'Stray Gods': The Challenges of Creating an Interactive Musical

[Music] so I'm Austin and I'm here to talk about this game called stray Gods which has not come out yet which makes this a pre-release postmortem and uh we'll see how that goes how much of what I say turns out to have been [ __ ] uh by the time it ships um and joining me as you can see here with a lovely asterisk is Mr Troy Baker so just to address the elephant in the room here hello everybody uh I am disappointed because I was very much looking forward to spending my very first GDC uh with you in such a great way to be able to have a conversation like this um for me the the notion of a postmortem is probably very pedestrian and vanal to you guys it became a very novel concept to me once I started uh participating in

games like BioShock Infinite or the last of us or second son and Studio started bringing me in and go we just want to kind of post morom with you and what is it that we could have done better and just we have some notes for you as well and it became a part of the process that I loved the most so being able to talk to you guys about the things that we learned the mistakes that we made and some of the accomplishments uh and the discoveries that we made through this process um is a conversation I'm very very excited to have with you in any way possible I think that's his way of inviting you to send tweets and things uh after the fact and and give your unvarnished opinion of what we have here to share so yeah long and short of it is uh as you're probably aware he he's quite uh consistently busy um principally as an actor and U some some work some pre like pre-existing work as scheduled some things at the last minute

uh that he he desperately tried to move but scheduling complexities being what they are he was unable to make it so I said okay well tell you what let's jump on a zoom call and I'm basically going to say hey what do you think about this and then just record his answer and show you all that so he can still be uh quite present because uh this project is one where it's a musical uh and I am the kind of music director and composer SL co-composer depending on the the section of it and and Troy became our kind of um voice director and so he and I worked really really closely together for years um on this thing and I really thought even though I'm assuming in fact show me by a show of hands who here is a composer primarily or exclusively okay yeah so as I suspected it would be most most of you although I thought it was going to be more overwhelming majority so that's nice I I like that um also what that probably means to me is that a lot of you are

sitting here going he's not here and you're looking and figuring out a way to quietly make your exit without me noticing I will notice I will not take it personally um he's very dreamy I get it so uh point being uh that uh because the GDC obviously here in the audio track and the world of game audio in general um I think composers and and sound designers get uh quite a lot of focus in what we do but it's really quite a an unsung hero in terms of how to work with and collaborate with voice actors and voice talent that sort of thing and because a musical calls for such a strong overlap between your actors and the music and for obvious reasons um the whole premise of pitching this talk together was that he could speak to the idea of of directing and what a lot of his thoughts I thought translated so beautifully in a kind as almost a metaphor for the way composers can collaborate both with the musicians that we hire and work with and help bring our scores to life but also the ways we collaborate with the people that

bring us on you know game directors and audio directors and people like that so a lot of what he says I think is actually quite Universal even though it's specific to this so um real quick let me give some background on what this thing is because again this hasn't come out yet so I'm going to hopefully not say too much that I'm just assuming you know what I'm talking about I'll remind myself no one here has played this game no one has any any clue what I'm talking about of course it's just general state that I have to contend with with in my conversations with people but uh so it's kind of a wonderful little GDC fairy tale because 5 years ago uh GDC 2018 which as a side note the idea that 2018 was 5 years ago I'm still wrapping my brain around but uh pandemic created this weird time Horizon that that uh it's like you know an Interstellar with seven years passing for one and 5 Seconds for the other uh I have a game developer friend who who called me up and said

uh when we meet at GDC in a few weeks this would have been like February or something of 2018 he he calls me and saysi want you to pitch me a game instead of me design a game and then ask if you'd be willing to write the score what if you threw an idea at me and we thought about making that game so I of course showed up to GDC with a list of like 46 game pitches and one of them was you know what would be amazing is my big passion in game music is is interactive music design I really really love exploring ways for the music to not just simply accompany the gameplay but to become an interwoven part of the game playay so I said imagine that but the game playay is in some way or another a musical and he goes oh wow I I hate that idea uh but weirdly I have a friend who's looking for collaborators uh on the and the premise of making an interactive Musical and he's from Australia and he's here at GDC for one one more hour and then he's

going to fly home so I scrambled to find this guy literally like Sprint across the city in slow motion and and you know with rain and and that was this time actually but uh uh meet up the guy's name is Liam mler and he was starting a company called summerfall Studios with the idea being what if we made a musical and and and the astonishing fairy Talen of it was that he was looking to set up this company in collaboration with uh David Gator and ell young um without knowing who would write the music or anything you would think that they would have had that figured out before going to set up the company and like quitting their prior jobs and things like that and so you'd be [ __ ] out of luck for someone in my position um but somehow we met at the exact right moment it was amazing we hit it off we had this amazing hour before he then had to rush to the airport fly home to Melbourne um and so it was like okay let's do this uh so of course the first question is well how is this going to manifest because game mechanics are as you know as numerous as stars in the sky so how do

you how do you define the way that music might interact with it well um our you know the co-founder of this company David Gator was the lead Rider uh for quite a bit of the Dragon Age franchise um and was had basically left BioWare in order to make this game and start this new independent company and so one of the ideas the kind of joking pitch was you know what if we took the dialogue system of a game like BioWare and then got rid of all the other parts of Dragon Age and made that the game so it's very very narrative and dialogue driven um and because he had spent so many years developing these just absolute crazy labyrinthine branching dialogue systems with huge amounts of narrative implications and not just what's behind door ABC you choose a line and then it funnels you right back but it's like the story actually evolves in a very branching kind of way uh we thought okay that's a great that's a great uh sort of jumping off point so

