Adventures in III Audio: 'Yoku's Island Express'

[Music] so i'm tom bible i've been in the games industry for about 19 years six of which i spent at lucasarts where i was audio lead for star wars 1313 and the monkey island special edition series i now run submersion audio with other former lucasarts audio team members and we do everything from mobile to aaa we're pretty focused on our vr work and i've had the chance to work on dear angelica henry and robo rico and my name is jesse harlan um i have been in the games industry for 20 years 10 of which i spent at lucas arts and i have been freelancing for the last six years working with companies like sony and ea and google and ilm xlab on a bunch of vr stuff and uh with all of our vr experience between tom and i we thought it'd be

great to give you guys a talk on a uh pinball game on the switch so who is this talk for well um first off it's for indian junior audio professionals people for whom aaa experience is either minimal or non-existent and who are interested in seeing how to apply some aaa audio practices to their indie work also maybe you're in the wrong room and maybe you've got an hour to kill before your next talk we would welcome you to stay as well senior audio people so what will we be talking about we will be talking about what it's like to interact with an indie company the kinds of things that we look for and the kinds of things that we do at the outset of a project from a aaa mindset

what are some of the creative challenges and what are some of the technical challenges that we faced specifically on the game yoku's island express so yoku's island express please put your hand up if you've ever played yoko's island express all right hey look at that a few people please put your hand up if you've never heard of yoku's island express um about double the people who played it okay so that's okay when the developers approached um tom and i villa gorilla the company who made the game this is how they described the game to us yoku's island express is an open world two and a half d metroidvania pinball game where you play as the ball set on a tropical island that happens to have a cthulian elder god problem at which point tom and i were like what um but they showed us the game and it was super adorable and we were like all

right you guys had me at cathulian elder god problem um so uh it's actually been a bit of a critical darling over the last nine months making a lot of best of lists at the end of the year up for a number of awards just found out we're up for two bafta awards so that's pretty rad we had the honor of being the 34th best ps4 game on metacritic and the 53rd most discussed switch game of 2018 hold for applause but not everybody likes your games a man that i'm sure needs no introduction uh twitter user maru deus said i got it on discount and still regret it um which you know that's a bummer but um we'll put our uh faith more in the bafta people

than mauro deus so let's take a look at what the game is and get those who don't know anything about it familiar with yoku's island express [Music] [Music] embark on a new kind of adventure [Music] meet an unforgettable cast experience amazing abilities [Music]

help save the island from a terrible fate [Music] [Applause] okay that's yoku's island express tom if you will sure so interacting with indies let's take a look at uh the map so this is where we all were you had villa gorilla based in stockholm in sweden i had myself based in oxford in the uk and jesse sort of nine or ten time zones away i'm sorry eight or nine

times away in the bay area right here so how did we get uh signed up on this project well we met uh jens anderson uh co-founder of villa gorilla at lucasarts where we worked with him uh he's pictured here in in the red circle he's the only person on the screen so i'm not really sure why i need a red circle but anyway he got in touch with us over email and uh laid things out for us and uh he we agreed a flat fee with a sales related bonus so if you haven't bought yoku's island express now's a great time it's on sale it's on sale yeah exactly um so and uh he said to us i know that we need world-class music for this game but i don't know if we need world-class sound design so my first job on the game was to persuade them that they wanted to put as much resources towards the sound design as the music and also to make a case for

wise which i'll come back to later so he laid it out as a one-year project which sounded great except that it lasted three years for us so yeah uh that was actually about double the work that i'd signed up for in the original deal so we kind of had to go backwards and forth later in the project but we're good friends so it all worked out fine so here's a couple of principles that i use when i work with indies so for me at least i think my relationships are way more important than the money so the relationships are so the money serves the relationships the relationships do not serve the money and what this can mean practically is that i try not to talk about money in the first meeting with an indie so often they're coming to me and they're not audio experts and they want to get an understanding of of what that would mean and they're kind of

