Always Be Composing: The Flexible Music System of Plants vs. Zombies Heroes

[Music] we are here today to talk about always be composing the flexible music system of plants vs. zombies heroes I am Becky Allen audio director and composer at PopCap Games and I worked on plants vs. zombies heroes for the last two years and you may say what is plants vs. zombies heroes a collectible card game that's right who here has heard of it played it yay alright thanks so it's an interesting project so I'm here to talk about the music design the music systems and the composition and all of it all of the different phases of iteration throughout the process we'll start at the beginning at the very beginning I decided on a guiding principle support gameplay and the players experience I met with the game

designer Kevin Lo and talked about the music for the game we had already made a prototype of the game in unity and with wise and put in some initial hooks lots of hooks actually utilizing old PBZ sounds but we knew that this was going to be a new game in a new genre with CCG but still in the pvz franchise PVC universe also at that time hearthstone was very popular and still is very popular awesome game and awesome sounding game so we were looking that at that and seeing how that sounded and music and sound design and that and also looking back to other pvz games and I was thinking hmmm how can I stretch out a little more here I want to support the gameplay and the players experience maybe even more with more interactivity a little more responsiveness move that needle a little further for this project

and meeting with the game designer we talked to initially about what what was he envisioning for the music and he said well I'd like there to be a perk a progression like a beginning a middle and yeah some kind of development there so that you feel the progression of the game and also there would be heroes in this game so whatever that would mean so this is the early phase and thinking about different music styles and influences there was a lot of pressure early on from the team to make this sound very pvz one ish because and even a little PVC - because they wanted the players to come over from other PVC games into PVC heroes so I did listen to a lot of PVC themes especially PVC one themes by Laura che guevara of course the wonderful PVC - themes of Peter McConnell are fantastic as well but I

did sit down with Laura's music and analyze that and so I sat in my studio and just kind of analyzed that in a traditional analytical way and I was like okay mostly minor lots of bass lines incredible melodies strong melodies so I sat in my studio and I started writing and trying to write in that style and finding what are the edges of that style oh if I do this too much and doesn't feel PVC if I go over there too much it doesn't feel too PVC and finding where those edges are and still feeling PVC so I was doing that for a little while meanwhile during this sort of exploration 'el style phase I was doing a lot of yoga in the morning at home and my daughter was watching powerpuffs in the background and I would hear the music of the powerpuffs and I'd hear these little you know little fragments these little personal stingers and small phrases that were kind of in and out and really fast but very identifiable and I really liked that and

I thought maybe that also could influence PVC heroes so we had a game play prototype and in order to really flesh out some of these ideas I took a linear capture of that game play prototype and brought it into my dog and started exploring with some themes and thinking about what the role of the music would be I talked to Devin lo again our creative director and asked him what are the average number of hands do you think in this game well I think probably about 8 pans would do and how long do you think an average session length would be he said about five minutes okay and then he said there's also going to be these sections in the game where you play actively and then a fight combat section where the game sort of plays for you and the cards are battling against each other like okay

getting the ideas here and he also said there will be 20 heroes ten plant heroes and ten zombie heroes so I started to explore and this is an early prototype of the music where I'm exploring the hero theme so this guy down here super brains on the bottom he's our zombie hero and up at the top is green shadow our plant hero and you'll hear three different things in here the zombie theme for super rains and then the plant theme for green shadow and the combat fight section so three different things playing [Music]