um the game stray Gods as it's now called was originally called chorus then another game came out called chorus so now we're called stray Gods um and it's actually way better name I love I love I love uh this title the long and short of it uh just to give a really quick synopsis on the story is um this character that you see uh in the Middle where in the kind of black leather jacket is named Grace that's your player character and at the beginning of Grace essentially uh is accused of a Murder She Witnesses a murder or Witnesses a death that's presumably caused by murder and then she's told you're the suspect and it turns out that the people accusing her are the remnants of the pantheon of Greek gods who as it turns out are real and alive and kind of living in a shadowy existence in the modern world and one of the things that happened happens uh as part of the death

of this character is she realizes that this character is the the last of the muses kopy and uh kap's sort of magical power is the ability to draw the truth out of people through song and so she inadvertently by mistake itally absorbs this power um and then the gods basically say to her okay so you have one week to prove your innocence or we will kill you so the game is sort of effectively a murder mystery um and so I was like okay great love it this was this was David's story pitch and uh so was like well we need to start working out how this is going to go so we made some initial Concepts um just what we did is kind of create like a paint over this was just let's create like a simulated UI some really basic animations and just kind of see how it feels so I wrote what is effectively a linear piece of music this is all again several years ago um where I kind of

predetermined the idea of a branch and we developed this sort of uh simple you can see this sort of trait based UI the classic BioWare model of course you think of Mass Effect or you think of nights of the Old Republic where you've got you know your your blue Jedi choice and your red Sith choice or or Renegade and Paragon etc etc um sort of good versus evil we wanted to instead lean into something that's a little bit more sort of subjective so our trait based system we kind of termed them the kickass clever and charming and the idea being that because the songs tend to be about antagonistic encounters where you're trying to get information from somebody you have different strategies with which to deal with them so you can be very in their face and very confrontational which is the red one you can be very kind of empathic and uh uh and sort of emotionally sensitive where you're trying to very genuinely see their point of view uh which is the green one and then the the blue one is the more kind

of cerebral intellectual sometimes that manifest says maybe it's even conniving or trying to outsmart them that kind of thing and so that the idea is that there is no actual right or wrong choice this is not solving puzzles this is essentially the essence of what role playing originally was conceived of you you are you are taking this existing character and then saying how would I approach this and because what's great about all these traits is that they're intrinsically emotional which makes it excellent for writing songs off of them uh so we had our little uh Team assembled we had the basic of our concept that's David and Ellie and Liam it's my girlfriend an Hill who was enjoying sushi with us um and then we brought on Troy and then we have the Superhuman Laura Bailey as our as Grace um and so it's kind of this uh dream team and so to that end um I I had Troy say a few words about this idea of casting and auditions and that sort of thing as an actor there's a little bit of you know um Insight that I think that I could

have into the process and and my my goal is always in whatever capacity I'm working in I I just want to try to be a problem solver and how can I position myself to be on the right side of the table with the right people looking at the right problem in the right way um and a lot of that is just as an actor I hate auditioning it's not fun it's typically very uninformed um it's not a it's not a delightful process for either party so what I found to be very substantially beneficial is if you can just develop relationships with people and understand who they are as an actor who they are as a person and how they're going to fit into this delicate ecosystem that you're creating that's a much smarter way to do it um why do the same people continue to get hired

because they consistently prove that they can solve the problems consistently so one of the problems with auditioning and I'm not saying that people shouldn't audition I'm just saying there's an alternative to it um part of the problem with auditioning is you have no idea as the Director or the producer how many takes it took for you to get that performance it could have been take five it could have been take 500 you don't know but what you got oh my gosh the the performance that we got out is great I mean obviously we're going to change it because they didn't we didn't tell them this thing about the character that's incredibly informative because we just wrote it yesterday but um you know I'm sure they'll be able to take that adjustment then you get the person in there and you say hey you're not sad you're angry or uh by the way you're not from this planet you're actually from this and oh you actually you didn't have a brother you had a sister and you watch as the actor can't make that adjustment and now you're stuck with a problem so

for me it's about find someone that regardless of what you throw at them they're going to be able to roll with those punches and deliver every time um that's why you get Laura Bailey Laura can do that it doesn't matter what you throw at Laura um it's just like she's just playing Fruit Ninja and she can just chop that up mid Midstream um for some people the auditioning process can be very formative and you can learn about the character because someone comes in with a completely different idea and you're like I never thought of it that way um and some some of the greatest casting choices ever have been because of people that do that they change the mind of the director because of their performance if you can be that person if you can be that director you can be that open then by all means do that see as many people as you can constantly iterate on your character you cast the character multiple times you cast them when you write it you cast them when you cast it

you cast it when you shoot it there's just multiple iterations in this industry as you guys know is all about iteration and Innovation um but regardless of the medium the challenge remains you have to cast this game and you better cast well we had a unique challenge in the fact of our casting choices were so targeted so specific because of the character type because of the genre and because of the skill set that was required of our actors we need you to act and we need you to sing and we also hope that you're pretty Adept at being able to track multiple nonlinear storylines across several months if not years that presents an incredibly unique challenge yeah one of the recurring themes that I have here is that the the cast we ended up with um are just not of this world and the everything he just said there is not only true very much of

this project but I also the reason why I put that clip for that long is I remember thinking this this really seems to apply to for example the musicians that I hire um on my scores like you know Kristen Nas is here hopefully especially the composers in the room should all be familiar with Kristen Nas woodwin player oboist who plays also every other instrument ever conceived um this is somebody who you know I can go to again and again and again and again and post whole new challenges but I know that it's not that oh this is the world's you know like all they care about is playing the OBO but it's it's this is someone who thrives on oh here's a new challenge here's a new thing that we can do Tina guo is someone I've worked with extensively who's the same way Tom sty is a guitarist and so I think that's one of those where uh finding someone that you can kind of go deep with as opposed to having a really broad Rolodex has has always been my strategy as well I like I always admired you know recently John Williams and stepen Spielberg celebrated years of collaborating uh since 1973 and and you