looking for a number and when you give them that number when i give them that number the conversation tends to end and uh you know because then they need to make that decision about which person to use for the audio now i'm not saying you should be evasive about talking about money i'm just saying that it's great to build an understanding of the client the project and their expectations of what they want from the audio before you get into that money conversation and i like to approach that by kind of working backwards from what's their sort of audio budget what's the scope of the game and then coming up with something that's really appropriate for their project maybe giving them a few options and they come away happy having you know increased understanding you've built up that relationship so even if it doesn't work out with them you've built up the relationship and that's always helpful and then i recommend get things in writing and use a contract so we used an email i don't recommend doing that but uh yeah i've heard stories actually

where games got cancelled and it caused problems because you had assets and it wasn't clear over who owned them like who owned the music and there were legal wrangles but uh it was fine for us but uh don't do what we did so and also royalties are great but they don't always work out so make sure your cash flow works without the royalties again uh yoku is on sale on the switch right now yeah and with indies don't forget about the marketing materials so there are a lot of videos that we had to make for there was about five or six trailers that we put out and i wanted to make sure that the sound matched the same quality as the game so i did all those and i didn't plan for that so make sure you plan for that uh in your contracts like i didn't so pre-production so we set up pre-production for every project the same way whether it's a giant aaa game or a tiny two-man indie

game so these are kind of the concepts and the rules i follow so firstly pre-production is the most important phase for audio it's your chance to build every system to test and refine every workflow because once you get into production you're going to be running through this workflow over and over hundreds or thousands of times and any sort of clicks you can get out of that workflow are going to save you loads of production time that you can spend on improving the quality it's a great time to take all your creative risks and fail while it's cheap and do all your creative experimentation try things out that may or may not work and uh set your direction so this is super key in triple a games and just as important in little tiny indie games i'll also say align your audio pre-production with the project pre-production now this tends to happen anyway but just in case it doesn't make sure that you're

you know you're operating holistically in the prototyping phase so when they're kind of figuring out what the game is support them with the audio so they're sort of iterating using all of the disciplines can communication communication is key absolutely key especially when you have an indie team and you're scattered across the globe um for example with yoku's island express we had weekly skype calls that seemed very doable when the game was supposed to be one year long the game went on for three years though which meant that every single week for three years i had to stay up until midnight the stroke of thursday and call sweden had something like 150 midnight phone calls with sweden and england in order to figure out what was going on with the game we made sure that we used a google

tracking sheet for things i recommend you use something like google because emailing excel documents back and forth or putting an excel doc on something like dropbox they get out of sync very easily even even using something like perforce or any source control software it is possible for your documents to get out of sync and then somebody makes change and now you've got two versions of something floating around and with documentation and communication two versions of something can be really detrimental so we made sure we had this document that tracked all of our goals obstacles and progress and that way everybody knew what everybody else was working on who was blocked by what and it made things go a lot smoother so some creative considerations so on the creative side let's start by looking at what i think is the most exciting element documentation

so i find it helpful to start most projects with a short document i call a creative audio vision which kind of sounds like a contradiction in terms but it is really useful uh i start with a short summary like what i call the audio pillars so for yoku's island express this was a world full of character and charm a responsive pinball feel and organic relaxing and exotic exploration which is a really quick and cheap way to get alignment with the team over what you think the audio should be about then it's obviously pretty useful to gather a few youtube videos you know you're not working with audio professionals so establishing a common sound design language by just some reference videos is a great way to to get started and get aligned what i often do on especially on larger projects is a prototype video so i'll take one to two minutes of a gameplay video of wherever the game plays at and score it in my door

and you can go back and forth with the creative director of the project to kind of come up with what the sound of your game actually is like in practice without having to rely on setting up systems and all things like that and then this document's a great place to put all your technical features that you're going to need so we knew that we were doing 2d open world audio which sounds straightforward but really wasn't a bunch of physics audio which you know could be a bit more straightforward but wasn't and then a load of tools which weren't straightforward either so when it comes to music i like tom also begin with a document i call this document a music map and the map is not a map in a traditional sense as in a a map that leads you through locations a music map to me is instead an emotional road map of the game it is a document that spells out from

moment to moment what the dev wants you to feel or not not you wants the player to feel where does the music need to change that might be location to location but it also might be reliant upon puzzle completion or it might be tied to the middle of some sort of cutscene this detailed list of where cues change and what they change too then becomes my detailed blueprint for what i'm going to be writing throughout the entire development of the game it has everything listed out and because i have created this side by side with the developer they have sign off already on everything and there's no surprises as to what i'm going to be writing there's an additional added bonus to creating this document in that so if you have everything listed in there now your brain is down in a document and i can hand this document to a

technical sound designer or a level designer and they can handle implementation if need be for some reason i'm not the one that's going to be doing it and it means that when the time comes that everything is implemented the same document that has now been made making its way through the entire project can be handed to qa and i don't have to be the only person who knows how music is supposed to function throughout the game it's all detailed there and qa can go through and see what's not working as designed and what is working correctly so let's take a step back for a second and think about classic pinball so classic pinball has two main sort of acoustic elements you got the mechanical and physical sounds of the actual table and you've got the additional sound effects and music layers to add excitement and reward to that so if you think about it from a ux point of view

so for the ux point the ux of pinball audio the goals are kind of like this to make short play time really exciting to give you immediate visceral feedback to be really rewarding and lastly to help the player know what to do so for yoku's island express which is it was inherently organic with a lot of soft surfaces so it made some of the immediate physical feedback a little bit harder you know the surfaces are dirt grass snow and with yoku being a dung beetle the ball is made of well poo um yeah which is not a hard surface yeah i spent three years of my life making poo sounds so anyway the reward sounds needed to be a lot gentler uh because uh the uh longer play time and the creative style of the work world so you know we were trying to give a calmer overall feel which meant less intense sounds

and a lot of the reward sounds only used c and g because i was trying to avoid uh dissonance with the music i actually asked jesse to write all the music in the same key to make sure that there was no dissonance which worked great uh for the first year or so until jesse forgot that we were doing that right yeah uh that's a problem when the game goes on for three years yeah so we we actually got away with it in the end but hey whatever uh so the character voices were one of the biggest sound design challenges for the project we had no budget for vo or localization so we had to take a lot more creative approach um now i spent a lot of years at lucasarts studying ben bert's sound design which has a very vocal quality to it a lot of the sounds used human vocal articulation like the the human sorry the alien and the robot voices they followed the the human speech pitch patterns and they were constructed using heavy editing of great source rather than heavy processing

so for the characters of mokumana island i looked for animal sounds that had those same sort of human speech pitch elements and uh edit those together and i did impressions of those sounds and mixed them together so you got some animals that were a mixture some that were all animals and some were just all my voice so you know here are some of the characters you had like uh the parrot that was pretty straightforward i could imagine how to edit uh parrot sounds into that you had more complicated ones like a giant eel and a pterodactyl that was a little more a little more work creatively and then i wasn't exactly sure what to do with a giant talking mushroom and a yellow blob with a hat but anyway all in all i was just trying to make the developers laugh so here's a quick video and you can decide whether i was successful

[Music] no [Music] there you go thank you so about some of the other sounds so the physics sounds were pretty challenging as i was saying the creative director and uh who's called matthias and i and realized that we had to take a much more organic approach so to in order to match the world i went out and i bought a cricket ball and a

giant marble and i went out to the local nature reserve and chucked it at stuff and got weird looks from passersby and uh i also bought a load of children's toys and cut them apart and uh you know made weird sounds with them much to the dismay of my son who was three at the time and oops yes and we had some metal rails which i grabbed the rack out of my oven and rolled the marble along it and also did a bunch of synth programming which i wasn't expecting to do some of the voices were actually came out of synths uh partly for saving time and partly just because i couldn't like creatively i just wanted to come out with something totally different so musical music when i got on the project villa gorilla said to me just do whatever you want and that's the first time in 20 years that anyone has said that to me in game development and i was like oh my god

that's amazing the shackles are off what am i going to do and i had no idea totally awful experience that's not how aaa works um i've had 20 years of having walked into meetings and people say this is what we want it to sound like and here's some youtube videos and here's somebody else's soundtrack and please go ahead and give us what sort of exists already so i had no idea where to even begin this was one of the biggest creative challenges i faced on the entire score so i decided to kind of almost zen-like go back to square one see what was it that made me want to be a composer in the first place i took a look at all these different scores and all these different albums and all these different like nes games and everything the melody writing of the beatles the production work of mass effect massive massive attack

