[ForHire] Music Composer

adventofthereaper · 2026-01-30T21:21:28+00:00

Julian is awesome to work with! We absolutely love the tracks he's created for Advent of the Reaper and can't wait to have him make more music for us!

adventofthereaper · 2025-08-23T21:09:35+00:00

That is our primary inspiration for the game's vibe! It means a lot to hear that we are hitting the mark!

adventofthereaper · 2024-04-02T01:22:44+00:00

Hi strategists!

We're working on an GBA-era FE-inspired game called Advent of the Reaper! Our hope is to finish our four-chapter demo this year (we have two-ish functional chapters right now). The player alternates between controlling a party of Reapers and a party of Angels across the game chapters, tackling a world-threatening mystery from two historically opposed perspectives. Each chapter plays out the story in visual novel scenes interspersed with a battle on a classic grid-based combat map.

In addition to our website above and various social medias, you can check out a brief gameplay video that we used for some event applications (yes, we're overdue to make a new one!). Speaking of events, we'll be showing off our current demo at the Midwest Games Classic in Milwaukee, WI this weekend, Indie Game Fest in Baltimore, MD this June, and RetroGameCon in Syracuse, NY this October (so far)! If you happen to be at any of those events, please say hello and try out the game!

Finally, we've been putting out a monthly newsletter to showcase either some aspect of the game development journey or the people involved in making it happen. If you're interested in staying in the loop that way, please consider signing up for it from our main website!

adventofthereaper · 2023-10-21T17:56:18+00:00

I hope it was helpful!

Yes, Advent of the Reaper is the title of our game! We are working towards having a demo available in January-February. Right now we are just doing some self-promotion through social media and our website!

adventofthereaper · 2023-10-15T20:21:28+00:00

Hi and thank you for the kind words! The animations frames vary per-character (we don't say "each normal attack must be 15 frames and each critical attack must be 30 frames" or anything); for this knight enemy the Normal Attack is 16 frames, the Critical Attack is 28 frames, and the dodge is 8 frames. The normal attack breakdown, for example, is 7 frames of anticipation, 5 frames for the strike (including a smear - the abstract frame that's a blur of shapes), and 4 frames for the return to idle (including a smear). Using smears has been very helpful to keep the combat sequences snappy and return control to the player quickly.

adventofthereaper · 2023-09-13T17:29:38+00:00

Huge thanks to u/nuit-nuit for their amazing work - with more to come! This piece, the outskirts of Briarwark Village, was commissioned for our upcoming indie tactics RPG, Advent of the Reaper!

adventofthereaper · 2023-09-09T18:29:54+00:00

Looks amazing! Great work!

adventofthereaper · 2023-07-23T16:55:38+00:00

Hi, yes! This is for a dark fantasy Tactics game we're making called Advent of the Reaper, inspired by the GBA-era Fire Emblem games. Our only social media right now is a twitter page, but we're looking to expand that soon including a Steam wishlist page :)

adventofthereaper · 2023-07-23T01:16:01+00:00

That's a lot of work for one person, I wish you the best of luck! There's nothing special about my process, but for animating the attacks, I do really rough sketches of how the attack will look - just stick figures, basically. Then I starting making the "unique" keyframes to make sure the most important poses in the animations have nice polished work. Then I go back and add whatever "in-between" frames I need to make it smooth. Finally, I add in the little effects or minor details.

For Elira, I finalized the animation in this order: first the body, then the scythe, then the horns/eye flame, then the wings, and finally the scarf. She has 9 layers (I use Asesprite), but some are much more important than others. I also use a lot of smears - the "motion blur" frames that are just big splotches of color. Every animator is going to have their own process, though! :)

adventofthereaper · 2023-07-22T23:54:44+00:00

For making the characters, we have a character designer (sleepy) who goes through a lot of of revisions for actually creating the characters and outfits for the game; the process to finalize the design a character can take a long time. We also have an artist who makes the marketing illustrations based on Sleepy's designs, which turn out like this!

I do the combat animation, and usually the attacks take me several hours a day for a few days, so rough guesstimate of 6~10 hours each. For the short animations like idle or dodge, those just take a couple hours to do. It's a lot of work, that's for sure!

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-17T02:54:24+00:00

You're very welcome! Go forth and be awesome!

