Big news! I just got permission from all of the artists I originally planned to include in the HATPC Reborn soundtrack, so I'm officially announcing that I'll be adding it to the game in an upcoming update. Maybe 0.5.1, maybe 0.5.2, we'll see.

Currently slated to be included in the soundtrack are 50 songs from 3 artists - 10 from Approaching Nirvana, 25 from Extan, and 15 from MaHi. Check out the full playlist here.

These songs will be used as the soundtrack for the new HATPCR campaign(s) and will be available for user levels as well. I'll add music-controlling options to the event syntax, so you'll be able to choose what song(s) play on your levels. You'll also be able to turn the music off in the options if you hate fun.

I have a specific license for those 10 tracks from A->N, but I have permission to use any of Extan or MaHi's original tracks, so if you want me to include one that isn't on the list, let me know and I could sneak it in. I'm also open to including one-off songs as long as I can get permission. I also have a friend working on a song of his own that I might include as a one-off.

Also, in case you missed it, HATPC Reborn has a homepage now. The documentation for HATPC Reborn has been updated, expanded, and moved to the new site, so check it out if you want info on stuff like events, cookies, and user level syntax.

This is really cool

This is interesting, but I personally think that the game needs more of a rustic/homey feeling in the music than a futuristic one for a soundtrack to really work. Parts of several of the songs you listed in that playlist are more fitting than others, such as the very beginning of "Breakfast at Cheetahs" by Approaching Nirvana, but the bass drops and whatnot are a little jarring to be played alongside HATPC. I'd perhaps recommend you mute the music by default if the entire length of the songs will be in the campaign.

Edit: was not referring to the bass drop in "Breakfast at Cheetahs," because there obviously isn't one. That was just a general statement.

I don't feel like the soundtrack really has a "futuristic" feeling overall. I mean, yeah, it's EDM, but I don't really consider EDM to be inherently futuristic. It's the same way that most movie soundtrack are orchestral despite having all sorts of feels (including futuristic) - you can make music of a general style fit any theme.


Breakfast at Cheetahs (y u no apostrophe A->N?) certainly doesn't have bass drop or really anything resembling one. Unless just having drums or electronic effects at all is a problem for you. That statement makes me think you just dislike EDM or don't listen to it at all, because most of the songs in this soundtrack are quite chill overall. There are some intense drops to be sure, but nothing that I'd say is jarring. Here's some examples of what I mean (all dubstep tracks to keep things consistent):

Extan - Beautiful Days has a drop, yes, but it's a very melodic an chill drop. I'd say that it's typical of this soundtrack's theme and suitable for most levels.

Extan - What I Left Behind has an intense drop (that you could stretch to call a bass drop I guess), but it still has that melancholy/chill vibe to it. This and similar tracks would go on particularly intense or suspenseful levels.

Approaching Nirvana - Cigarettes n Boats is probably the heaviest song on the soundtrack and has a real bass drop. I'd only use this in the most intense point(s) of the campaign if at all (Not all songs will necessarily be in the campaign at all - they can be in the soundtrack purely for user level creators to use in their levels).

But for comparison, here are some dubstep tracks (with bass drops) in my library not on the HATPCR soundtrack:

Koven - Telling Me - Vocal dubstep from one of my favorite Monstercat artists recently. Heavy, but still pretty chill, actually.

MDK ft. Nick Sadler - Phoenix - A mix of orchestral, rock, and EDM in this one. It actually has 2 or 3 different drops depending on how you count them, so I'd recommend you listen though the whole thing. The first two drops are dubstep (intense guitar dubstep and chill mostly EDM dubstep) and the third is hardstyle or hardcore (or something like that like that).

Klaypex - Rain (feat. Sara Kay) - Classic dubstep from the Skrillex era. Now that's a bass drop.

