The Sound and Music of Hyper Light Drifter

[Music] hey everybody my name is akos the KY before we get into stuff we're actually just going to play a trailer of hyperlight Drifter just to make sure everything's on the same page one thing I want to remind you of or a couple things I want to remind you of before we get started turn off cell phones and noise makers and all that sort of stuff especially for an audio talk that would kind of ruin the point of this if we hear your sweet Metal Gear Codec Ringtone during this so keep that on quiet also fill out those surveys that you'll get in your email after the fact when the ca scanned you in you'll get a survey in your inbox about like how did you like this talk and you're going to rate US the highest possible and because you're going to love this it's going to be the best so let's play a trailer of Hyperlite and then we'll get going looks good oh whoa who oh no hold up TR [Music]

[Music] [Music] all right thank you

goodbye you uh yeah that's hyber Drifter um so uh a little bit about us my name is Rich Freeland um I make Sound and Music uh for media under the name disasterpiece and I've been doing that for about 11 years and U Akash who are you my name is akos thear I'm a sound designer working in games for about five or six or so like that rich and I actually went to school together I met him by asking some ran him in the hallway like where's the video game music Club at the school and it happened to be this guy so and aash was a metal drummer right I was a metal drummer had hair down to like his feet yeah like super long hair and a giant beard and for the only straight edged person at a music school I was always asked for drugs it was it was it was a treat it was just a treat um so I got onto this project literally just kind of in a funny way so I already knew Rich already when the kickstarter had already begun it already got funded by the point I kind of got in touch with Alex Preston

the creative director and I emailed Alex and Rich and said like do you do you need a sound designer I'll do good I'll be good um and Rich thankfully vouched for me and you said yeah he'll he'll be all right yeah he'll do a good job he'll do a good job that was kind right he'll be he'll be all right he'll be okay um so that was kind of the end of the conversation it kind of blossomed out of that just me sending a couple quick emails to Rich and Alex thanks to you that all panned out but how did how did you get on it so I had a friend who uh who music as well for games and and does game development who was a friend of Alex the creative director and uh I guess they were talking about the project and uh Alex knew that my friend knew me and so he wanted to get in touch with me through my friend and my friend was uh happy to uh put us in touch but also a little sad I think that uh that he didn't get to work on the project but this was like around the time of the kickstarter cool so that's kind of how it's funny how just friends of friends of friends kind of yeah very meta it's very it's very meta um so we're going to

get into quite a bit in this talk we're going to talk about music sound design experimentation and all sorts of little bits of nitty-gritty of course we're going to leave plenty of time for questions at the end so please feel free to ask those at the very end and we will answer them to the best of our ability but let's start with the music uh yeah so uh I wanted to talk about some of the initial experiments with music um so the first thing I I wanted to show was uh the uh the very first thing that I wrote for this game kind kind of the thing that um you know after after kind of seeing a a footage of the game and and kind of talking to Alex briefly about what what the game was about kind of the first you know initial sketch idea so let's play that [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] oh yeah so Alex kind of liked this one and uh it it pretty much ended up in the game in uh uh a that was pretty close to

this and it was a good just kind of initial step to kind of you know this was just just seeing just sitting and thinking about the world like I wanted to do something that was kind of uh deep and dark and and kind of had little um I don't know kind of ambiguous details and uh so that was a good place to start um you know after that we kind of tried to do some experiments I had this idea where I wanted to run the entire soundtrack through um through cassette a cassette deck to give it like a more of an analog sound but um doing that actually it like makes the speed of the recording fluctuate uh and so if you're trying to do Dynamic music in a game where you have multiple layers of music that are moving through different uh scenarios and are meant to stay in sync with each other if you're using a cassette if you're running music through a cassette deck um you'll lose kind of the sync the synchronization of the layers that all get like fall out of phase so I had to scratch that idea it didn't really make sense

um okay and then so in the beginning of the project you know I I was write uh something that I like to do is I sit at the piano and come up with lots of different ideas and just kind of uh uh try to let the the project inspire me and see what comes out and it doesn't necessarily mean that the music that I write is going to be music that we use but it's it's a good place to start and kind of helps open the dialogue between me and Alex um who's a creative director and had a you know uh had a pretty strong Vision so uh I want to play for you kind of the original uh theme that I came up with for the game that I was really excited about um on the this is like a rough uh uh uh piano recording [Music]