know I look at that and I say that's that's a relationship that has gone for depth versus breath um and I I admire that and I think this notion of just being a problem solver like for a prospective musician wanting to record for composers for example um framing yourself as someone who can help solve their problems as opposed to oh I can just play the notes on the page is is the point he was making about actors in one that I find very um uh appropo and likewise if you find yourself pitching yourself as a composer to an audio director or whatnot the more it's I'm someone who's here to help you solve the problem and make this easier and it's not just oh I I'm some genius who writes all the best notes is you know going to yield better long-term in my opinion um so yes as you can as I mentioned Troy became our our director um and because this is a project that has quite a lot of dialogue and a lot of singing you know we ended up tag teaming I learned an insane amount um one of the biggest things that I learned from him that he

himself had had to learn from other directors that he had worked with over the years was that it's really easy to overshare uh and give a lot of information that's just fundamentally unneeded I've gotten that from the podium from conducting orchestras a lot of times where I'll you know I I'll be working on a queue and I'll stop and I'll turn to them and I'll say here's the thing this is a scene where you know the main characters just found out that uh you know their their family has all been frozen in in carbonite and they may never see them again and and uh it's going to be really uh you know it's going to be really difficult but at the same time it inspires them to have this resolve to cope with it and so it's sort of simultaneously heartbreak and this and 10 minutes later the concert Master say so louder uh and it took me about 40 times of that happening before I learned to just say okay let's do it again this time a little louder uh because it's just you became convinced that they need all this information that somehow the

bow is going to be really informed by this imental image of the and it's just not the case but my assumption was yeah but that's because musicians are abstract get in the room with the actors now that stuff really matters and choy's like no it doesn't it it it really get he he had a quote he mentioned uh where he says all they need to ever know is what's at stake and what does the camera need like in the case of performance capture or actual on camera you could think of it as what does the microphone need that's it um I have a little glimp here we when we did our initial little prototyping um I was here's a little moment can't think like that going to get through this no matter the odds I'll solve the crime I'll be divine I guess I'll give this world give yourself that cool yeah so we're going for uh I can't think like that yeah bar or section 11 is bar

[Music] 40 four don't mind me uh at which point he discovered I'm not paying attention I'm just [ __ ] filming so uh we made a little prototype here's just a little taste this is not we every single note was completely thrown away and started over again because this prototype is just proof of concept to try to get money for the game basically but here's a little we did with Laura okay so it all began when the band held auditions no no no no wait no singing I didn't fine all right I know this might be hard to believe I'm not drunk or possessed okay A little naive but this happened I swear it happened my life was normal

until this just this that's part of a longer thing but just to give you a little taste of kind of you know how it was sounding and then of course pretty much right after we did that the pandemic hit um so it was like okay well now we have to rethink our strategy in fact the funny thing was that the team is principally based in Melbourne Australia and we're in La for us to really kind of get rolling and do some initial recordings and um it if you all remember those first few days it was kind of hard to gauge if this was a real problem um because it just didn't seem like it can't possibly get it can't scale to like a global it's just nah that that's like movie [ __ ] and so they had they had flights to go back to Australia and it was one of those where every day got you may want to consider moving this flight earlier you may never go home if you delay and sure enough at one point they did finally move their flights and then the next day all the borders closed and it was it was kind of dodged a bullet um it was it was quite a

time to be starting something uh this sort of huge in in scope anyway uh we showed our little proof of concept around and uh you know yay got some money now we got to actually write this [ __ ] so um uh I I fundamentally am not a Lyricist as evidenced by The Poetry you see before you and so I knew that I wanted to bring in now appropo Troy's comments earlier about finding people that really can consistently you know inspire you and that make you better and you hopefully make them better um I have had the great Fortune of working uh on this photo on the left that's a that's a band from Australia called tripod um and um they are genius songwriters and uh so I I had worked with them on Assassin's Creed Syndicate and a bunch of other projects where they were we were kind of co-writing stuff and they were writing lyrics to music I was writing and and they're just they're amazing they're a comedy band go look them up on YouTube they've been a band together for almost

30 years and just absolutely hilarious and Brilliant and unlike most musical comedy where it's sort of very generic and Bland music with witty lyrics they're actually really quite brilliant musicians so the songs are interesting and also hilarious and witty and interesting so uh I said I want to I want to bring these guys in obviously it helped that they live in the same city as the games Studio that sort of somehow made things easier for I don't know why matters but it was nice and um and then the funny thing was we we there was just we started to look at the list of what we was needed and and realized like there's there's a lot of material here because originally it was going to be okay the four of us together will write each song and then it was said oh okay so that's going to take about 46 years um because you'll see I'll get to it in a minute but the the complexity started to really exponentially go nuts so then it was okay then I'm going to I'm going to work individually with each of them on multiple songs want so like so like the guy on the left uh is Scott Scott

and I work on a song the guy uh with the cap on is Yan Yan and I will work on a song Gates you and I work on songs the third guy and even with that it was like this is still going to be pretty hard to finish in a reasonable amount of time there's just so much music that we're we're looking at and so Liam the co-founder of the company and our studio director he just sent me a list of he's like here's some other sort of songwriters and weird interesting Indie musicians and stuff who I like and it could be cool and one of them was this woman Montaine and was listening it was like this really kind of quirky pop music that I thought was really well done she's got incredible vocal chops and we were saying oh yeah that should be cool we should maybe track down her manage or something and reach out and then before we can do that she cold calls us because she heard about the game and was just like hey I'm a nerdy gamer this sounds awesome do you need any help uh and it was like holy [ __ ] that's amazing welcome aboard and then the hilarious thing was then we get started of course the pandemic was off and rolling and um uh and then she was like oh by the way I got to go I got a