[Applause] [Music] so during this proof of concept phase I was trying to explore going back and forth between the heroes and also that combat music because really at that stage they didn't think that the combat or fight music needed to be different and I thought that we could do something it could be fun so along came a feature in the game called the phase indicator and it was in the right hand side of the

screen and it told the player what was happening and it was first I would say zombie turn then plant turn zombie tricks combat phase post game and then back to the next hand so this was awesome it communicated to the player what was happening and also it gave us hooks for the music to hang our switches basically switching from one kind of music to the next and we decided to use that as the music structural driver for the for the game so with that what are some music considerations when you have some kind of structural driver in the game like that well first of all the melodies per hero are indeterminate lengths can be interrupted at any time based on the different gameplay so that's going to be tricky and I knew at that point that transitions would really really be coming into play and I didn't know what to do with them or how they would work or anything but I

knew that was going to be hard and then I thought about well if we're going to go from one hero to another hero in a hand what could make that hold together and I said well let's have common key centers per hand so say you're in hand one whether your plant or a zombie you're in the key of G minor jump to hand for both of them are in the hand of C minor so common key centers per hand also I decided that at that time that I would set a common tempo of 125 bpm for the whole game and I just said it and kept it there and it kept everything tight and feeling together and I'm glad I glad I did that so these are choices and things that I was thinking about what to change what not to change also in the hands I thought about the drums and the progression of the drums so in the early hands you have light hand percussion kind of mysterious hands and then as you go to the later hands you get the drum

kit so whether your plant or zombie you have the same kind of percussion so that carries the glue between them as well of course there needs to be differentiate or there's the plant faction and the zombie faction and they're much like teams right so I'm on the plant team or I'm on the zombie team how should that sound and we're dealing with you know instrument sets in terms of how should they sound not colors of uniforms but instruments so I decided that there would be a common set of instruments between the plants and the zombies and that was mallets mallets are used all over the place the walking bass line pits of course is used all over the place as well throughout all heroes there are a couple strings that are used also a couple of other instruments that are the shared common set but then you go into the perfection set and for the

plants I decided they should be woodwinds so woodwinds are the identifiers for the plant faction and within that let's say you are a hero and you've selected your hero and there are also I will be one or two unique instruments per that hero so every time you hear that hero you go oh that's my guy or that's my girl like spit out for example he's a funny funny weird hero and he has bassoon and so that of course reflects his personalities I should say that those choices of instruments came along as the personalities of the heroes came into being so you know spit out being really weird bassoon seemed unnatural so as the art came into place I would choose different instruments per hero so zombies how should they sound we had the common instrument set as I mentioned and then we had the perfection instrument set and so for zombies I

chose trombones and lower brass because they're a little heavier and that seemed to fit very well with their art and their style and then of course there's the unique instrument set per hero so as those heroes came into play for example like rust bolt who was really angular and weird he got the 8-bit keys and gargantuan who's big but he has a little guy up there he's got the tuba and the Harman muted trumpets so these kinds of instrument choices reflect their own quirk so you know I'm going along and playing with these different instruments and exploring and alone comes a marketing trailer and most of the time marketing is over here right and developments over here and they're quite disparate and we're all kind of used to that and that was still the case right at this moment actually I should say the creative franchise director and a head

of marketing came and said hey we've got this great you know marketing trailer to announce the game and the franchise directors like hey can you make it like The Incredibles Mike sure I can okay so I go out and I buy The Incredibles and I go out and buy the incredible soundtracks and I think any composers are in the room with if somebody says hey can you do it like this you go out and you get that music and you study at new Bri that you live you try to become it so you can kind of understand the style and I did that and then spend a couple of weeks working with the franchise creative director on the trailer and we came to a really nice piece two and a half minute trailer with that style and we were going to do a live recording which was awesome so it's a Monday and I had told Panther modern that I would be handing him the music or the sessions the next day to prepare for our session at bus steer on Friday but that Monday night our head of marketing and franchise director played it for