[Music] [Music] you kind of get the idea um that was uh you know even though we didn't end up using that piece um because it didn't it wasn't it wasn't quite right for any particular moment in in the project and that that happens quite a lot actually for me I'll write this kind of sweeping

piece of music that maybe encapsulates a lot of the ideas that I have about what what I want the Aesthetics to be what what kind of emotional things I'm trying to capture but um from a uh from from like a practical standpoint there's no there's nothing that I can like very directly assign that music to um so in this case it kind of helped don't don't worry about that right now but uh uh in that in that case that piece helped with um kind of esta ing certain adjectives and ideas about the music you know I wanted the music to be uh uh very dark but also cinematic and um have this sort of impressionistic style uh kind of inspired by impressionist music uh composers like Revel and debc and Sati uh and and things like that so it was a good kind of just to get into the heads space and figure out you know what what is this going to sound like um and then so the last kind of initial experiment I wanted to talk about is um I like to kind of

experiment with the creative process and and see if I can come up with new ways of coming up with material and so uh very very early on in the process uh Alex really wanted to do um an arena mode and uh of course if you played the game you probably know that there there is an arena mode and the final version that's based on waves where you know you kind of have a bunch of enemies and then you clear clear room and then another another wave comes and so um we were kind of planning to do this music system and I had a friend who gave me these Q cards uh these flash cards with all the different notes uh of uh you know the chromatic scale and um I kind of came up with this system where the bottom the bottom row of notes is like the bass and then you kind of uh you kind of draw like a this is kind of hard to explain you kind of draw like a tetron like starting at the starting at the bottom going up and then over three and so the top four are like the the right hand stuff like uh like cords and then the

left the one on the bottom on the left is the base and so you have basically this idea of um music that moves through every basically moves through every tonality like every key and then it kind of Loops back around so this was kind of uh uh the starting point for this this demo that I want to play which is um something that I wrote for it was a it was a sketch for the kind of the Arena mode very early on a [Music]

so this piece we didn't end up using but it help help solidify this idea of of having uptempo music and kind of battle sequences in the game so when you fight bosses you know um any sort of encounter that feels like that and um this was in the game while we were developing it for a couple of months and it was during kind of uh convention season where um they were taking the game around the demo of the game to different conventions and um you know Alex the creative director would be on the floor talking to people showing the game and this music would be running in the background and it was just like you know a

50-second loop and so he was hearing this music like probably 6,000 times and uh he's just he started he hated it by the end he really really hated it and he it's like so uh I I tried to like stick it back in towards the end of the game and he's like what what are you doing no you can't you can't do this I can I have this like extreme negative reaction to the song so it never even though it's one of my favorite like ideas we never we never use it that's funny all right so let's talk a little bit about how the sound design also worked as well so I already gave a talk at GDC Europe about some of this stuff so I'm want to make sure not to retread the same Grand but there's some stuff I'd like to mention for those of you who are new so for this game we did a lot of experimentation on both ends but for sound design I decided to go with weird Tech to get a lot of the sounds to sound kind of distorted and crunchy and kind of nightmarish almost like some sort of Evangelion is

awful neon nightmare sort of thing so one of the first things that I went to was a wire recorder which is a 1950s recording device which I'll show you in just a second and it records on this thin metal filament so it looks almost like fishing wire so it's before tape it's before vinyl all that sort of stuff so it creates this really crazy distorted sound when you record directly onto this metal wire and when I got this thing it came with a whole bunch of recordings from the 1950s when this thing was built so you could hear recordings of people playing the piano a little girl learning A Song For The First Time people listening to the radio people talking about their experiences during World War II I digitized all of it so it's like a lot of cool historical sounds on this thing so best $250 eBay purchase I've ever had um I also made a microphone out of a stethoscope which is the most normal thing I'm sure all of you have heard of so now that no one's confused let's move on no in all seriousness I basically use that to record a whole bunch of sounds I couldn't get under otherwise so things like quiet machines like fridges and Freez and my own blood which I'm going