What is definitely true though is that this soundtrack is more melancholy and "edgy" than you might expect for HATPC overall if you were expecting it to be lighthearted. That's not the case for all tracks, but in general I am going for a much more melancholy style for HATPCR's soundtrack, and there a couple of reasons for that:

(1) I really like that style of music
(2) I'm changing the storyline of HATPC to make it less lighthearted and more serious. The general concept is here: http://www.interguild.org/members/forums/topic.php?id=69525 but the tl;dr for HATPC is that rather than just exploring the caves to find treasure Hannah is actually trying to escape from pirates through them.

P.S. - To give you an idea of where I'm going with the soundtrack, the menu music is gonna be Approaching Nirvana - Ethereal. Giving things a nice chill introduction.

Also, I'm not gonna mute the music by default. But if you want to turn off the music, you can turn it off the first time you load up 0.5.2 and never listen to it again (on that browser) because cookies remember your settings. You only have to hear the first few notes of Ethereal.

I think a lot of these songs can be used for background in HatPC, but there are also a bunch I wouldn't consider using. In the ones with bass drops, such as Cigarettes n Boats (I know you said this was an extreme example, but still), the music can go from fairly soft to loud within a relatively short amount of time. This isn't good because the music going from calm to intense like that should coincide with a similar change in mood within the game. If the level is an intense one, then the calm section will seem out of place, and if the level is calmer, the loud section will seem out of place. In general, a level will have either a consistent mood (fast paced speed, slow placed puzzle, etc.), where any quick changes in the BGM's mood such as a bass drop will seem out of place, or the level will switch between calm and fast paced, which still doesn't work unless the creator can control exactly what time the user reaches a certain section of a level (a DDA or a non-stop speed cave). With most game soundtracks, each track has the same mood throughout, and any changes in mood tend to be relatively small and very gradual. Here's an example from my favorite game soundtrack, Ori and the Blind Forest. There are changes in the feeling of the song, and there is buildup, but it is gradual and small enough so that it doesn't seem awkward or jarring when playing the game.

Obviously very few people have the resources that the developers of Ori had, but my general point is that in most cases the BGM should have a consistent feeling and should not have abrupt changes in mood like an extreme bass drop. That being said, I would use many of the songs in this playlist, just not all of them. In addition, I disagree with the notion that EDM music can't be used for HatPC.

You're right that I'm not especially familiar with the genres you've chosen, and I won't deny that I've always preferred orchestral music to electronic, but I also wouldn't say that I necessarily dislike EDM. However, HATPC largely does not lend itself to the genre. The songs are supposed to be "chill," sure, but only in profound/evocative sort of way: you're supposed to be absorbed into and exhilarated by the music. A bass drop (I use this term loosely) isn't inherently relaxing; it's supposed to get you excited. The same goes for most of the other songs you listed: even if they don't technically have a bass drop, their presence distracts too much from the actual game.

That's not to say that all video game music has to be calm. Skyrim's theme, for example, is used very well in the game. The goal with the piece is to be dramatic: it's supposed to impress you. However, it's absurd to think that the entire game should have music anywhere near that intense. That's why most of the non-combat soundtrack is a bit wistful, at most. There's emotion here, but it works fantastically with its environment. I would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of situations in HATPC where a dubstep track would fit in with what is being done in the game: perhaps it could work in a fast-paced dynamite section or something, but hardly anywhere else.

I wouldn't use this style of electronic music for the same reason that I wouldn't use a power ballad or a symphony: it simply doesn't fit. I like a lot of the melodies in these songs, but many of the more robust electronic effects and bass drops are really out of place in a game about a squirrel hunting through a dungeon for treasure. HATPC is supposed to be playful, not majestic. The soundtrack should reflect the theme of the game: something adventurous, certainly, but also charming: not quite so intense. The songs you provided are interesting to listen to, but you just get a different sort of feeling out of them than what you would expect from a flash game of this caliber.