gig I got to go do um but I'll I'll be back and we'll keep writing again in like a month or whatever turns out she was Australia's Eurovision contestant uh so she had to go kind of do that for a minute and then come back she very generously return to the land of normal people to help us on our game so um one thing I want to explain about this is that uh I don't actually think of this as nonlinear I I started referring to it as multi-linear because it is it's a branching narrative but it's not it's not open-ended in the way like an open world game or something that's procedurally generated might be it's more just that there is a completely stupid amount of possibilities that we are arming the player with so that you have an enormous amount of agency but it is fundamentally all bespoke content and and so um it's it's not linear but nonlinear didn't feel like the correct word and so as part of the discovery of the distinction between those I I laid out a few rules for myself and also in talking to the team because the music

had such an opportunity to inform the narrative it wasn't just that David wrote a story and said okay here's you know your situation go go write songs obviously the songs very much impact the story so it was a it was a back and forth constantly through the whole process to make sure that we're very lock step with each other and he is a very generous collaborator there are many story points that were changed because in the middle of writing a song we'd have an epiphany and go what if this and say well that you know but he's this like he's like this genius with keeping track of all the branches in his head I will never understand it we go oh well if we change this what that means is like there's 42 scenes later there's this AB choice and if if we change what you're talking then the be is going to have to change which I guess is fine because there's this other scene and and then you just like work it out from memory in in front of us over and over and over and I always go is this written down anywhere like if you slip into a coma are we just completely [ __ ] and uh and I think the answer to that might have been yes for quite a bit of the project but um I didn't ask too much for sake of my sanity so here was some of the the rules that were laid out first off the songs have to have narrative

consequence this seems obvious but it's really easy when you go into the normal rhythms of game design to just kind of as the writer as the you know creative director to start laying down F foundational points and just know okay there's going to be music that fills in the gaps um in between but it was like no no no no the whole point of a musical is that if the narrative reaches a certain emotional threshold before words no longer count it must be sung in order to really get the meaning across that means that that's when the actual important stuff is happening so we need to make sure that all those Lynch pin moments in your story where it seems like you know this is this is going to really make a difference to how the story turns out and who the character ends up being blah blah blah that needs to happen in song uh and in addition to the fact that these choices need to be something that the player is making we're not feeding them these are not cutscenes the songs are the main gameplay um it's not just that you're making a succession of choices in this kind of like concatenated series of one-offs the idea is that these choices have to comp account so think of it as um I'm I have

door A B and C like I showed you the three colored traits I have door A B and C it's not that behind that is door de andf it's that behind a is De andf behind B would be g h and I and I'm very quickly going to lose the ability to keep this going um but you get the idea it's each each decision impacts the decisions that come after it and so it has a ripple effect it's like life in that way can't just randomly walk back everything I do as much as we all wish we could do that on a regular basis uh and so the uh the compounding of the choices was a was a crucial one um and uh the last one which again sounds very kind of pointless to assert is that they have to sound like real songs but what I mean by that is that it's really easy to get lost in the weeds and say okay well the character is gonna sing this to whoever like Grace is singing to X and um and so then X replies with this

and then Grace can then sing with this and this and very quickly it's almost like you writing dialogue and just setting it to Melody and it's not a song songs even structurally off Ong guard ones typically will have some form of perceptible structure that is what makes us register it as a song and not just as a through composed you know an art song as we would call it in the classical world or something like that although those also tend to have perceptual structure so terrible example and I'm a fraud uh the but you get what I'm saying you know the most most Bol way to phrase it is you know Verse Chorus pre chorus chorus returns like you you these structural elements that we're all deeply familiar with as composers and songwriters uh need to be able to come back but you can imagine that if this is something that is crazy branching how to also shoehorn it into that kind of structure became fundamentally our challenge so here's an example this is like maybe the simplest song in the game

um it's really really basic but just to give a sense of of kind of how some of the diagramming works and this one even this is almost an incidental sort of transitional moment this isn't even like one of the full-on songs but it gives you a little sense of of um the way that things kind of there's paths that are also different lengths where sometimes you arrive at an ending like if you go here you know 1 to two to threea uh four to five um actually one two 3 C and five is actually quite short compared to some of the other possibilities you know 1 2 3867 um that's just a fundamentally longer song so it's interesting because then different choices actually yield really different musical results even just in terms of their length um some of the other kinds of interactivity that we had is some choices that you might make in a song determines which songs will even then populate the game after that so that some of the interactivity is happening in this Downstream way where you know you have three different characters that you're kind of interacting with and you choose one the

two that you didn't choose may have had their own musical numbers that are now completely removed from the game for this particular playthrough so I wanted there to be kind of in other words short and medium and long-term interactive musical Concepts at work so the the actual set list as it were was evolving as much as the actual songs in real time are um and there's uh we do some things for example where the system is actually also measuring how many of a certain type of choice that you've made and then will funnel you into a choice based on the average like okay you chose red more often than the others so what you don't realize is the next thing you're hearing is part of the interactive system this isn't just through line cinematic but you didn't choose it right now you chose it over the last five minutes based on the things that you've been doing in aggregate so that there's again this compounding that can occur so you end up sometimes with a really simple one like this and then some times they look more like