to show you worked out as kind of an Ambience near the end of the game and I eventually ended up deciding to use samples over synthesizers not entirely there were plenty of sents like massive and stuff built into a lot of the layers of the sounds I ended up using but the reason I decided to sample and record stuff using this uh wire recorder or my stethoscope microphone or just field recorder or whatever mics I had handy was because it allowed me to have the sounds grounded a little bit in reality and then stylize out from there as opposed to kind of grabbing things from The Ether with a whole bunch of just pure synthesizers so that allowed me to make things sound really really stylish but a shotgun could still sound like an otherworldly shotgun for example and I think that's cool too because the the music is kind of like very sort of ambiguous yeah and everything's trying to be like kind of Otherworldly on some level even though some of the ideas are rooted in reality but I think it's a good counterbalance to have the sound effects be more everything kind of stuck out more as a result and separated

itself in a good way and also most every sound was created from scratch uh I barely used any Library stuff I maybe used a couple gunshots here and there as a base or a couple explosions here and there as a base but most everything I record from scratch in my one-bedroom apartment and just like had a carp like just carpet covered in sand just doing footsteps and all that sort of stuff so that's kind of how the process went but I want to show you this wire recorder thing that I mentioned earlier so this thing built in the 1950s and what I want to show you real quick is just a quick video of what this thing actually sounds like so I'm going to play you a quick video of just a recording of some piano music that came onto this [Music] [Music] thing so that song was probably like brand new at the time which is crazy um all the

Distortion and artifacts and stuff you heard of like it's slowing down and speeding up that wasn't like the microphone freaking out or anything that's what it sounds like when you record onto metal wire the craziest part is that it can snap in half that wire snaps all the time and the instruction manual even goes like it's going to break it tells you that it's going to break and when it snaps like if you're close it'll cut you it'll cut you good and I'm serious I you have any scars I I don't have scars but I've been caught on my hands like a good amount and you have to physically take it and tie the metal filament back together I don't know if any of you have tie tried to tie metal back together like a shoelace it's really hard I'm glad this thing is deprecated and obsolete but man it gave a cool sound so I'm going to show you some examples later um but next up is this everyday normal looking device uh is that a stethoscope attached to a regular microphone absolutely it is Sir okay Ingenuity um so what I did was buy a cheap stethoscope off of Amazon on um for like five bucks I think this was

actually yeah five bucks is um I cut off the little ear hole thingies so it's just a straight tube basically and then looped that through a garden hose spigot because why not and then taped it taped the hell out of it to a very cheap small diaphragm condenser microphone so then the signal of the stethoscope goes direct into that microphone and I can record regular everyday things like blood or the conversations on the other sides of Windows you know just regular everyday whatever took fancy whatever I felt like that day um so I'm what I'm about to play you is a recording of my own blood basically so what I did was just hold it up to my wrist and just it's about to get really personal it's going to get real um and all I did was take that blood recording pitch it down and add Distortion to it and this ended up being a part of the ambience that was in the last boss battle this kind of low Rumble so for those of you've played it and beaten it you've all listened to my blood

[Music] I'll never look at you the same way I may have some health issues that I need to get checked out um but the cool thing is is that a stethoscope has two sides to it which I didn't know before I bought one so the kind of larger flat side is a low frequency capturing ability like it has the ability to capture lower frequencies and you can turn it around to the Bell which you're seeing kind of facing upwards there and that captures higher frequencies so you can choose getting your breath breath or your heartbeat and just turn around that way so it's like a contact mic that you can kind of play around with it's it's pretty neat I'm I'm a big fan of it oh okay so we're going to talk about establishing a style and getting creative Direction um so how we use creative Direction on this project um you know we kind of had to feel out the Dynamics of I feel like you have to feel out the Dynamics of a a relationship when you go into a project figure out you know who's kind of um who's kind of the go-to