EA's VP of Marketing and he's like huh okay that's great but what if it's a little more Batman II you know like 1960s but kind of the 1980s remake so they brought me in on Monday around 7 o'clock and they said well what do you think of this and I listened to it and man I had to agree it was really awesome it was so good and you know I had to quickly let go haha the two weeks have worked that I had done and the idea of how it was going to go and our head of marketing Center so what do you think hmm yes good can I have till tomorrow morning and I'll try to do that and he said oh sure and I mean I'm like oh my god I've got Stan lined up we're gonna record on Friday but I just worked that night and tried to write in that style and came up with something pretty good by the next

morning and they came in and like oh yeah that's great so I wrote it all out are you still recorded on Friday and then we brought in a drum kit and bass and may this kind of 60 spy genre type thing and it worked out really well and I'm really grateful for this marketing trailer because it was this watershed moment for part of the style of the music of the game and also a big trust was established with with the team and from that point forward I feel like smooth sailing for me so it's really grateful and another thing that I want to mention here is as I said norm marketing's over here and developments over here but the marketing trailer actually really impacted the sound of the game and I took that style of the trailer and put it into the combat fight sections so I played that for you sorry

and the PowerPoint problem sorry I want to play it for you [Music] Joe thanks Damien's here yeah anyway I still enjoyed this trailer I listened to it it makes me happy but yes I took part of that trailer and put it into the combat fight sections right after this trailer happened and we lived with that

in that section of the game internally for quite some time so we go into what I call the content phase of the game where both Luca foo sees the lead sound designer you're there yeah he and I were working pretty much in tandem at this point we'd have like a hero on the board and we'd both be working alongside each other and kind of laughing about the weirdness of of the characters and he'd be making the weird voices and it all just came together really you know very fun and playful way like I said you know speedo and his bassoon and his weird voice and then Russ Bolt and his 8-bit keyboards because he yeah it was just a great and happy content phase I should say so it took me about one week to compose for these heroes and it was eight hands and I would write the set for that hero and then I would bring it

into wise to integrate also during this time I should say you know calculating it out I realized that 20 sets would be 2 hours of music so reduced it to 10 sets and thought started think about a little bit of sharing with some of the heroes and it did work out for size on mobile and also for time in terms of production so no I'm gonna go into wise show you a little bit of the integration so here's wise wanted to show you a bit of wise because in here I'd like to show you how the hands were laid out a bit of the progression from hand 1 two hand eight also I'd like to show you some of the transition work between the zombies and plants and how that was done and so I'm going to show you through a little bit of that so here we are interactive music hierarchy and we go

into the hand to counter you know these are the hands like the phase indicator would indicate next hand next hand and we did set it up with the eight hands as Devon low our creative director told us it would be on average so here is a hand one and as you open up the container for hand one you see there's a bucket there for plants and then for zombies and then surprise zombies our zombie tricks we call them eventually they were called zombie surprise Dom bees for a while some transitions that I sometimes used combat fight section here and a post combat that became important eventually as well and those are all things on the face indicator for the most part so let's just open up the plants and the zombies alright so here we have super brains

[Music] here of course a lot of mallets instruments as well and now when we go to Penelope who is also known as green shadow in the game here's her hand awesome mallets that's like glue let's hear the bass in these early hands are very contemplative not a lot of action you okay so that

would be some of the hand one I want to play you a little bit about of the zombie tricks this is what would interrupt right here would interrupt the plant as a tense moment and then that would be interrupted by combat [Music] so that is the combat I wanted to say a quick note here this score as a hybrid score its a mix between MIDI and wave and I'd always thought it would be a hybrid score and it did indeed develop

into being a hybrid score and there are some challenges that come up along the way about that but I'm pretty pleased with how they live side by side and how they all sound together the last part of that sequence really is the post combat alright so that's a bit of how the how the sequence of queues goes and then we want to look at transitions now we have our transitions up here on this higher level switch container we did experiment with having our transitions in at lower levels and that got really complicated and eventually found that there's actually consistency between them and we're able to control it from a higher level of course when you have your some rules established on the higher level then it trickles down to everything below so here we are on this level and we set our transitions here in this tab when I go to that's not the level it's

actually at this level here we go alright and whenever your zombie plague is a zombie now you always play zombies first and they're always interrupted by plants so after through a lot of experimentation with this is the hardest one actually in the game I realized that it had to be custom cue transition from zombies to plants I tried immediate I tried next bar I tried all sorts of things with this one in particular but it didn't feel right musically in the game to have it any other than the custom cue and I'll show you how those work so that was what zombies do plants were let me show you in the key know how that looks over here in super brainz and let's look at that for a second okay so you see down here these