this but you can kind of see from the label along the right um the way we tried to force it to have sort of the essence of uh of uh what an actual sort of song's structure might look like it took by the way about two years to write all of these um it's well over 5 hours worth of material and we ran an algorithm in unreal and and it turns out that there's like many tens of thousands of permutations so no one will ever actually play the game every possible way in the one lifetime I don't think that's even physically possible um and and that's the meaningful differences there's some differences where it's like okay well you chose this you chose that you'll get similar music but the orchestration is slightly different between them I don't even count that that's too superficial to even include in the list if you include those it's like hundreds of millions of permutations it's absolutely stupid um I don't advise this this is basically a talk for me trying to steer you all into better choices in your life

so um but you can see the color trait organization and you can see some of the concepts I was talking about where the player reaches these nodes they make a choice it will feed them it will then feed you different choices based on the choices that you made before so that very often uh like for example you can see on the line labeled chorus 2 where for the player they think they are making a choice of three they have three options they have a a trium uh before them and uh but in reality there's actually nine because the system is going yeah but what did you do before so if you're like under this blue Banner then you have red green and blue under the nest of blue and if you had chosen red then you have red green and blue under the nest of red all this has wild musical implications it sometimes means whole different genres of music within a song and you're kind of swimming back and forth and changing um and the idea is that all of this has to sound like a real song and hopefully a good one if we're lucky um so yeah like I said it took about two

years so yay now we have all the songs we record this [ __ ] um turns out that's a whole thing as well um so I had a quick uh thing here from Troy about uh onboarding our cast into this that actor walks in and it's this dance and the thing that I found is that you have about five minutes to let them know who's in who's in control who's in charge because if the director and the writer are not locked up if there's there's any dissonance there it's not that well the writer's going to have control that's who I listen to the director's going to have control the actor will take control because they don't trust either of you now because there's not this harmony between a single voice that's speaking to them and saying the same thing so you have to walk in and go we're here to tell you this story and show you how you fit into it and we're curious to see

what you can bring to it so now you real what I'm trying to set up is that it's the three of us working together as opposed to we've given you a script you give us lines and we've got four hours to get out of here yeah I think I think another way to phrase that is um the only possible way to get through it all was to really make sure to invite the cast to feel like real contributors because we booked nearly a hundred sessions with the actors I mean it was six months of recording and so especially in the case of someone like Laura you know you got to spend a lot of time together which means that you need her and everyone else to feel very bought in that they really have a have a voice in this so one of the choices that I made was we wrote all the songs in fact let me just jump to this um I'm gonna in the interest of time I think this is a little long um I got plenty I got plenty from from from Troy here so uh well I

I'll save the point I was going to make till when I can play you audio in just a second so let me uh an easy trap to fall into is we'll just hold their hands through it and that sounds like a lovely sentiment and that sounds like a very supportive thing the problem with it is the second that the actor becomes aware of the fact that you're holding their hand the instant thing that that telegraphs is yes you're supporting them but also you don't fully trust them and this process really required that we just let it go and and we had done everything that we could on our side to write to um create a world that felt real and tangible even though it's very Fantastical but also to cast to these people and go we know that you can do this we believe in you that's why you're in that Booth so show us what you can do and if they feel our hand on their back the entire time it can actually kind of um be very counterproductive to letting

them feel comfortable enough to do something that's really really awkward which is to sing it's one thing for an actor to come in and go I've got this now when you're dealing with people like yes you know that you're dealing with talent and these guys knew exactly how to do you're dealing with haven't necessarily been in this situation before you need to let them feel that they can do hard things and that they they are up to the task so a lot of times we have to do this the problem is if if you're not holding their hand if you're not overc communicating there's a lot of information that we are having to communicate to our actors in order for them to understand where they're at in the scene because it's not a very traditional way of doing this most actors want to come in and go okay so where are we right now what has just happened what do I want all the basic questions that actors have been taught to ask either you or themselves the problem with our game is go well if the player has and making sure that you could have already done this but if you

didn't so now there's this box of of you know disconnected ideas that will come together as a very cohesive story but in an actor's mind they've got nothing to hold on to so what it becomes very critical is that we concisely communicate information yeah it's always the same just don't overshare uh and just try to try to boil it down um it it's part of the process as well there'd be so many times you get so lost in the weeds over over a single line and then just realize you know this is going to go by like that or maybe they'll never even hear it because they chose some other path and it's really easy to to uh kind of shoot yourself in the foot uh with that in the interest of time he kind of uh talks here about basically you don't need to do a billion takes if it's not working move on um but uh I want to not run out of time here and I also prefer to have a Q&A and have discussion it's way more fun um but the point I was going to make

a moment ago that it sort of leaps off of of of his notion about giving them space was we made the decision early on to approach this kind of like we were workshopping a Broadway musical and so when writing the songs we would create essentially like rehearsal piano tracks or in some cases like the tripod guys they were recording the vocalist cuz as you can probably guess by the way I talk I can't sing for [ __ ] and so I was like let's make some scratch vocals with the real singers um and they they would find it easier to record to some rudimentary drum beat or something and so they would literally just take like a garage band you know Fruity Loops or something and just create something very generic just so that it helps them to to sing um and so the most elaborate that we would have in terms of these initial backing tracks were just you know simple piano chords uh and then the the maybe a drum May a simple Baseline uh the idea being that

when we get in there with the actor they actually really have a lot of say and you know not just sliding it up and down and repitching it in Protools live in the studio with them in order to to accommodate the strengths of their voice but also to let that be part of the storytelling where you know Laura might say you know this is right in a Range where I can sing it down here in the lower part of my voice and it has a very kind of grumbly quality but if I sang it up an octave much more of a head voice it would take on this kind of equality and I think reading through the lyrics it actually makes sense to have it up there but in Bar Seven it's a little beyond what I can reach so can we like pull the whole thing down and and so we would like and say yes yes love it the fact that that you are discovering ways to kind of bring your own ideas into this and and breathe life into it is amazing and it and it makes it uh so much more of a of a viable finish product because it's the product of all of our ideas and intuitions it's not just uh you know I wrote thing now please don't deviate read my genius

notes and God help you if you change anything I'm not like that at all and again I part of the reason why I wanted to focus so much on this aspect of working with the performance is I think this can hold true for every musician collaboration we have I have it all the time with you know like I mentioned the guitarist I love working with Tom stry you know he'll say things like oh you know I'm playing this part on a 12 string and I see what you wrote here and if if I drop this note that note and that note I can I can think this way more organically and as a non- guitarist I would say I care about what sounds the best here here's the emotion I'm after here's why I wrote those notes and he's say ah what if we did this or or here's actually a different instrument that might achieve that better what do you think of this in my attitude is always the the player The Listener will never know about this conversation they only know how it makes them feel and so the thing that creates that feeling I do not care how we get there whatever whatever gets us there so I will the skip this uh so we can listen to [ __ ] um so here are some initial little sketches this is where I'm gonna end up fighting uh PowerPoint slightly because

it it's very janky um so this was I would send this to tripod um I forgot it's going to get very loud it might be worth Rue if you could pull it down just a little bit that's fine that might be too much so we would do these Zoom calls to write these songs together and I would often be kind of working stuff out on the piano and then I would just record it and send it to them and and say you know what do you think of this what do you think of that so here's one of those little sketches of this is that song that I showed you with the crazy colorful branching a moment ago that was this was some of the earliest ideas that I sent them for that so you can see it has a little bit of a kind of a sultry quality it's a little bit sort of swaying and so there's one little taste so here was like okay let's refine it a little and then about halfway through

this there's a little fragment of a Melody will you hear this and it was like oo that might be something this so it's okay let's let's play with that so then they start [ __ ] around with lyrics for that so you're keeping your guard open that'll help once you're out in the freay lots of folks out to get you hard to get graci that's the right is this clown for real they were very fancy with their panning to represent two characters in the scene so then it's like okay let's keep messing with that mes Grace do you know tear up I show thees so you get the idea sort of playing with it that the idea is this is Grace is being taught about her superpower Freddy what do you think think fredd is her best friend some old Rando is trying his

luck wear him out Fred so you know kind of playing around with the idea so then it was like okay well what if what if um you know that becomes a recurring hook and that each player choice sort of presents you with something new in front of it maybe maybe that's how we make it feel like a song can we start over my name is Grace this is Freddy and wearing a band what should we call you how about oldy weirdo who's up in our face yes so keeping your then our little familiar I starting to figure out how do we going to play with the structure uh and really make this come uh together um forgive me this is going to sound horrible because I'm going to tab through all of those speakers okay this [ __ ] weird primitive PowerPoint

so um so then let me show you uh some of the actual final mixes on how we end up uh with this so then we you know the these little speakers correspond to where they are positioned um on here so I'm not going to play all of it for you like I said some of these songs to play you the full song in every Incarnation would literally take several hours because even just the raw guts of the way these things can be added up is our average was about 5 or six to one so if it's a 5 minute song There's 35 40 minutes worth of material that is potentially being pulled from which is how you end up with um like five hours worth of musical numbers um please kill me so here is um so here's an example of how how it starts off where we introduce our little our introduce our little um verse tune that I just played with [Music] you Grace you know that you're lost

now you've been given Powers you don't understand I'm the guy who can help you all that you hear is at your command wait no it's okay Freddy this is all me what do I do he's literally teaching her how to use her powers now why not time of wasting so then you have your first choice uh one of the things that I decided to do is because the player makes different choices and then we often again each song is structured a little differently depending on its role within the narrative the idea was uh to make sure that we have simultaneously Downstream effects that you will carry with you but always there needs to be something that the player immediately registers as feedback to the choice that they made and so the way that I personally chose to address that is by saying that each trait choice will

always have a very noticeable instrument in the mix that is only associated with that trait choice so that you develop a kind of pavlovian association between that color and that sound so the three that I chose is that the red you will always hear a prominent semi distorted electric base in the kind of supportive you know base role um the green the empathic I chose a harp which often is very kind of ethereally treated um as well it's not just straightforward um and what I like about that is that those those have a different role from one another they're both inherently uh accompanimental instruments but um but they have very different ways that they can be accompanimental obviously harp having a massive range um and then the blue the clever I chose I alternate back and forth between B flat and then Basse clarinet often in a very kind of you know like borderline Dixie Land kind of play style um which is fun because that's a melodic instrument and so it's now about counter

Melody so that you you feel this twist even though it won't change necessarily in that exact moment what the verse and the chorus are it that's an aggregating a compounding change you'll feel the instrumentation shift instantly once you make make those choices so that you never feel like you're you're making a choice but you don't really feel that you did something that's David Gator our our creative director and the writer had this brilliant catchphrase where he says if the player clicks on a thing and they can't perceive what they did he calls that doing card tricks in the dark and I always thought that was genius because it's it's like it is just not a good game design strategy um so we introduce our our little ver you know he obviously uh hinted at it in a very sort of Quasi spoken way uh and then we get our our first uh little taste of it uh in that very first choice not about to just trust you you B in and take over the place I don't know what I must do but here's what you can

do get out of my face I'm doing it right now you're a natural girl you can also hear a fair bit of vocal production on her that's something that is consistently associated with the red Choice the idea is that it's a lot drier it's a lot punchier there's often kind of delays and saturation effects and things like a pop song in order so that red her voice sounds different when you click that choice throughout the game every song no matter the genre no matter if it's a sweet and sentimental song song or it's a big you know show stery kind of over the top one Whatever It Is there needs to be these consistent things that somehow have to be made to work um in the case of like the the blue for example that tends to be a very kind of middleof the road treatment with little occasional uh uh effects and things placed on her voice and then the green tends to be really Lush Reverb and really spacious uh and and there's also orchestrational implications you know the red tends to be more percussive in nature uh etc etc etc so if the player had instead of chosing red they chose