person uh or is it more democratic when it comes to you know the creative direction of a project and so um in my experience everyone tends to fall on some sort of scale when it comes to uh how they like to uh you know have uh direct a project kind of ranging from hey you can do whatever you want or to like you know Uber control freak um uh like an Uber otter um and Ur is kind of a phrase that I think fits well um an Ur is like someone you know usually a filmmaker who has a very singular Vision about what they want and everyone's ideas kind of get funneled into them and so uh Alex the creative director in this case I would call him a friendly auter because he has a very singular Vision but he's also malleable to external ideas and so he was he was really um Pleasant to work with um yeah and he was the first artist director I've ever worked with which is a treat honestly so he could use a lot of OT words and give a lot of good feedback kind of from his

background and it worked really really freaking well I liked it a lot there was no micromanaging happening which was much appreciated but he had opinions ready to kind of help both of us when either of us were stuck or maybe not hitting it as much as we could I hit like version 40 on some of those sound effects so there were times where his opinion was extremely helpful to get things all kind of settled away so we kind of crossed the Stream a little bit throughout this whole project um there are some musical sound design elements and some sound Desy musical elements that came across all throughout the project and they just kind of popped up naturally we never really discuss like oh I'm going to do a musical sound design thing here or you're going to do some sound designning musical thing there um it's very natural whatever kind of came up that we saw needed needed some work um so basically what I'd like to play for you is if you've played it there's a sound that happens whenever you pick up a module and I decided to to make it kind of a fun musical Fanfare

that isn't too positive cuz this game is kind of dark nothing could sound too happy um initially though it was kind of a oh let's make this sound kind of Zelda is but if I went that far then things did not work out well we didn't want too much happiness in this game so it's like you did it but it's it's pretty still a pretty dark world so don't get too happy here's a moment of happiness for you and back to it uh yeah and then uh on the music front you know in my in my process of uh of making music uh especially early on you know we were kind of concepting ideas for areas of the game that maybe didn't have any sound design yet or um you know maybe Kos put kind of a placeholder Ambience there and maybe it wasn't exactly what I wanted to explore so we we kind of um we kind of set out to explore things separately in some occasions and so um uh I wanted to play some sounds this this first sound is for um uh the uh the

birds that live in the northern northern region of the game um they're kind of like cultish and I wanted to create this kind of like menacing sound of of birds swarming uh and use that as like a as like a texture in the music um so this is what that sounds like [Music] [Music] that's so cool is it menacing very so um yeah I mean we use that in the music and and down the line we actually I ended up kind of isolating some of these and and using them as amb as like straight Ambience as well um the uh next thing I wanted to play was uh two versions of a track and um the end of a track just to show that like a lot of the music in the game I'm kind of thinking about like the

um kind of the surroundings that the music is being used for and like you know are there would there be animals in this environment um you know what what does the air sound like there you kind of thinking thinking of music as sound design and thinking of you know what are sort of the uh what are some of the things that I can achieve with the music that will help to establish the ambience and so this piece that I'm going to play is for a section of um in the uh Eastern region of the world where it's kind of this like uh uh it's like a water outdoor water temple it's there's like running water everywhere um yeah um so uh I'll play like the music uh the end of the song with everything and then I'll play kind of the isolated version [Music] [Music]

[Music] so there's like wind in there and Hoots like hooting sounds like ambiguous animal sounds so I'll I'll play the isolated version now so you can hear them better [Music] [Music] so just in general I was trying to think of music as like as as mimicking the reality of the world um and that wasn't just for like animal sounds and and wind or whatever um you know it was also for creating kind of uh depth of atmosphere like in some of the deeper regions so when you go underground a lot of times you hear this like drum that's like really big and kind of far away it sounds like this [Music]

so I use that same sound like almost everywhere I tried to play that out on my laptop speakers and nothing came out it's so deep yeah uh and it it actually I found that it worked really well in just kind of establishing like there's something like really far away from where you are right now that's happening or just something to create this sense of like really big deep space and I feel like that helped a lot and then there are other sounds kind of of that ilk that do similar things like I had this kind of like this very far away like kind of electrical sound that I would use uh from time to time to kind of give the same impression and that sounds like this it's uh it's kind of subtle but um in in right moments it kind of like comes out of the mix a little bit and just helps to establish the en environment there and then this other

