Music and Game Design
As a composer working in contemporary classical music, I naturally structure games (as well as prose writing and other things) the way I write music — around tension, development, and resolution.
In my current project, Meadowvale, that instinct shaped the entire design and gameplay narrative. It plays out like a musical form:
an Exposition, where players build the shared landscape and gather early tokens,
a Development, as habitats connect and species interact, and
a Coda, where everything resolves in balance.
The game ends with a resolution, like a cadence. Once all terrain and animals are placed, players enter an Endgame phase where they spend three types of tokens:
Species Tokens – double the score of a chosen animal.
Nature Tokens – reward well-placed animals within thriving ecosystems.
Wildflowers – allow movement of animals to alter/refine/disrupt final scoring patterns.
These layers don’t add complexity, tokens are collected during play and only used in the closing phase (wildflowers do allow movement and redraws in the main phase). It turns the end of the game into something almost performative, a quiet act of refining the landscape that has been built during the game.
So the game has a genuine thematic ending, not just final scoring.
Here is a link to some of my compositions for anyone who may be interested:
