A Lonely Place

Goal: Capture the eerie, intense mood of this game idea loosely using the functions of an old NES 5-track sound card as inspiration for the music.

Intro: You wake up inside your spacecraft after 5 years in cryo-sleep. An extinction event on planet earth has forced you to build a spaceship and launch yourself at a nearby galaxy in hopes of finding a hospitable planet to start a new life. Thankfully, technological advancements in the late 23rd century have enabled long distance space travel. All it took was a little elbow grease and a mechanical engineering degree. And a doctorate in astrophysics. And a couple billion dollars...but you managed to get it together just as the last bits of oxygen on Earth were depleted. Most others weren't so lucky.

Now you have to find your way to a nearby planet and hope to high heaven that it has enough oxygen for you to breathe. Luck has been on your side so far, but there's trouble incoming...

OST

1. A Lonely Place

You wake up in your spacecraft, all alone. You're overcome by the gravity of the situation, too aware of how you may be the last human alive. You pry yourself out of your sleep pod and trudge around the ship in order to check on all of the sensors and make sure everything is in working order. After a while, something appears on the radar...

2. Unexpected Encounters

You gasp in awe as you peer out the window of the ship. In the distance some hundreds of thousands of miles away is a giant blue and white planet. That isn't your immediate concern however. 

3. Enemy Ship

Between the planet and yourself looks to be an asteroid-sized spaceship. This ship does not look as if it came from earth. You count your blessings, because this ship doesn't look to be very friendly either.

4. Blasters

An intense space fight ensues. Luckily, you outfitted your craft with the finest missiles earth money can buy. Good thing too, because that money is useless now.

5. All This Way for Nothing

After obliterating the alien spacecraft, you check the sensors again to find damage to your hull. You heave a sigh of relief...only to see the flashing red light coming from your oxygen system. There's a leak, and your odds of survival just plummeted.

6. Full Throttle

You throw the thrusters into overdrive. A few hundred-thousand miles in an hour is doable. It has to be. You dodge through an asteroid belt as fast as you can go, slipping through the space rocks like water between your fingers. It's going to be so close...

Epilogue

The craft breaks through the unknown planet's atmosphere. It tears through the air at blistering speed as the icy mass of rock and mineral grows closer. A crash landing shakes the planet to its core. You've been dead for a few minutes now, as the small amount of oxygen in the cabin just wasn't enough to keep you going. Not that there would be enough to keep you going on this frozen sheet of ice.

In a strange, oddly calming twist of fate, it turns out this mission wasn't all for nothing. The bacteria from your body manage to find it's way outside your ship over the course of the next millennia, and where there's ice there's water. It may take a while, but evolution exists even here, at the farthest reaches of a new galaxy.