thing that I would do a lot is I would build these synth patches to use to play chords and Melodies and things like that but then I would like experiment with the sound um because I have I have all these effects on the sounds if I go up like six octaves and try to play it you get all these weird like like uh like aliasing effects and stuff that I wasn't expecting and so I use that a lot to kind of create kind of just weird weird sounds so um this is a little shrill so prepare yourselves that wasn't too bad huh it wasn't bad uh yeah cool so there are some kind of more iconic sounds in this game so we're going to talk about some of those and Rich your your stinger is probably the most yeah wellknown I can't I can't take all the credit for this because um Alex and I had this process where at some point I was struggling a little bit to find the sound of this game and so I we just started a drop off folder where I just threw like tons and tons of piano

sketches into it there probably like 100 150 sketches in there and him and I would just listen to them and and talk about it and take notes and he found this like he found this like three chord thing in one of the sketches and he's like this should be the theme and I was like you're right this is this is perfect so this is uh this is what it was this is the piano version [Music] so we felt like it kind of did a lot it was very evocative in a very short period of time so that was something that we could probably latch on to and so um you know that turned into uh the first time that we got to use it was when we did the the second trailer uh so this is this is that in the context of the trailer press it again [Music]

[Music] so it kind of worked I think um yeah yeah a little bit yeah uh what and it's funny because uh talking about trailers you know the kind of the um the aesthetic and tamber of the theme kind of came out of working on the trailer and I have a lot of mixed feelings about working on trailers I kind of prefer to work on the thing itself as opposed to getting caught up in trailers cuz sometimes you can take like weeks to get the trailer right it's very meticulous but in this case for this game it was so important like this trailer and the final trailer which had the pi has piano in it those were really important and kind of helping us to understand you know what it is sonically that we're trying to achieve with with this game all right so next up is some of the weapon sounds and I spent probably the most amount of time on making the weapon and sound as cool as humanly possible so

to do that I did a technique that basically all sound design uses and that's called layering so every time you hear any sort of sound effect in most any game or movie or any piece of media every single sound is made up of multiple things playing at the same time and the sound I'm about to play for you here is the diamond shotgun and what that is is made up of nine different layers for each and every shot that you pull and there's two different versions of this but I'm just going to isolate one version for you so in this video This is is just a video of me in logic pro which is the software I used for all the sound design in this game and basically I just walk you through each layer to see what they sound like individually and then at the very end you'll hear how they all come together and you might be wondering how I recorded a lot of this stuff a lot of it is the result of that wire recorder and that's how I could get kind of such strange artifact kind of distorted sounds so this will walk you through every layer and then all together at the end

[Music] it's a little basier in here flutter Echo wow yeah that's that that delay is not actually part of the effect so if you're like that's not that's not a part of it that's just this room um so that's how I approached basically every single sound effect from the footsteps all the way to the weapon sounds to the monsters and everything in between is made up oftime times as much as 20 different layers of sound so every single weapon you hear and that's kind of the trick in a way to make things sound unique or iconic or special to that world is building it up of different elements that on their own can sound like they fit within that world in this case like Hyperlite but altogether sound like its own cool unique thing and next up is the kind of monster effects so I've talked about this a little before but this is Hal he's the final boss of the game this is an older animation but it's a cool GIF so I thought I'd throw it in here um so for all the monster sounds except for

the Wolves uh you're hearing my Angelic voice being super processed so all the monster deaths and Roars and all that sort of stuff all them screaming is what what sad soul did you ask to do the Wolves wolf voice is just I just I had a wolf recording did you go find go searching for wol I went searching for wolves I have a pack of my own anyway so I just I just recorded them they're my friends just curious yeah yeah yeah you know normal things um so for this um for this uh how character here I needed this to sound completely different from every other monster in the game it needed to sound horrific uh Alex Preston the director kept saying like make it sound really terrifying I want to sound scared when I hear this so what I did was squeal like a pig into a microphone and then process the hell out of it what so what I'm going to play for you is my raw voice which will sound awful um squealing like a pig into a microphone and then the processed version and you're going to do it live no no a come on I actually thought I would I

