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SELECTED
WORK
MUSIC THAT
BUILDS WORLDS
Original Soundtracks for Games, Cinematics and Emotional Player Experiences
From fantasy RPGs to cinematic trailers and emotional key moments each score is designed to create atmosphere, identity and unforgettable player memories.
Music and 3D Level Art by Marika Schanz
Featured Projects
Farm Simulation
Anhedonia: Sanctuary of Ash
Challenge: Create a memorable main menu theme that immediately establishes the dark and emotional atmosphere of Anhedonia: Sanctuary of Ash while maintaining a calm and immersive tone. The music needed to feel mysterious and haunting without becoming overwhelming, supporting the game’s melancholic world and inviting players into its atmosphere from the very first moment.
Musical Direction: The musical direction focused on dark ambient textures combined with subtle Gregorian chant influences to create a calm yet unsettling atmosphere. Deep drones, haunting vocal elements, and minimal cinematic instrumentation were used to evoke feelings of isolation, mystery, and ancient spirituality while maintaining an immersive and emotionally restrained tone fitting the world of Anhedonia: Sanctuary of Ash.
Anhedonia Main Menu
Farm Simulation
Pasture: The Livestock Simulator
Challenge: Create authentic Austrian country/folk music with a warm, organic feel using real recorded instruments, while ensuring the composition could later be seamlessly expanded with live mouth harp performances.
Musical Direction: Rustic, intimate folk music with a handcrafted feel — built around live violin recordings, natural acoustic textures, and simple melodic storytelling. The goal was to avoid a polished “sample library” sound and instead create music that feels close, human, and alive — like musicians playing together in a village pub.
Pasture - Outback Sun
Action Adventure
Rootbound - Brainlag Games
Challenge: Create an adaptive soundtrack for a physics-based exploration adventure with a strong day-night cycle, where daytime needed to feel warm and open, while nighttime became darker, lonelier, and more atmospheric. The music also had to support seamless combat transitions through adaptive loop-based systems. Rootbound’s world centers on exploration, dangerous nights, and survival around light sources like campfires and torches, making atmosphere essential
Musical Direction: Sparse, intimate acoustic writing built around single guitar lines, subtle ambient textures, and quiet emotional space. The goal was to create a feeling of solitude and closeness — less like a cinematic score and more like sitting alone near a campfire or inside a small village pub. Day themes stayed brighter and warmer, while night layers introduced darker harmonic tension and adaptive combat variations for dangerous encounters.
Rootbound - Guitar
Survival
Fatal Frontiers1869 - Paydirt Games
Challenge: Create a cohesive rustic Wild West Main Theme for a 19th-century survival and gold prospecting game set in the harsh Alaskan frontier, where players explore dangerous wilderness, search for gold, and survive against wildlife, bandits, and brutal conditions. The existing soundtrack was built around my Wild West music packs, and I was asked to compose an original main menu theme that felt seamlessly connected to the rest of the musical world. The goal was to make the score feel authentic, grounded, and emotionally tied to the frontier experience rather than overly cinematic or polished.
Musical Direction: Rustic Wild West music built around organic acoustic instrumentation, sparse melodic storytelling, and a strong sense of space and solitude. Warm guitars, folk textures, and frontier-inspired themes created a believable pioneer atmosphere, while the original main menu theme was written to match the identity of the existing music packs—evoking dusty landscapes, danger, ambition, and the quiet tension of chasing fortune in the wilderness.
Wild West 3 Frontier Legends
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