white markers are custom cues that means if you play from here now their white markers are custom cues on all of these so any time here it'll go out at that white marker and here as well I'll show you some of those where later in the hands because they get a little more complicated in any case custom cues from where the transition points established from zombies to plants now plants let's go back up here to our transitions plants - they get interrupted by the tricks zombie tricks and that is immediate because if you tried to do it

later though it sounds better musically it didn't feel responsive enough in the game so again you play the game you see where you need immediate where you can actually extend maybe to the bar or to the end of a phrase or to a custom cue and this is something that you just have to play with and find what feels best for game play super important and then let's see any to combat was next beat now this one you wouldn't think necessarily you might think and combat needs to be immediate but next beat felt up just a touch better so actually consistently next beat works best for this transition so that's where we set transitions and they are slightly different per hand if we go down through the hands but we set them right there on that hand one for the transitions in hand one so now I'm gonna go and play a little bit further in hand for just to show how it sort of develops

and sounds a little more active now you're into the game a bit a hand percussion still a little more energetic [Music] and a little bit of green shadow all right so it feels you're now in the meat of the game and now I'm going to play a little bit of hand eight so we can see where it goes it gets more intense

[Music] thank you [Music] I bet you know this one alright so you hear a progression from one to eight you know as per our creative directors request beginning middle end progression and then you saw here the transitions and a bit of how the segment's work so with that I'm okay

so this content phase continues remember how I used the trailer music in the combat sections for trailer music from the marketing trailer in the combat sections and now we've been living with that in the game for a little while and so has the team and how was that working well not super great actually because it was like two Stingaree but at but in but up now and it was a bit jarring and irritating it was the right style but it wasn't quite the right thing so decided to go in for a second recording set session which fortunately was approved in the budget and which is a blessing and I wrote eight specific combat cues which are slightly more melodic but still completely in that

same style also for this second recording session these things called comics or narratives were coming on board and each hero would get an introductory comic and it would be fine I'm the hero and then it would have these panels comic panels panel one panel to panel three and then they also had three more comics adventure or story comics also again panel one panel to panel three so I talked to the art director and I said well let's see if we had four comics per hero four times 20 is 80 there's a lot of music right that's really too much for this game and so I so I thought we need to develop a system here if we can set some some consistency within the panel's we can have a bucket of a mix-and-match type thing so it's four seconds per each hana at the panel one two or three and now you can pull

from panel one bucket for any time which didn't matter which comic you know pull from these different buckets so it's good to work that out and we recorded that in our second session and this is how it sounded and sound different but they all work really well together so along comes the MIDI phase I like this part of the story so guy Whitmore had decided you know this is a great pop cap enterprise project that we should record our own sample library for our games for mobile games and he and I work together to decide which instruments we should record based on the projects that were in production at the time and also

looking out to the future what would be good ones to have in general so we came up with a list of 24 instruments I always knew this was in the plan it didn't happen it had a midway through production for heroes I'd already finished seven heroes by this time writing for east-west libraries but we were undergoing this sample library exercise and knowing that we'd be moving over to those samples eventually and you may ask why but mobile you know we're always thinking about size and ways to be smart and this is a really smart way to do it and also no licensing fees by having a sample library that you pull from within the game so we went to Studio X and we recorded these 24 instruments three different articulations three different dynamics per instrument and then guy hired Panther modern and his team of specialists which maybe there's some in the room today there are many people who helped us in terms of editing

all of these materials and getting creating these mirrored sets a mirrored set for contact and for why so you write in your DAW with your contact one set and then you bring it over to wise and it's pretty darn close set so it worked beautifully and they did a great job so thank you thank you so much so some of our instruments here alto flute saxophone that's just our list of instruments that I used mostly then I brought them over to logic and talk about that hired panther modern to help with the midi arrangements because I was going to take the seven sets I already had and moved them over to the PopCap sample library so I asked him if he could help with that and also asked him about MIDI exporting because Pro Tools didn't seem very good at MIDI exporting so he said yeah logic is way better so I decided