this one how the did here's our little weirdest night I've ever had and you say I have powers how could this possibly turn out bad am I doing it now brilliant so it's like a parallel reality version of the same phrase and then finally our our uh green choice the heart I don't know what I'm me to do something in awaken but this goat guy thinks I'm some great on I'm doing it now huh so it's like this is just so obviously this one's very simple because one of the ideas I also said to them is I don't want it to just be it's the same Melody but it's different lyrics each time that's the really obvious way to do this but because this is the first major song of the game where we're teaching the player to kind of clock what we're doing we start off with it doing that then the player reaches the next hub and now they actually fully Define What The

Hook of the song is going to be so you choose [Music] red say narratively this scene she's been accused by the gods of a murder and then sent back home and they're like okay good luck see you in a week good luck you know you can do it hoping of course that she can't and that they get to execute her and in strides this character um who basically is clearly one of the Gods and is saying you know I can I can help you and the player ask choose do I trust this guy he seems kind of Shany but he is actually he is actually one of the Gods so I mean he certainly knows more than I do is this a bargain I'm willing to kind of go with and and of course as you can imagine you you work out pros and cons as the song and this is going to have Ripple effects through the whole game um and so the scene and you're with your character C's best friend uh Freddy um and so the song kind of becomes this

tug of war where the red choice is about like both of you need to give me some space because I just have to work this out I clearly I don't think I can trust you and you know Freddy I love you but you can't empathize with the position I'm in fully so I should probably just work this out on my own whereas the blue choice is you know this uh this guy you know he knows stuff that I don't know I should probably trust him even if it feels a little funny and I'm I'm sorry to my my best friend and loyal Confidant and then the green choice is the you know sorry you're you are shady as [ __ ] and I'm gonna stick with my friend you know my my ride or die as it were um and so you'll hear that reflected in these in these hooks like this one the the the red one ends up being this is my time time to shine and this becomes the hook of the song that influences everything so that no matter what you choose from that point forward we're playing around with this hook words and the tunes I feel he in my soul if this is a power

I'm not overthinking this was a drink I'd be drinking it but someone is dead and I'm losing my head like the goat said this is my time time to shine this is my time time to shine Grace nothing makes sense here and won't the carpet be covered in fleece and you said someone died here shouldn't we then just call the police she's getting a lot of push back of course um in contrast here is the morning the [Music] green this morning fades in the day he's telling you you don't have time to sit on this trust me I know where you belong Grace the song Grace I can show you the

way time to play come I have a bad and that comes back again the interest of time I'm just going to power along [Music] here your L girls a resue that you can take home so here's where saying him you are shady I won't say you're not drowning you're waving and you too are you a dating it's so tiating Grace we got to be careful so you get the idea so then and then what happens from that point forward is basically the song is going to kind of arrange itself in front of you almost like you know Iceman and the X-Men where it's this it's going to look at the decisions that you've made and start feeding you new decisions under the banner of the decisions that you've made so here's an example of how this can

manifest later on in the [Music] song This is obviously one of the blue [Music] choices but all I want is to sing it again it's my time time to shine so like we initially heard that under the red banner but now I'm choosing it under the green this is why you're hearing this clarinet with it but that's our hook so we're we're we're sticking with it question does that make sense you end up with these Cross pollinations of the material day our place is he going to stay I don't think I have any choice you belong Grace the song Grace but can you show me the way time to

play so what do I so you get so you know there's the taste of that and then finally here's the [Music] last so all three that I've just played have that prominent clarinet going on which means the player just clicked green but you can hear all three of the hooks are passing through this filter because earlier choice would have dictated that like they chose they chose the I said green I'm in blue they chose blue earlier in the song I keep flipping them by the way because we changed the colors halfway through the game and I was like I can't learn new things sorry I got this for most of the development green was blue and blue is green and yeah I'm hopeless so anyway point being is that does that make sense what I'm describing I know I'm being a little bit succinct here because I'm running out of time and I didn't want to uh get cut off but that that agency means that you know you end up making a choice and then everything is sort of going to Compound

on top of that uh forgive me once [Music] again um so yeah hopefully maybe it's not [ __ ] um and I just wanted to really quickly address uh some of the challenges and and and possibly even failures of this because part of the goal here in in taking on this project is we said well what's something that feels like no one's ever really tried before and as Troy succinctly put it um usually there's a reason um and uh that turns out that this thing is quite a lift it's very expensive there's there's no way to do it this way that doesn't require just obscene amounts of content so it's really hard to do it efficiently um there's nothing that can be done sort of generatively or procedurally about it um like I mentioned before we often have a five or six to1 um ratio of Music That's recorded that a player will hear On Any Given playthrough which is obscene uh and which also means that there's huge

amounts of content that maybe you'll never ever ever hear also don't even get me started about how in God's name I'm going to do a soundtrack album for this but uh um that's a whole other talk I think um and uh there's Troy just basically I I'll summarize this because I want to take a couple questions before we get chased out of here um uh but he basically was uh talking about as well given the number of people the number of actors this constant um uh he felt he had to relearn over and over this idea that this really this needs to be our thing and if I come in prepared to direct it with a specific goal in mind and the actor brings something totally unexpected to the table uh to just say you know what actually you're right let's go with that and to to Really lean into that because the the end product is likely to be better so um anyway uh enough of uh quote our [ __ ] um can wish list the game on Steam now uh and um yes let's just get chased out of the room uh answering questions go for it yeah as an

