I started conceptualizing this album about a year ago, in early 2025. I've always enjoyed themes in albums (see the OCR albums for Link's Awakening and Chrono Cross, which I directed) and the idea of an album focused specifically on roguelikes/roguelites - originally it was just deckbuilders! - was a fun concept. There's a lot of niche games in this genre that are not well-known, so the idea of doing something to highlight a few was interesting to me. I originally had the idea of doing an EP - maybe twenty minutes of music total.

I took a while to get going, though, because at the time, I was feeling what I now recognize as stress-driven depression that only got worse as the year went on. I kept getting in situations where I loved the compositional process but couldn't motivate myself to get started on anything. Now that I'm past it (somewhat!), I am able to see the similarities between this period and the time after I got out of grad school and was struggling with finding a job and dealing with burnout. I handled it pretty poorly back then. This time around, I was intentional about working through that and pushing past the crushing apathy I was feeling. It was one of the more difficult self-improvement projects I've ever done, and I think it manifested in a variety of ways for these songs, but it's also something I'm very glad to have had the awareness to focus on and work towards.

This project represents the first time I've ever put together an album of songs that are all specifically made for that album (instead of just being an amalgam of random tracks). It also represents a real cohesive definition of what I identify my sound as, something I've been moving towards for probably a decade at this point. I was surprised by how much I had written when I had finished representing the games I wanted to represent... and then I did three more, because I had too much for an EP, and not enough for what I consider an album. I was in such a groove at the time that it was only a few more weeks of work. I think what's here is probably not the most perfect final version of each track I could ever generate, but it's cohesive, it's intentional, and most importantly, it's done enough that I am willing to say it's complete and put a bow on it. Figuring out when to be done and move on is something I've never been good at, so this is me exercising that skill.

Roguelikes and roguelites are all about learning and analysis. When you mess up, usually it's a significant problem, and that experience hopefully results in improvement or a better outcome the next time around. This cycle of reinforcing better habits and constantly learning is critical to improving at these games - if you're not improving and learning more, you're just wasting time. A key element, though, is you can't stay down. You have to actually use the knowledge you've gained through failure and mistakes, or else the negative experience was just that and nothing more. Along the same line, I've spent most of my life screwing important things up, but I like to think that I've learned from most of those mistakes at least a little bit. So that's where the album's name comes from. *It's all about falling down, and getting back up again.*

This album is the largest composition effort I've ever done on my own. I did virtually all of the arrangement without collaborative input, but I want to call out a few people who helped significantly with critical feedback and positive reinforcement:
* Treyt for doing the first listen of most of the album
* Chimpazilla for her sparkling album master
* gravitygauntlet for his input and conversation while I was working on the end of the DotE track
* My wife for being OK with listening to these songs repeatedly on different sound systems over the last six months
* My son for specifically asking for this to be added to his new MP3 player, and then having it be the first thing he listened to on it <3

From a technical standpoint, this was made in FL Studio 2024/2025. I primarily used Ueberschall's Elastik packs (The Resource and Trance ID 1 and 2) and Addictive Drums 2 for drums, with most of the synths coming from Gladiator, Omnisphere, and a few FL built-in synths. Most of the effects are done using FL Studio's bundled effects, with a few unique plug-ins like dblue Glitch to fill in the holes. All of the arrangements are mine, with the initial mix done by me and then an overall master handled by Kris.