well okay then I will learn logic and I think at PopCap worked no no one's too shy to learn a new da in the middle of everything and I thank you all for being so brave cuz I'm like okay I can do this too so I decided I'll learn logic and what was great about that is some of you probably all know this but if there's such a great community around logic you go onto YouTube you ask any question and there is a tutorial video and I could I basically got up and running very quickly one or two weeks and I felt like I was you know fluid and if I had any questions I just go to youtube hello and all your gracious people who shared information really helped me so I was able to get up and running quickly and I want to say I am NOT a Pro Tools hater I still do like it for multiple movies I think it's a great tool but I do think it's good to choose the right tool for the job and logic was the best

mitii and i still also use metals so i had given green shadow as the first one to stand the pard to do the midi arrangements and to the PopCap samples he came into pop cap and we sat down and we listened to it and it did not sound the same you know I'd been writing to the East West libraries primarily and that are beautiful and different and our PopCap sample library is fantastic too but it's totally different so the sounds were not the same and it didn't the music even though they were the same cues it just just felt wrong and I had a day of depression but I pulled right out and I learned at that moment that a French horn from one sample library is not the same as a French horn necessarily to the other or the mallets or several instruments in this case weren't matches and so I you know I

think it's very important if you can to write to the sample library that you'll be using ultimately at the end try to start there if you can it took a lot of time and effort to get to a place where I was comfortable with this sample library of course a couple weeks with green shadow and then I was fully comfortable with it but we had to learn techniques so we did we sat down for a couple of weeks and we learned that layering helped layering different kinds of instruments switching out reor castration in some cases velocity changes actually duration changes in the mallets we're really key I took as I said about two weeks on that and then after we learned some of these tricks it went faster for each hero after that and this is some of the layering that was done that didn't lean as I leaned a lot on the French horns in East West and then for PopCap I leaned more on the

trombones and then did more layering with vibes this is how it sounds for super brains MIDI [Music] [Music] [Music]

all right so I think it turned out really well and eventually after getting them all into MIDI and into the game I totally forgot what it sounded like before I loved it and I actually think it fits way better with the aesthetic and I loved it I just grew to totally love MIDI and I'll tell you more why later so I want to talk a little bit about size we are a mobile studio and we have to be very mindful of our size because of the devices that we are played on and about midway through we went through an exercise and established what our size would be and we sort of claimed 80 Meg's 44 music 44 sound effects and vo Luca made a beautiful pie chart we met with

the TD we showed it to the executive producer and they said fine okay now at that time we were still kind of in this hearthstone era that's what sort of a big game but now at this point we're in late production I want to switch to late production and Along Came clash Royale and that was a quick game it loaded quickly and everybody was loving it we had some pressure to come down to 30 megabytes right we got an email over the weekend and we're like oh yeah you're too big you need to be 30 megabytes no I think we all broke out in rashes at that moment yeah the executive producer came by our meeting fortunately that day and he said hey just okay you know just see what you can do so we saw what we could do and we held to 60 60 megabytes and with our wise wizard Damian Casper oh right here he pulled all the levers and wise to

make it work and to go down to 60 and make it sound awesome he used over 21 different compression settings for the different sound types really massaging it and crafting it we switched some things from stereo to mono but not everything we streamed all the wave music and we streamed larger wave assets like hero assets we also reduce the instrument ranges for the instrument sets so in some cases if there's a higher range that's not needed I could just stretch out the note or just remove that so I just went in and kind of did some pruning and that worked out well I also reduced the variation on the Stingers that the block sounds bow-wow in the game and we got down to 60 and it sounds great and that's where we stayed so now music the late face we'd been playing the game now for quite some time the music has been in the game and it hasn't changed