the um the current production techniques of remix artists like pogo all of these things influenced me and ended up one way or another in the game's score i had a number of goals that i set for myself with the music score for yoku the first one was that it needed to service the game um as with a triple a project i knew the music needed to first and foremost serve the needs of the game so do whatever you want isn't quite as self-indulgent as it sounds it had to it had a function and that function was to support the game if i make a score that supports the game i make the developer happy if i create something that gets called out in reviews i make the developer happy if i create a soundtrack that people want to listen to on spotify and buy i make the developer happy so that was another goal the harder goals for this project

one of them is something i'm calling the dichotomy of opposites yoku's island express by its design is a metroidvania mixed with a pinball game and it's like chocolate and pepperoni but somehow it works and it works really beautifully so i knew i wanted to reflect that musically throughout the game's entire score and i'll get to that in a moment and i also wanted to find much like tom wanted to one of his goals was just to make the developers laugh i also wanted to just have fun with this score because there was so much creativity already i wanted to see how crazy can i take it where's the boundary where i've gone off the deep end and the developers are like that's okay like all the other stuff was fine but now you've gone too far and that's just nuts and doesn't fit in our game and then i could walk it back and know where the boundary is

so let's talk about the dichotomy of opposites take for instance the opening area of the game it's a nice sweet tropical beach i knew i wanted to start with some ukulele but because i wanted to have the opposite of ukulele i also thought why not mix that with turntablism and beatboxing and that led to this [Music]

i was thrilled with that thanks it hit everything i wanted it to hit it was two things that really don't go together usually but they seemed like they'd just kind of always been waiting to be put together like that and it was happy and it was bright and it was a great introductory way to get into the game and another part in the game there are these frogs who are monks and they're building a spaceship out of wood in order to leave the planet so there's this again this dichotomy there's the science element there's this very organic element and i knew that i wanted to reflect that in the music so i thought well what if i take the um the the early 80s synth sounds that you'd get on like a elementary school science film strip

um and why don't i mix that with tuvan throat singing and and i did and it sounds like this [Music] [Music] so again i was really happy with how that turned out um thanks and you might have heard in the background there's a like a vocal track going c-a-t-c-c-a-t-g

um well when i started the track one of my ideas was to have a gregorian chant in the track but instead of having them singing liturgical text i wanted them to be singing chemical formula like deoxyribonucleic acid that kind of thing and i recorded it and i put it in the track and it sounded terrible just totally didn't work maybe that was me maybe one of you could be successful with that idea uh feel free to run with it um but i knew i still wanted something to represent that so i decided oh well what if i were to take the dna sequence of something and speak it through a vocoder and just run that in the background of the whole track as almost a vocal percussion kind of track so i did a quick google search and the first first i looked for frogs because of the frog monks but i couldn't find frogs but the first thing i did find was the dna sequence of yeast so

thank you google i put the dna sequence of yeast throughout the entirety of that track just spoken in the background through a vocoder and it works so how'd i do with my musical goals for the score well i serviced the game the the reviews frequently call out the soundtrack as helping with the atmosphere of the game uh with uh it made a number of um best of lissaika called out a bunch on twitter so that was great villa gorilla was very happy with it they loved using it all over their marketing stuff the harder stuff did i do this dichotomy of opposites thing yes i figured that out i was very happy with it now i got to a point where i thought all right this track is the one they're going to shoot down i had written a track that was a medieval fugue for sean and crumb horn and bebop

saxophone and after about 30 seconds of that it became a reggae track and i said here and gave it to the devs and they were like yeah cool great this sounds good so um i never found a place where i i managed to go too far uh i never found where they were like no that's too nuts so i think trying to push myself to find that i i don't think i normally would have gone for uh medieval reggae bebop but but i got there okay so technical challenges all right so technical tribulations let's start with uh middleware so i mentioned uh at the start of the talk that uh the team was a bit skeptical about getting wise into the workflow because it was expensive and it gave them not very much control over the audio code so i had to make a case for it and making a case for middleware is

