Four tunes, one motif, and a tape that slows down

One loop, eight chords, ten minutes.

Until today the music was a single loop of eight soft chords. Pleasant, calm, and after ten minutes you had heard all of it. No rhythm, no melody to hum, in a game about consultancy that does not take itself very seriously. Earlier there had been a busier theme that sped up with the scope, and it was removed because it made people nervous. So the brief was clear: more character, but not faster.

Listen first, build later.

Nothing went into the game before it had been heard. A separate demo page offered four directions, each with a slider for the phase of the project and a switch for scope in alarm. The feedback was precise. The guitar in the bossa nova was too busy for a quarter of an hour of play: fewer strums, softer, slower. The slap bass in the eighties track jumped out and was turned down twice. The finger snaps under the jazz could come forward a little. And the vinyl crackle under the fourth track was simply annoying, so that track was replaced by a new one.

What is in the game now.

The Heist is the default: cool jazz with a walking bass, finger snaps, a muted trumpet and brass stabs. Ocean's Eleven, but billable. Hold Music is bossa nova, the kind you hear while the helpdesk tells you your call is important. Corporate Video 1989 is FM piano, a big gated snare and a synth trumpet, the soundtrack of every introduction to a new ERP system. Overtime is lo-fi for quarter to midnight, with a whistled melody and a tape that wobbles slightly. The last three are unlocked the same way as the house styles, and you pick one in the settings.

It grows with the project.

Every piece starts bare and adds an instrument per phase. The Heist opens with nothing but a bass and finger snaps, and by Hypercare it is a full band. The tempo never changes; it gets richer, not busier. If your scope goes past 300%, the key tilts and a low drone swells underneath. In The Heist a single note drops a semitone, and suddenly it sounds exactly like an Evil Corp proposal.

Four notes you will start to recognise.

All four pieces carry the same short motif: Koon-sul-tan-cy. At the end of a run it comes back as a closing phrase. Deliver the project and it resolves. Lose it, and it ends a semitone too low.

As before, there is not a single audio file in the game. The guitar is a string made of arithmetic, the trumpet is a sawtooth through a filter, and none of it touches the seed: the same seed still plays the same run, down to the cent. Four pieces of music, one motif, and a tape that slows down at the end of the night. Billable, all of it.

Version 1.7.1: the mix from the demo, and sound effects in the right key.

A few hours after release it was clear that The Heist sounded thinner in the game than on the demo page. The trumpet had slipped to the back. The notes were the same; the difference was where the volume sat. On the demo page the music hit the compressor hard, which pressed down the bass and the kick and left room for the melody. In the game the volume was turned down before the compressor, so nothing got pressed down. The volume now sits after it, and every piece sounds exactly like the demo again. The sound effects came along too. The ones with a pitch, from the counting blocks and the rate chord to the coins and the jackpot, were all tuned to A, for the old theme. They now follow the key of the piece you picked and tilt along when the scope goes into alarm. And a jackpot, a promotion, an unlock or a won engagement now plays on the instruments of the piece itself: a brass stab in The Heist, FM bells in Corporate Video 1989. The stamp, the paper and the till stay exactly as they were.