too much for several months how was it working how's it not working Luke had been playing it a lot and he's like well he got he was saying that like in hand 8 because his games were longer than five minutes so some real-world stuff real-world info is coming in now you know these are and sometimes they're shorter than five minutes but sometimes I'm you know it's an eight minute game and how's that working it wasn't responding quite as much as as we wanted it to as I wanted it to remember I wanted it to really be the connected to the gameplay experience and responsive and for it to give emotional feedback to the player so how could we make it more responsive there what MIDI was going to become our friend now one thing I thought was hah well when you get further in the game and you're up by a certain amount you want to feel good you want to feel lifted

you know remember Barry Manilow how he did that he transposed okay and it worked so not all of you remember Barry Manilow and I realized that anyway he did transposition I'm like ah yeah we should try that so they me and I sat down together and figured out I host Damien as I call we could home could we do this with MIDI and so we created an RTP see four players relative health in wise and with MIDI what we were able to do was if you're up by five points all the MIDI music went up a whole-step and if you're up by 10 points all the MIDI music went up two whole steps and it worked it was awesome that's why we love MIDI it really was flexible it was something that you can really work with and at that point that waves were starting to become an issue because remember this is a hybrid score and the superblock

waves but Pao would actually happen over the sections where there's MIDI music and if you transpose your MIDI and you don't transpose those brass stingers it does not sound good so they were feeling kind of like clunky the waves like pulling us down and we utilized the same RT PC but use playback speed for the waves and we're able to get that working but it was really not as easy to to do but it did it did get sounding great then we utilized the same health parameter same point spread and added an overlay track to the to the plants when they're not doing well and the zombies when they're not doing well for the plants I used a bass clarinet pattern and the zombies I used a trombone pattern and so the same RT PC would call that for a negative when you're down by 10 a different health parameter that we used when the player was not doing well

was we utilize parameters to drive switches and by that we I added a horizontal music layer an overlay track and it switched to a low health subtract to a cello ostinato and bass pits part so whether you are a zombie or a plant it's the same you're down to your last five and you're not doing well yeah you kind of cut that jaws I'm texting happening we also at this phase because we're kind of like how can we get this more responsive Luka had been thinking about those kinds of ideas way early on and he had this EKG that we called it game parameter which was a combination of many different things of how the player was feeling so combination of like different many different things I cannot explain right now but basically if you followed that parameter it would be an intensity change and so we thought oh we'll try that with speed and Cyborg and some

drums let's try it on some drums so we added some sub tracks and layers with drums and it was working in the game and we could hear it but the material itself the drum tracks I it was live drums that I'd recorded at bestir I never recorded really very much variation at all never any variation in intensity so there wasn't much feeling difference and I think I'd love to come back to this someday with different drums and put in more intense drums to have that match and follow because I think it's a great feature but we decided it's not actually you actually don't feel the lift because the material wasn't there so we tried it was awesome and we decided to not use it for now so other late music changes were in the combat section remember I wrote those phrases we recorded them in our second session they were and they would get interrupted at the next beat if you in the game but it sounded a little weird to me early on in the game or if there weren't many side kicks on board during the combat

sections so we decided oh I could probably edit those combat phrases into shorter shorten alone so we utilized a game parameter based on how many cards are on board on the deck in the combat area and if there aren't if there are three or less I believe then it goes to a short combat and if they're three or more then it goes to a long combat so we changed that as well and now it's more responsive so all these changes a little more responsive and then I'm going to play for you a little bit of how the transposition sound [Music] right now a 16-4 solar flare [Music]

all right so that's how that sounded in the game so I just want to recap a little bit the guiding principles that we set early on to be for the game player the players experience always coming back to that as our guiding principle allowed for changes to happen along the way and for our phases I would