something i've done a number of times over a number of games with some success so here's how i approach it so firstly uh when i make my case i come up with a feature list of all the things we'll need from the middleware for the game and then work out the cost of making that themselves or ourselves and usually it kind of works out like this it's cheaper to uh do it ourselves which doesn't seem that obvious and then the team says well why do it well there are other elements too so debugging yes you can make it yourself but when you add the the time you're going to spend debugging it gets more expensive and to get it to the same level of quality and reliableness as the middleware it sort of works out about even but it doesn't end there you've got iteration time to worry about like how quick is it to get your assets in there and then iterate on it and get it to the level of quality that you want and that increases the the cost as well and then if you want to make it scale so

it's all very well making it work for just a few assets but then what if you're dealing with thousands of assets or tens of thousands of assets if your system's gonna need more work to make it scale it sort of ends up here and then you know the independence of the audio workflow are you going to be sharing the same files when you're working working with wise means i don't need to have those files checked out and it you know it ended up kind of off the off the charts and the team were like okay fine we'll just use wise so music tech yes i had uh the task of figuring out what is the interactive music functionality of the game going to be how granular did i want it to be and i had some really high concept ideas i wanted to try i wanted music that adapted as you solved puzzles maybe the instrumentation changed as you completed a puzzle the team asked me they said there's a central hub village in the game and they they said that as you complete parts of

the game maybe as you come back to the hub there's new layers of music and the track builds up the more you completed the game and one of the things i really wanted to try was boss music that changed tonality when you scored a hit on the boss so hit the boss all of a sudden this minor key track switches to major for a few bars and then seamlessly switches back into minor and i had some prototypes that i made and it was working really beautifully unfortunately i had low time because the game is only supposed to take one year and because i'm freelancing uh i have to go out and find jobs and as is so frequently the case with freelancing everything hit it once and by the time it was deep in the heart of production on this game i was actually working on five different projects at a time i worked too hard and i ended up in the hospital because i worked too hard

and i had to hire help which i'll get to in just a moment some of my other challenges is that being an indie game there's not a very large budget for the music let alone for live players and i knew that there was going to be mostly samples in the score but i also knew that just recording a few live instruments completely brings tracks to life so i can't recommend it enough if you've got a track that is almost all samples just find one instrument that you can record live and it just brings so much life to the track so i knew i wanted banjo and fretless bass which i'd never heard in a game score and a couple other things i knew i had male and female vocalists for the front uh main title screen uh and a brass section where was i going to find players to do this um is everybody familiar with the materia collective

no great so let me introduce you to them the materia collective is a video game music fan community they are a group of musicians not unlike the overclocked remix community um who do cover versions of music but um they are also a record label um and they put out their own albums and because of this they are getting used to the idea of producing top-notch high-quality music but they are still a fan community so i knew that these were going to be young players who were really good liked game music were familiar with it would jump at the chance to work on an actual game but their experience level was going to fit the budget that i had so the first bit of help i hired was francesco del pia he was

what i'm going to call a technical music designer um in vancouver which was great because now he was in the same time zone as me so we could just chat throughout the day and i didn't have to wait up until like three in the morning to talk to him about iteration um and uh he helped me out designing all the interactive music and trying to stitch together pieces on the fly and and figuring out whether layers would work better or chunks stitched together he was great at that then after i hired francesco i seemingly hired every musician in north america to sing on the track or to play banjo for me or ocarina or harmonica and a vocalist down in chile now the the big challenge with this is that i needed to make it sound like everybody was recorded in the same studio i needed to make sure that everything was homogeneous when in reality i'm getting who knows what from

people across the globe and i need to make sure they had the right delivery specs for everything everything needed to be up to the quality level that when i put everything together and it took some shaping and it took some mixing and some tweaking but i managed to make it all sound very homogeneous tom so underwear yeah uh in the age of unity unreal it'd be crazy to build your own engine from scratch and exact that's exactly what the team did so underwear is the name of the purpose-built engine that powers yoku's island express so it's got a live editor mode so you can switch backwards and forwards between the game and the editor and set up the audio really easily it meant a really fast iteration loop which was awesome and in my experience faster iteration is the same as greater quality because you're spending more time on getting those assets sounding great in context and it had the visual editor that looked