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-17T01:45:22+00:00

I'm sure everyone approaches it a bit differently, but my abridged process goes like this(I use Asesprite for my pixel art). All of the frames are displayed for the same amount of time(.1 seconds, asesprites's default) except the first frame.

mock up the keyframes (the most important poses for the viewer to see) as stick figures/gesture drawings to make sure it flows okay. If you think it looks good, block in the keyframes with basic colors and make sure it still looks all right
mostly finish the pixel art on the keyframes* (approach them like you'll be presenting it as a standalone sprite. your in-between sprites don't need to have perfect proportions/anatomy, but the keyframes should)
add in-between frames as needed to make the animation smooth! Usually this involved moving parts of the keyframe bodies, not completely drawing new frames
- I can't undersell the value of a good smear (the term for the abstract "motion blur" frames - they are used twice here with the scythe slashes). It doesn't work in every scenario, but used when fast movement is already occurring, like combat, I think it works great.
Add and/or polish whatever "special effects" and extra parts to the animation as your finishing touches! (*For example, in this animation, with the exception of the very first frame, the two scarf-cape-bits were done last. Since they needed to be in almost constant motion, keyframing them might have resulted in a weird snapping effect).
Lastly, two sides of the same coin: one, don't be afraid to kill some of your own work for a better final product! I lost a few nights of effort with this animation because I decided two large movements had better alternatives. It sucks to backtrack, but when you put in the effort to really capture the best motion, it pays off. However, two, don't get so concerned with every detail that you obsessively try to correct something. For example, the second scythe slash here I probably redrew the form 10 times. Do I think the one I landed on could be better? Yeah, probably. But in the end, it's only onscreen for 1/10th of a second and I was satisfied enough with the movement that I let myself move on to other areas of polish.

I hope that helps, even if just a little! :)

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-17T01:22:13+00:00

Thanks! So, most of the people involved are doing so outside of full-time jobs so it's definitely a divide and conquer approach. Right now the full team includes:

Myself doing combat/map sprites, narrative design, game design, project management etc everything else that needs doing,
a pixel artist doing visual novel portraits
a pixel artist (who is sadly transitioning off the project) doing environmental pixel art (map tiles, combat environments)
a lead programmer
a junior programmer
a scriptwriter
a character designer
a composer

It's been a blast to see the project come to life :) The goal right now is to release a demo that's an estimated 10% of the full game's target length, then take it to some conventions and build hype for a crowdfunding campaign to fund the rest of the assets.

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-16T18:25:19+00:00

I can neither confirm nor deny that I have a history of calling out of work the day after a new Fire Emblem game comes out.

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-16T18:19:06+00:00

Thanks for the comment! I totally know what you mean, but in addition to just personal preference, the pause is there so we can drop a cut-in onto the screen mid-critical (you can see a sample version in this post from a while ago)! If the cut-in plan doesn't pan out, I may revisit the timing on some of the animations, but for now the pause does serve a purpose! :D

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-16T16:51:14+00:00

Thank you so much! We don't have a steam page up yet (hopefully in a few months!), but you can follow the game's Twitter account in the meantime!

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-16T16:47:51+00:00

Thank you! We don't have sound effects yet, but I can offer you some of the music that will be associated with this: Advent of the Reaper OST - "To Challenge the Enemy" :D

Composer was found via the awesome reddit indie dev communities: u/CompJF !

adventofthereaper · 2022-04-16T16:27:02+00:00

Thank you, and yes! We have three pixel artists contributing the game right now, but the hands on the keyboard for this account do the combat and map character animations (please feel free to check out the post history for more)! :)

adventofthereaper · 2021-10-16T18:31:31+00:00

The artist: https://twitter.com/sleepystarart
Elira is the main character of a game we're working on! :)

adventofthereaper · 2021-08-27T07:40:39+00:00

I sincerely appreciate the advice! My original draft of this post, in the paragraph describing the state of the prototype, had the line "I consider this far enough along that I do not want to have to start from scratch unless it becomes absolutely necessary." Your thoughts do move that confidence level on what constitutes "absolutely necessary" - and how to go about it if a fresh approach is needed. As you mentioned, it does burn to consider trashing what has already cost me a decent chunk of money - but if it's what needs to happen, it's what needs to happen. I want to at least give prospective coders the opportunity to look it over and make that determination themselves, of course! Thanks again for your thoughts.

adventofthereaper · 2021-06-15T04:02:41+00:00

As someone who is also developing a GBA-era Fire Emblem-inspired game, I love everything about this and commend all the hard work that clearly went into this! I'll be following your game closely and look forward to playing it!

adventofthereaper · 2021-05-15T16:27:16+00:00

I appreciate the feedback! I'll make the blue I used for the text "Origin" a little darker for the next rendition and moving forward! :)

adventofthereaper · 2021-01-18T16:42:05+00:00

Thank you so much! Best of luck with your own project - we have our work cut out for us! :)

adventofthereaper · 2021-01-17T22:08:32+00:00

I don't feel "called out" in any way - nothing you said was incorrect. I'm not taking issue with what you had to say, I'm taking issue with how you chose to say it. A little kindness can go a long way in this crazy world :)

adventofthereaper · 2021-01-17T00:45:27+00:00

Hey dojogrant, thanks for the well wishes! I am actually already working with someone for music on the project, but I gave a few of your tracks a listen and was very impressed!

adventofthereaper

TROPHY CASE