say from the prototype to content midi late phase even where you think you might be done no no you're not done you can you can re look at it you can reassess it you can say can this be better and utilizing your tools and an open mind and a flexible mind and flexible team I should say as well you can make these changes all the way along through the process so speaking of a team it does take a village and if any fine one indeed so I want to thank everybody on PVC heroes team Lucca fousey lead sound designer extraordinaire thank you technical sound designers RJ Mattingly Damon cast our interactive mixer Damian Kass Bower and wizard of wise as we all know you to be panther modern a MIDI and orchestra arranger Music Mixer Corey crock and Berg for all those trailers in the brass sounded so good at best ear our additional sound designers sound Rangers Formosa RJ and Jaclyn and

of course our studio audio director guy for trusting this project to me I am so grateful for having this opportunity because I loved these last two years on this project so much it's been the best of my whole career and and then thank you very much for your time today and I'm ready to take some questions if you have any and for the first eleven people I think that ask questions you get a mushroom so don't be shy so thank you I kind of went through the same thing as you I was tasked with a mobile game and what to listen to what was out there and this was the first game I listen to and realize that was

out of my league so so kudos to you and the PopCap team my question is why when you realize that like the stingers weren't working as real-time music did you not just convert everything or pre-recorded music did you not just go all MIDI all the time yeah I guess I could have done the stingers as samples that is possible but I really like the live brass and I didn't want to use the PopCap sample library brass because the the stingers would have these great bends and a bow though their articulations you just you only get that in life and so for brass I decided that just had to be the live waves thank you yeah I'm sorry Masha if I hit you oh that was a good one so I was wondering about the the transposition with using the wave files

did you have to change the tempo at all or where all the way files such short phrases that they they didn't change tempo when you transposed him oh okay so the only ones only waves that transposed were the block stingers boom but no and when we did that pitch thing they of course sped up just a little bit but that was fine because they were not time-based in any way they were just kind of attacks the combat phrases the fight music that did not transpose and I'm like oh how will that sound but it did sound fine in my opinion to transpose up and then combat such a section does it stay where it was so we did not transpose the combat section okay hi thank you so much I believe they sort of asked the questions that I was about to ask but now I have the mushroom so yeah yeah I might as well just no ok but no I actually didn't have a question so what I guess it was related to the key that you chose to have things

in how did the different kind of gameplay Keys work together you have sort of each character has their own theme and motif in the right key I maybe just touched on that a bit sure sure yeah each character has their own motif and each in each hand I set common key centres so hand one and through hand three it's all G minor and then at hand for they all switched to C minor and then hand five I started getting a little more crazy and I did C and D minor so it could be in C and D and then seven and eight it was C D and G and they're all you know complementary so it was fine to switch between those keys okay thank you that kind of states safe I think I'll pass on the mushroom over I've already got one are you sure you don't want a double no

give it something well friend give it to somebody else okay I'm curious about your decision because you guys are always pushing the envelope which I love but I was curious that you know you're talking about these late changes etc which knowing the way you guys do things were probably fairly you know you know you're going to be changing up until almost the minute it was done so I'm kind of curious on why there was the decision to do the live recording what seemed to be sort of earlier on in the process because then you've like as you even sort of said it yourself it's kind of like oh we can't do anything with that so whilst obviously the live recordings give you a really awesome sound wouldn't have been sort of more flexible to do a semi okay version of that in samples which you could then leave the recording to the end and then if you've changed things it sort of you know so what was the benefit of doing the live recording what was the decision on that one oh well I think because of the marketing trailer marketing trailer came quite early and it was they had budget for live recording for it and so you took advantage of the advantage of that rock

and then in editing and shopping that and those the beautiful brass sound that brought to the game and putting that into the game I'm like ah I kind of fell in love with that brass no no no no thank you that makes complete sense cuz I do exactly the same things like well I'm not gonna waste this right but look through your talk it's like but that would have been really much better to do at the end but of course you didn't you out choice well and yeah and that's you know kind of like how things go you don't know always where things will happen and you flex and you follow thank you for sharing yeah sweet so always be recording always be composing always be mixing all of this you had someone come into your office and basically say cut out half of this was there any concession that you had to make in the composing was there anything you had to change or was Damien just that good and made it work not well no you know we