a lot like this so i could easily see where i needed to kind of hook the sounds into made it very straightforward although you did have some situations that looked more like this i don't really know what's going on there but the sound works so there you go and we had a few key technical issues on the project uh as it's a physics-based game uh primarily with especially when you had multiball is that there were too many loops in fact we had so many loops that uh all the sound cut out from the game uh at times so uh we came up with a solution using the wise feature of multi sounds where you have a single sound that's sort of spread over multiple locations and it takes the average pan and well actually that created some other problems but i'll take those problems over all the sound cutting out so you know we also had an open world zoomable map uh which was pretty interesting because a lot of the way that the sound is

designed to set up to work in wise is based on a 3d principle so when you can be sort of zoomed in on one game area or zoomed out looking at the whole thing or part way in between it made it a bit challenging to set up the attenuations in a sensible way and figure out what sounds actually needed to be playing so the way we figured that out was something we called the listener rectangle and here's a picture so this is in editor mode we can see the rect the listener rectangle um you got an inner and an outer rectangle and in between the uh the inner and the outer is a range of zero to one thousand and that defined the volume and the pan and inside the rectangle it was maximum volume and center pan which was great because it was on screen space so however zoomed out or zoomed in you were it would choose the appropriate sounds to be playing and set the volumes appropriately and this view gave us a view of all the rt pcs and the sounds playing so this is a really helpful debug view

and i thought i'd give you a few key technical questions that i asked myself so when you're planning your 2d open world metroidvania pinball game with a cthulian elder god problem you can ask yourself these questions how fast is the iteration speed like i said iteration speed directly correlates with the quality so that's important how is your tech going to work with thousands of assets it's all very well if it works with one or two for your test cases but when you scale up what pro what kind of problems are you going to see how is your tech going to affect asset creation so you might come up with a new way of doing things and that might require your assets to be made in a different way so you need to have this figured out early so that you can make all the assets in the same way how easy is it to debug so having great debug tools like we did is really going to make closing the project down a lot easier and a lot more straightforward and a lot less stressful but then what risks is your tech going

to introduce and how comfortable is the team with those risks so that's worth considering and then how flexible is your tech for special cases there's always going to be places where the tech doesn't really work so for us that was boss battles or little scripted sequences that we kind of had to work into our tech and then lastly what's the bang for buck so you could come up with the best audio system ever the most nuanced and interesting but if your average user isn't going to notice it what's the point in spending your time and resources on it so when we sat down to begin the process of making the music tech tom said to me just make it good enough for a gdc talk and um i didn't unfortunately but here we are reason is that too many simultaneous layers and streams totally nuked the engine

and towards tom's point of uh does it have bang for its buck the team decided that all this nuanced interactive mixing on the fly and changing out instruments and whatnot they didn't notice it and they were working with it on a day-to-day basis and it was nuking all of the game so in the end it ended up music is just based on macro level locations there's a snow area it has two pieces of snow music there are caves they have two pieces of cave music it's way more basic than i wanted um but it is how it worked out so how do i spin that as positive because when you

are working on an indie title as opposed to a triple a title you don't have the infrastructure that you get from a aaa development studio so if you're going to go out and try and promote the game you're going to have to hire a pr company or you're going to have to do a lot of legwork yourself trying to line up interviews with podcasts and websites so the pr hook that i decided to uh to go with was oh music's handled like a throwback shout out to the classic nes games i grew up loving which is true it functions that way but it's not the goal i set out to do um but it sounded like a positive and i could instead hang my hat on the creative element of the score the dichotomy of opposites thing that i had worked so hard at with the music's production

and i could let go the ability to talk about the music tech so all right well in summary uh build your relationships and gain understanding before talking money with new developers relationships really are what this business is all about take all of your risks in pre-production and have all your systems working in pre-production it's really going to get make production that much easier do all your panicking early maintain regular communication with the team it really is the lifeblood of the project uh there was a some times when they said when we got a bit crunchy where that failed and it causes loads of problems always causes problems yeah live instruments and field recording are awesome do that and indie projects often don't have the infrastructure of aaa so often you don't have qa pr or marketing though we did from

