The Music of Debris Crusher

During the development of TIME FALCON, a new team had approchaed me for help developing their new platform fighting game. I offered to lend them the TIME FALCON game engine for this purpose, since I owned the sole rights to it and it would ensure they didn't have to deal with any proprietary licensing concerns, nor any uncertainty about performance or portability. The only problem was, the existing code for Canithesis's in-house 2D game engine was very interwoven with the TIME FALCON game logic (what little of it currently exists - development has been incredibly slow). So, development of my own game had to be put on hold so that the code could be forked and cleaned up. Since the new, forked code required much more flexibility than our original development goals, we ended up maintaining two separate branches of the engine code and backporting any relevant fixes to TIME FALCON when it was appropriate. Had the engine not been tiny in size, this probably would have been a nightmare.

Fast forward a few months to December. Krampushack 2025 is now underway. As it would turn out, I had registered earlier that summer in the middle of a waiting line at Subway and completely forgotten. So now, in between writing tons of API documentation by myself and fixing glaring omissions in our toolkit, I had to cobble something together. The good news was that I could use this opportunity to create a demo for our game engine, which we dubbed MYTHOS.

That demo ended up becoming Debris Crusher. Debris Crusher is a co-op Asteroids-like about drones in the atmosphere in the distant future who have to clean up all of the world's space garbage.

I didn't complete the game on time, since I was caught up in solving more technical problems. However, I did complete the soundtrack. It was, admittedly, pretty rushed. Samples are thrown together from seemingly nonsensical or low-quality sources, or entire drum loops are re-used unmodified. I deliberately played into this fact. The theme of Debris Crusher was very industrial, very metallic, so a robotic sound reminiscent of chopped-up, compressed instruments or pitch-shifted clips with the sounds of power tools strewn about was a good fit.

The opening theme song is a dark, moody electronic track. It begins with a sample from the acid remix of Lunatic Calm's "Shockwave", looped repeatedly to a new drum beat, before the song breaks back down into very low-pitched ambient synths and bass punches. The song abruptly picks back up with the sound of whirring motors, before the Shockwave sample kicks back in and the song loops. There is not a lot going on in this song, and out of context I have been told it is quite boring. But it's about the atmosphere for me. That feeling of being alone in space, far away from home, like you have a serious and tough job to do, but not one you're happy about. As the title theme, the player will most likely breeze past this song after taking a peek at the high scores. The darkest parts of the track are reserved only for those who idle for a few minutes.

"Pollutionmart" is the standout song out of the entire project. The Super Stardust influence becomes really apparent here. The piano is sampled from the intro to "Precinct" by Stanton Warriors, though it's only a few hundred milliseconds long, so you might not recognize it. The guitar sample is ripped straight from Super Stardust. The sound of a drill powering up persists throughout the song, with radio noise acting as a bridge. The emphasis is still on atmosphere first. Debris Crusher didn't really warrant anything overly grandiose or melodic, but just enough to keep the pacing in line with the combat and sell some degree of emotion. The most effective game soundtracks are the ones that best compliment the action in-game, and I think this does a pretty good job.

This is when I started running out of material. I only gave myself 10 days to work on the music, which doesn't leave a whole lot of room for fresh ideas. The rest I had to dedicate to programming, game design, modelling and sound effects, all by myself. So the rest of the songs here aren't much to write home about. "Who You Callin' Garbage?" is the sister track to Pollutionmart. I attempted to make more tracks like that one, but didn't come up with anything substantial or worth using.

Throughout the game, there would be these randomly chosen encounters the game would throw at you. Dense minefields, hostile satellites, aliens? Some of these were crossovers from TIME FALCON that went unimplemented, the only trace of them in the game being some leftover voice lines I recorded from SAM. The boss theme that plays during these encounters is a bit of a panicked-sounding drumfest. I've been told the main melody sounds like the Mortal Kombat theme. The resemblance isn't intentional. The vocals sampled in this song are from Kekkaishi, though in hindsight I am not sure that they all fit very well. I really was just going balls to the wall at this point!

This is an unused scrap. I didn't like where it was going, so I wrapped it up and moved on. It might work for some sort of extras menu, though.

If you like what you've been hearing, feel free to pick up the gold masters from Bandcamp for the price of a candy bar. They're in 24-bit 96KHz lossless quality. Or you can just get the raw in-game version from ModArchive.