took out variations our concessions were in variations and with the sound effects and the and the music so some concessions but never really a large amount of content was changed I don't I think we really held to it because we believed in and how it was all working together and because Damien is so good with wise and knows the tools and how to really get it working in I think that's why we're able to not really have to change the content cool thank you very much I think if we didn't have Damien we hello thank you for your talk sorry about that it's like a ground ball I was just accused for your live recordings where where's the microphone configurations that you hole I don't remember we went to bestir and

oh okay so am bestir and we had an 18-piece brass group it was it's a giant church and I think they had they had many different sets of mics I don't remember exactly on the brass but I do really remember the drums they built out a little room in the middle of the stage a little drum room to record the drum kit in that space so it wouldn't just be such a wash and so that was fantastic and then we recorded the bass inside the studio and the brass we took advantage of that beautiful space and so I can't remember exactly all there miking technique that they used for that but thank you yeah standard kind of thank you for to talk oh come on I'm just curious about the MIDI sample library and you made a 24 instrument it's really

sounds really good but I want to know about more and how many variation in each instrument you have oh yeah we did three different articulations and three different dynamic ranges so usually a soft medium allowed and depending on the instrument what kind of articulations so that was about pretty much what we did for each sometimes four articulations and then we went and chose which ones we wanted and needed for our games and further called that down but now we have all of that for the future huh each note imagine guy and I sitting for two weeks oh no that last one was pitchy [Music] [Laughter]

so three education three dynamic range and our each for each tone for each pitch each beat and I did take about two weeks it took exactly two weeks to do 26 job hi hi thanks for the talk you're welcome I just wanted to ask a question obviously um so you sounded like you composed or maybe you just arranged in logic and then exported MIDI and we're playing the similar or the same samples back in wise I just was wondering if you talked a little bit about any mixing that had to be done in wise or I'm assuming you're applying your ambience your reverb and wise and what was that like - like did that make did that help sell the transitions to help absolutely yeah we've had the same kind of reverb in wise and we used that as a glue

between everything and I think that's important because it makes everything everything feel like it's coming from this same space so yes we did yeah I wonder if you could do that even with waves or if if you just didn't mix it with reverb and then you applied it we have a little bit of reverb on the waves but we also utilize the same reverb within wise I don't think we brought anything in too wet because we knew that we would be utilizing the reverb within wise cool thank you yeah I think we have probably time for two more questions and then our time is up thank you hi I had a question I just change my mind though that my first question was about musical genre did you go back and look specifically at certain references stars composers ordered it was it just come out of your experience but I mmm I was finding about many controllers just based on that last question is we are

using expression control and things and wise oh not really much no I didn't really I've been using the pitch bin lately but you can I bet you can if you want to and you know it's flexible enough to do that the MIDI system in wise has a little ways to go definitely there's no editing in there so if you wanted to even change any kind of velocity at all you have to back your dog and then bring it back in and but still love it thank you okay last question and before I forget everybody please fill in your surveys I mentioned how great thank you first of all this is a great sorry this is a great talk you a brilliant mind I really really are my question is kind of when you talked about when you had to reduce the size

when you meant you mentioned different techniques like kind of carving and compression and things like that was in a matter of reducing data in the actual file and the playback because was that the result of all the changes you made and reducing it from like 80 to 60 was that the result of it yes more about what we did a lot of compressions compression so if that's what you mean yeah we did a lot of that and then we did some but I mean maybe let me Cal clarify like the the net cut that you achieved yeah well how would you summarize what the the achievement you get with all the changes you made was that a reduction in kind of like the size of the print of the file or what was the actual result the cumulative result of all the products a megabyte memory footprint on device was the result of all the different wizardry that Damien did in wises okay so we had eighty and then we went to 60 and then we did have a lot of things that are streaming so basically it just

became smaller and helpful to the game because when you know especially on mobile they want download to be quick and also for the footprint on the phone to not be too large because people will just remove it yeah that's well thank you everybody I appreciate your time you