team 17 and they were awesome uh but other projects haven't had that so you have to plan for that and then you have no institutional limitations so often you've got no nda which means we could tweet about it and talk about it and that was pretty amazing the ability to just you know screenshot saturday yeah anything i was working on yeah that never happens in triple a yeah i meant we could come to gdc and actually tell people what we were doing right great and that's it thank you thank you look at that look at that any questions oh how many devs that feel gorilla uh the answer is um at the moment one um at the height of the game four i think it was five five yeah um but there were sort of two main guys

throughout the uh uh oh yeah well you're not counting us in that five are you counting us no not counting okay so yeah somewhere around less than 10 um for the development of the whole thing yeah it's a very small team it was primarily jens and matthias and then they brought on extra people as they got closer to completion right yeah hello thank you for the awesome talk sure um i had a question about one of the first things that you said so i'm a composer and i'm doing music for independent projects and i'm always worried about the possibility of getting my payment in royalties i have always accepted like a a fixed fee because i don't exactly know how that works on the long term like do they keep track of their sales and send them to you the numbers for infinity like well steam sales how does that work i mean they're supposed to

um does that happen in reality no you have to chase it down because and it's like that with everything i mean you talk to you talk to people who have royalties through tv and and film and they're they're always talking now you have to chase down stuff too so royalties are no one out there is dying to give you royalties um and so you're going to have to keep tabs on it but but sorry what would you be doing that in 15 years be sending mail well you have to okay so you have to be realistic about games because there is an extraordinarily steep falloff curve of sales um take for instance uh when the game came out i set up some twitter notifications just to see how much twitter was talking about the game nine months later now and there's almost

no mention of it on twitter anymore except for when the game itself is saying like hey we're on sale or hey we've been nominated for these awards or whatever um but you don't get a lot of people talking about it and so there are ways for you to gauge how much life the project has in it still and as long as there's life in it i'd say chase it down but 15 years from now i think that that'd be crazy to be trying to chase down in fact you'd be annoying the hell out of your developer 15 years from now you're like where are my royalties from 15 years ago you got to judge the life of the project and and keep tabs on it you know if um you know four years it's not unheard of that four years later some new console will come out and suddenly it's you know a game that came out i think what's how many consoles is skyrim on now that every toaster that comes out now has skyrim on it so

that thing's got some life to it still you know so keep tabs on that thank you very much sure i have a question when you do a contract how often do you retain ipv of the music you make is it all the time or part time and my second follow-up question then is if you do have a clause that says you retain ip what how do you word it so that the developer has still has the freedom to have that music and they want to use it i guess for another version of the game or something like that um the answer to that question is basically how much are they willing to pay you the less they're willing to pay you the more you should own the music with yoku's island express they own only one piece of music and i own all of the rest of it they bought the main theme they gave me written permission to be able to put it on the soundtrack but everything else i own and i can do whatever i want with it i

could send it to you know music licensing houses i can stick it all over spotify if i want it's on spotify um but uh you just have to you just have to spell it out with them um and uh it basically comes down to you know this balance of how low are you willing to accept a payment versus how much are you willing to give them of that music forever um and it's it's a balancing act that answer the question almost so in the future if they wanted to make like yoku mastered or on a new platform or something like that they wanted to use that music again would you have to read negotiate a new contract with them yeah to have them use that music again i'd have to renegotiate the contract if they wanted to do another game a sequel and reuse the same music i'd have to renegotiate with them for everything except the main theme which they own and everything else

they couldn't use without renegotiating okay thank you very much great great talk thanks uh i was surprised when he said material collective um i'm a record collector and they've been doing a lot of really nice vinyl releases recently that's right and i was wondering if you have been considering working with them i'm possibly putting out the soundtrack on vinyl i mean i'd love to question was have i considered putting out the soundtrack to yokozana express on vinyl i would love to put the soundtrack out on vinyl and the big question in that regard is is there a record company that wants to take the risk on a soundtrack for an indie game um it got a ton of creative accolades it got a ton of critical press really loving it has it done as well in sales not so much

