, website, Gantt charts; those kinds of things.

I hope that answers some questions people might have, and hopefully answered yours Calum.

deviantart ryusadow.deviantart.com

Main Website: www.talesofallula.com (still being Designed)

Community Forum: www.talesofallula.com/community (Also still being designed)