Having spent the last few months writing the Cletus team’s blog posts I’ve now been asked to give my first talk at Animex, the International Festival of Animation and Games. Held at Teeside University, Animex is a mixture of speeches, workshops exhibitions and screenings from all areas of animation, including games. This is the first time I’ve given a talk like this about working on Cletus Clay and although I am a little nervous, I am mostly over excited and a bit squeaky.

Looking through the speakers and seeing people like Scott Campbell from Double Fine Productions and Tristan Reidford from Valve has made me feel really honoured to be asked to appear at Animex. Hopefully I will do Anthony and the Cletus Clay team proud. Wish me luck!

Happy New Year everybody!

I’ve been back-and-forth a bit on the subject of the game’s music for a long time. I had recorded a few tracks a long time ago; mostly raucous bluegrass-inflected stuff as you might expect, but I don’t want to simply do the obvious thing. It’s going to have to have some banjo in there - that’s inevitable - but I also want to mix in a chiptune/old-school arcade game angle, and some retro sci-fi ambience as well. And find a way to put these elements together in a way that sounds genuine, rather than just a pastiche.

Anyway, these are a couple of instruments I’ve had for years, which I have recently been trying to repair. The first one is a banjo mandolin which I’ve always hated - it’s fiddly to play, impossible to keep in tune, and has a tone that is reminiscent of a traffic accident. But having recently taken off half the strings, dropped the action significantly, and restrung it as a banjo ukulele instead, I think it may have some potential after all. The other is my Yamaha 20M analogue synthesiser, which I love, but it stopped working several years ago. Being 30 years old now, a lot of its internal electronics have simply worn out, and I am slowly replacing all the fritzed components with new ones. It’s a big job - it’s like a TARDIS in there - but I hope I can successfully get it working again one day.

Together, these instruments kind of sum up what I’m trying to do with the music for Cletus Clay. Minimal, but with character. A mixture of retro and retro’s granddad. Stubbornly analogue, lo-fi, anachronistic and unusual. And just to make things more interesting, I’m going to attempt to create this new kind of music while simultaneously developing a video game…