It's your game, though, so of course it's your decision in the end. You don't have to make the soundtrack overly "lighthearted"—that would be unnecessary, especially if you're going to change the tone of the main story. And I'm not trying to imply that all of these are inappropriate: "Breakfast at Cheetahs," for example, is pretty nice. I don't really like the percussion they went with, but I can see it working as general background music in the game. I actually really enjoy the melody in "Beautiful Days," and I can imagine "What I Left Behind" being used in a tenser scene, but I still feel that it's a bit alien to HATPC.

in my humble opinion ... any soundtrack for hatpc must capture the Zeitgeist of the year 2003 A.D. any other choice would be completely anachronistic, akin to playing Pong against the background ambience of dubstep. therefore, i suggest looking to the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2003 to find suitable choices for the .mp3 files that a young teenager may have downloaded from Napster in the year 2003 A.D. in his bedroom as he slowly worked on the masterpiece that would surely be chosen as the Cave of the Week by the faceless authority of The Neopets Team.

I think you might not be giving the songs enough credit for consistency. I think it's possible to have both louder and softer parts while still having a consistent mood. Take for example a couple of the other dubstep songs in the soundtrack (I swear there are a lot of non-dubstep tracks in here too, lol): Approaching Nirvana - Death of a King and Extan - Love Me. Even though they have both loud an quiet parts (for lack of a better distinction), they have consistent themes throughout - Death of King is suspenseful in both the loud and quiet parts, and Love Me is melancholy and melodic in both the load and quiet parts. Believe it or not, I've aimed to pick songs with a consistent theme for this soundtrack.

Cigarettes and Boats might be one of the worst example of this but even then its intro is pretty suspenseful. I could see it being used without precise timing if you have a level that's especially intense and suspenseful mood. And at the end of the day they main reason why I included it in the soundtrack is for variety. After all, I want there to be lots of options for level creators. You not wanting to use all of them is 100% okay. That's kind of the point of having a lot of variety - there will be something for any situation.

It's also worth noting that it's very possible to make a cave with precisely timed pacing without making it lightning fast. You just need to prevent the player from progressing too fast using mechanics such as water filling or blocking the player off until a trap is done. For example, level 17 limits the speed at which you progress by making you wait for water to fill (same in tutorial 6, but in a less subtle way).


I disagree - I don't think that these songs are necessarily distracting. They certainly aren't distracting to me, I've been listening to them while doing other stuff for several days now. I think that they might be particularly distracting to you because you aren't used to that style of music. Maybe you should listen to if a bit and let it grow on you.

Out of curiosity, I decided to check out the distribution of genres in the soundtrack. Here they are:

DnB (Drum and Bass) - 18
House (including electro house) - 16
Dubstep - 11
Other (chillout and orchestral) - 5

So dubstep only accounts for 22% of the soundtrack, but like 90% of the examples in this thread. XD

>implying that i even knew there was dubstep in your soundtrack

By the way, all of those genre categories besides "Other" (which has no MaHi tracks) have a song from all 3 artists, although MaHi and A->N are primarily house and Extan is primarilly DnB. Here are a few of the outlier tracks:

Sometimes is the only Extan house track on the soundtrack.

Ethereal is the only A->N DnB track on the soundtrack.

Imagine is the only MaHi dubstep song on the soundtrack. And actually, it's drumstep (with a DnB section in the second drop to boot) so it's a bit of a stretch to lump it in with dubstep but I don't want to make another category for drumstep. There may be other songs that could be classified as drumstep that I put in DnB or dubstep.

Please put https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJDQMyHbSko on the soundtrack.

@CSD While the actual composition is public domain, I'm guessing that recording of it is not, so I'd need to get permission to use a specific recording of it for the soundtrack.

OK how about https://musopen.org/music/1562/ludwig-van-beethoven/symphony-no-3-in-eb-eroica-op-55/ (It's the 3rd one there.)
Recording quality could be a bit better but it's not bad.

The quality sounds fine to me. Even if I'm wrong it doesn't have to be top-notch. Anyway, I was surprised by how well that fits. I would never imagine Beethoven in a soundtrack for a game like HatPC, but I think that particular piece would go well with it.  

How dare you suggest Beethoven when we have some perfectly fine PDQ Bach just waiting to be used in HATPC?!

BTW, one of my favorite movie soundtracks is the Wreck-It-Ralph soundtrack. I love that fusion of orchestral, electronic, and rock music.