Computer games music - foreground and background

A friend asked me to make music to his computer game about Vikings, and here it is.

My thoughts about modern computer music is, when it's not bombastic and Hollywoodish, it's a little too much in the background. I wanted to do something memorable and noticeable, a little bit closer to the player. The result you can hear for yourself, though it's not finished (I aimed for 10 minutes).

I used a tracker for this score, OpenMPT to be precise. If you don't know what a tracker is, don't bother to find out, it's a pain, really. The samples I got mostly from YouTube, after googling a lot about Viking instruments.

Inspiration is from Settlers 1 (notice the smooth transitions) and Warcraft 2 (clear melodies and second solo parts). Both these scores use melodies as the base, or main focus. It's rarely only "engine". Compare with this score from WoW. Can you here the melody here? No, because there is none. Quite atmospheric none the less.

When you use melodies to create a peace of music, you divide the score into two "levels", so to speak: melody and accompany. This is no dichotomy but a continuum, which is ever so clear in the WoW score above; the instruments kind of "hover" between melody and accompany, not really the one or the other. That's really great skill, and to be able to control this is important.