Hello,
My name is Leo, Also known as 'I/O'.
I am an artist in the medium of adaptive music - treating both production and implementation as a singular, dynamic piece of art.
Join my mailing list to get free music packs ready to import into your middleware of choice, or manipulate however you see fit.
Below, you'll find my Portfolio and commission information.
Thanks,
Leo
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Portfolio
For I Am But A Brain In A Jar (Free Adaptive Music Track)
As you walk down the dark, decaying tunnels of the facility you woke up in, you hear only the sounds of wind rushing in through holes in the ceiling. You reach the end of a hallway and enter an unlit room. You trip and drop your flashlight. It falls far further than it should. When it finally hits the ground, the sound echoes for at least ten seconds before trailing off into the distance. You can see just enough to note you’re completely surrounded by skyscrapers.
No… Not skyscrapers, server racks?
Suddenly, A colossal lighting array flashes on from beneath you. The airflow of a thousand cooling fans knocks you off your feet as the bass kicks in…
Heavy gears chug, concrete scrapes against rusted steel as a glass tube a hundred metres wide descends from the ceiling. Inside it, a giant brain attached to a thousand cables. His eyes, still attached, are fixed on you.
celeste but you ableton too hard (2D Indie Platformer Music)
The Middle section of the full 11-minute track featured by corkr900 in an upcoming Celeste Custom Map.
I was given a visual brief and a description of the level's difficulty and emotional curves.
Badeline's Breakbeat (Celeste-Style Drum 'n' Bass Remix)
The score for the most intense section of corkr's map: The boss fight.
Keeping the same aesthetic and tone, while going ham with choppy break beats and the occasional time change all while using the musical language established in the base Celeste game.
I accidentally made a celeste beat... (2D Indie Platformer Music)
This was my first adventure in composing Celeste remixes. It may even have been the one you found me from, since the algorithm seems to like it.
Stabby, driving synths with an interweaving melody/ counter melody structure between Madeline's Piano and Badeline's synthesizer.
Strata
Strata is my current work in progress.
This precise, skill-intensive platformer was inspired by the sheer joy I felt while learning to speedrun games like Celeste and Ghostrunner.
These games feature difficult yet expressive hidden mechanics that, when mastered, allow players to propel themselves through levels at ludicrous speeds.
Coming soon: Strata's music system will shift and adapt based on the player's mastery of the mechanics, reinforcing the player's expression with instant emotional reinforcement.
The goal is to study the effects of adaptive music on skill development and memory retention.
Blasteroids
This was a solo project where I challenged myself to make a one-button game in a day.
My goal was to squeeze as much depth as possible out of very little complexity.
The player dies in one hit, but is only vulnerable while moving, represented by the character sprite turning
dark.
This is paired with an exponential combo meter that quickly decays any time the player is invulnerable, or resets when they die.
This aims to foster intense risk-reward gameplay and a high skill ceiling,
I have received consistent feedback that the combo system is hard to read. I will address this by switching the combo system from a scale to a levels system. I will leave math as it is, but add a combo meter displaying up to five highlighted bars.
This would decrease the conceptual barrier for new players by giving them instant and clear feedback on their gameplay, freeing up the game to lean further into its frantic core loop.
Research in Music:
Ludic Composition in Video Games
This 3rd year research project is the precursor to my current dissertation.
In undertaking this research, I studied a wide array of literature on adaptive music and game design while also performing media analyses on a variety of games and their scores.
Game Critique and QA
Past examples of my feedback on other people's games. This is here to demonstrate my understanding of design and ability to give critique and find issues. The first document also shows me talking in depth about multiplayer map design.
In both instances, the developers ended up implementing changes based on my feedback.