so that's basically a risk that the record labels would have to take i've had a couple people approach me i've talked to them nothing's really happened yet but i'd love to do it um i it would be my third album on vinyl and i don't own a record player which is funny to me so um my first ever soundtrack was for the game counter spy and the the creative head of the project just liked the music so much that he did a small vinyl pressing of the soundtrack and handed it to me and i was like this is awesome i got my first soundtrack ever and i've no way to actually listen to it so anyway that's off topic um i don't know if that answers your question it it does thank you okay so this is a question for jesse uh i really appreciated what you had to say about the challenge of starting with no creative constraints whatsoever

yeah um i work with a lot of students who are learning how to do game audio and that's one of the things that we struggle with is trying to set up some creative constraints for them but i was struck by what you said about in the aaa world how they hand you a pretty specific brief yeah so what i wanted to hear was your thoughts on what would be a good approach for students you know do you want to give them a specific set of things you know follow this template exactly do you want to give them a range of parameters what do you what do you think would serve their interests best so the question is what is the best way to serve students when it comes to educating them about how to begin a project by way of briefs yes that'll do yeah okay um and i would say um the best answer really is to give them a number of uh different swings at it a couple different projects where you give them a couple different versions of it um

because they're going to end up dealing with a whole lot of different things they're going to have projects where uh like right now i'm working on a project where it has a temp score and they just want me to recreate the temp score as close as i can without infringing copyright and that's not super creatively rewarding but it's a job and it's with a company that i really like so i'm happy to do it but then you also have other situations where the company will come to you and they'll say hey we've got some um we've got some ideas and and we'd love to hear your thoughts but here's kind of what we're thinking and then you've got this uh unicorn um where they said just do whatever you want um uh i had a really interesting project i worked on at lucas arts this is one of my favorite things the creative director has ever done for me

they brought me onto the project they said here are the characters here are some real solid descriptions of what the characters are like what i'd love for you to do is put together an ipod playlist of what each of these characters listens to get in their head what kind of stuff they like um and i found that to be fascinating as an experiment um it made me really understand where they were coming from as characters and it made me listen to a ton of stuff that was not film scores and game scores and it made me pull in influences from all over the place that i wouldn't have normally gotten i got like really into checking out the um like at the time very underground chinese hip-hop scene because of this it was really cool it was a great experiment um so

you know i'd say try and give them as many opportunities to be flexible or inflexible as is often the case as you can because that's what they'll really face thanks a lot that's really helpful sure okay we've got about four minutes so if there's any other questions please feel free uh to ask but um otherwise thanks for coming everybody any other questions i shouldn't have [Applause] how long it takes to build its middleware underwear sorry could you repeat that how long did it take to build underwear yeah to build underwear yeah so uh jens was on this project for five years and he built the engine from scratch specifically for this uh so

i guess you know over the duration of that you know five years but probably you know i i can't say exactly without asking yens but i would imagine a couple of years because that was when he approached us and the tool was mostly stood up by that point so you you didn't do this for this game specifically uh no he did he uh jen's the creative uh director on the project he built underwear specifically for this project um and probably worked on it for about two years or so got it into a really good shape before he brought us onto the project and then once we came onto the project uh tom thankfully talked him into using wise so then we had nicely integrated audio tools and didn't have to worry about building that and so then we were able to just do our work with wise while jen's continued to build underwear off on the side for what he needed thank you so much sure thank you all right one more question yeah i think we have

time to get started from someone who's not yeah especially thank you by the way uh the licensing scheme for wise does that expand if you want to integrate it into a custom engine or is it more expensive it is obviously a little bit more laborious but what was the sense from yen's and the project if how much that factored into it sorry i'm not sure i fully understand yeah um so the question is about the licensing of wise yeah and how does that work with uh a custom engine and i think that the tier if someone can correct i mean i can't speak to this so the i mean the license from a cost point of view uh you'll find it actually all on the audio kinetic website yeah so you can see how it's all laid out and the tiers so it's based on the total i think uh production budget of the title right and you know so it doesn't there's no like oh custom engine implementation no more like indie scale aaa scale yeah uh sized games yeah it doesn't have to do with the the size of

your engine yeah they they've got your engine the cost doesn't they don't really factor in whether you're using unreal or building your own engine right that the the integration side is uh kind of your part of the deal so yeah thank you thank you sure well i guess that's what we've got time for so thank you everyone thanks everybody look at that