actor and singer this seems like a dream project I was already thinking in terms of those YouTubers that love to post cutcenes and how that's going to make their life absolutely miserable um is there going to be a feature in this game which will allow players to have their version of the song just so they can listen back to it because they might really like what they come up yeah I think that's OBS um uh okay uh because yeah there's been a lot of discussion about that but you know as ambitious as it is we don't have infinite resources that that was a thing that was discussed I was floating crazy ideas I was like is there a way to somehow export it and then they can sell it like on the steam Marketplace like in Counterstrike uh and uh that that has not been met very well but um uh but no so yeah it's one of those where I have plans to release kind of like a barrage of albums that hopefully cover the bases as much as possible and then it is going to just end up being a you know you just kind of have to play the game to to you know experience it different ways which which was that was always the goal though that's like you know I thought what's a game that actually if I watched a twitch

streamer play it I then thought o I would do something different therefore I want to check this out as opposed to I kind of got the gist of it now and why go get it myself and was there any specific like visual novels or musicals that really inspired you guys in the process of that oh I mean I'm a sonim junkie you know to me to me sort of like the the the king I'm also a big obsessor for Leonard Bernstein but but uh uh uh so you know uh Sunday in the park with George and Sweeney Todd and actually but funny enough you know what the number one thing that we talked about the beginning was The Buffy musical because first off it's pretty genius but also it's baked into the fabric of that Musical that they know they're in a musical and they have to escape it to survive and that was kind of like we thought that's an interesting kind of premise of sorts let's sort of play with that like the the characters know they're in a song that's the idea so Buffy was was a big a big inspiration yes sir thank you a great talk um I'm a narrative designer and occasional composer and I think over the

last half hour you melted my brain um my question is I'm curious to know because of those two hats I wear um what was the sort of um interactivity during the writing process because you said David had sort of come with a fairly uh put together concept but what the interactivity between the music and the musical which of course you know you'd expect a I don't know a torch song and act one closeth or 11:00 number whatever between that and the uh narrative side of things and how did they talk to each other during the course of putting this together it's a great question short version it was a lot of back and forth it was a lot of oh you know this is an interesting moment let's expand this we can make this a full-on number this originally was just a passing comment but there's really major narrative implications for this that I think we're overlooking what if we built this out or hey we thought we'd stick a number here but let's get to the point of this scene faster and whatever and like I said David was really uh generous with with letting us kind of have a major influence on the on the narrative Arc of the game like he in in musical theater terms he would be the book writer um but we all

really you know helped each other and there were a few songs like the the finale is a a complete Insanity I mean the thing is analyzing every song You've Done in the game and it's just it's absolute it took us it took us months and that was one where we would have to jump on a call with him every couple of days and go okay we want the player to do this and then we want to bring a reference back from this earlier song but I want to know is that even possible and he would go oh well no actually because if you're talking to person it means you didn't talk to them in this earlier scene and the only reason this person's in the scene is because you did talk to them and so we're going to have to and so it was like we had to constantly have him hold our hands to even know all the millions of branches to know what what even should be on the menu and that was just yeah just constant you know slack yes and a lot of Zoom calls awesome thank you yeah my pleasure hi there first off I'm super excited I've been following this since the Fig campaign so just love seeing this come to fruition um I'm really curious um coming from like the Dragon Age M Mass Effect style of Storytelling

I know that a lot of people reach the moments for decision and they take a long time so when you're dealing with something like a musical where there's a Time component to it and you're working with the music in the background trying to keep things in a general song format how does that work at those decision points that was a major design Crossroad we reached do we reach a threshold where the song will then just infinitely Loop and we only do that once ever which is the first time we ask you to make a choice we we actually pull up text and give a little brief explanation of what the three traits because you're choosing what is in effect your character class uh because that unlocks a whole other thing I don't want to get into but there's a whole idea of of the first time the player has made this choice we don't to just assume that they've played other BioWare games or something and would just immediately understand what this is so this one actually goes into an instrumental infinite loop it's the only one in the entire game um that does that because otherwise I said the tradeoff of the player constantly feeling like they're on a rail is that

it can feel like a musical number in a way that you fully sacrifice if you if you take that away because my little mental image fantasy is if you're playing the game and I'm kind of over here like doing laundry and I'm not fully paying attention I should think that you're just watching a musical it shouldn't occur to me that you're driving it because that's then sounds like a real musical it just turns out that there's like tens of thousands of things you could have done and so uh the way to achieve that one of the potential sacrifices and possibly a weakness of the format we chose is um that uh you you have a time limit to make these choices and after trial and erroring a million different possibilities of how to contend with what if they just don't click on one we ended up basically going it's just going to pick one at random uh because if we if we don't pick one at random it becomes well why did it choose that what's so important about that and it was very important to me it never feel like there's a right and a wrong or a canonical answer versus a not it should really feel like no no no this is

about role playing this is creating your story and so Random felt like the best way to get to that than okay well I secretly think the red one is the best version so I'm going to make you do that if you do nothing it's like well no no no that's it's actually that's even less agency I thought than and so to me it's not my favorite aspect but it felt like a necessary compromise to make because the the infinite looping that you would run into if you wanted to try to to not have that um undermines the musicality of it so dramatically we tried it we again we experimented on a lot of prototypes and things like that but that that's where we that's where we ended up on that it's a very Savvy question because you wouldn't believe the amount of hours we spent sort of you know Sweating Bullets Over what do we do with this this is a really interesting design challenge so yeah you end up with Jeopardy music at some point I think I'm out of time is that what that means all right I'll just go hang out outside and we can we can address thank you all uh blah blah blah uh evaluation forms you know be nice to to each other thank [Music]

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