was like oh maybe I should and then I realized how much it hurts to do this it's so painful I'm not a voice actor by any means but it was good for Monster effect so here's the raw version of me squealing like a pig so that's me um uh this is pro stuff right here this this is real this is the real art um so now next up what I did was record that directly into my wire recorder then put it back into logic pro and to do that there's no output on that thing they didn't have those back then um so what I did was just have shove a microphone up against the speaker and then record it directly back into logic pro like it's an amp and then what I did was take that sound that you just heard and time stretch it Reverb It bitc Crush the hell out of it and add some Reverb and this is the result [Applause] yeah

yeah so yes all all the monsters are start from this seed but thanks to the magic of old and new technology it starts to sound a lot more unique and a part of this world they all started from that one sound every single one every single uh so um have you guys have you guys noticed these things and what they sound like anybody okay so this so uh the the sound of hyperlight was something that Alex and I started talking about uh um I think it was just a random idea that I had and he's like yeah that's cool we should we should try that so um this is what those things sound like oh man wow got to go to the gym hold on to the gym um there we go oh oh oh man go go back yep

[Music] [Music] so this is just like a subtle thing that we decided to do to kind of like you know what what is the sound of Hyperlite does it have a sound and you know there are these like there these little modules and stuff and pink stuff like in corners of of like most of the rooms in the world uh and so you know we we made the sound and um the the sound is singular so no matter how many of those objects that you have in a room you just hear the one sound which I thought was kind of like a cool thing uh I'm assuming almost nobody notices but that's okay it's a nice touch oh this is me this you uh so ambiences so this is a funny thing um we we kind of you know akaj set off in the sound design world uh and you know know had a lot had his hands pretty full with figuring out these sounds and I kind of

set off in a music world doing music and I was doing a little bit of Ambience like as part of the music uh at times but not always and at some point towards the end of development we kind of realized like we should probably have some ambiences in this game that would probably help a lot and it made a huge difference um and so basically um I was like Hey Kos is it cool if I just like start making ambiences cuz you know I didn't want to step on your feet yeah like go for it aot time yeah so I just started making ambiances for the game um and I actually hired an intern whose name is Curtis Mitchell who uh helped me uh and um you know he just kind of did a lot of foundational work for me and then I would come in and like we'd kind of do the right effects to the sounds and make you know we' do like spotting sessions where we'd play and be like oh this needs a sound this needs a sound um and uh um we did not use bitc Crushers actually there's no there's no big crushing in the music or the ambience um

and there's a ton of bit crushing in the sound effects which is something that we I think just kind of happened out of luck and helped to like create I think a good contrast between the sounds and the music so you it helps with the I guess the communication level of the uh of the sounds yeah um so yeah yeah so we did a lot of iteration on this whole sort of process in this game there basically for me at least nothing was really right on the first try um I think only one sound which was the rail gun is still at version one and I'm I wish I took a screenshot of this but Alex said I want to marry the sound it's like yes yes um but everything else hit version two and above again some I can hear that sound in my head yeah yes awesome um so yeah so a lot of things took a good amount of time and a good amount of iteration to really get right um s I no uh yeah so uh the West music

was something that uh uh went through a lot of iteration um there were multiple versions of things it kind of reached this point in the project where I thought you know maybe I should like maybe I should write everything at the piano and like figure out the entire these long like five six minute songs and then notate them and maybe that will help me and that was like that was the wrong totally the wrong decision that didn't help at all it was a total waste of time but uh we I kind of over time figured out that oh yeah the music should probably be like these shorter pieces is but have a lot of different variations of it so that the music can react very quickly and we were also somewhat limited technically by the software that we used which we'll talk about in a little bit later um and so you know that was a really important thing and then another really important thing was um this idea of kind of reappropriate my own ideas from the past and this is something that I always bring to projects um I have a huge database of just musical ideas from when I very from the very beginning that I started writing music and so you know often like go back and find an idea from like six years ago that's like oh this

might work for this particular thing and then I'll you know I'll you know dress it up so that it fits the project um and a lot of times when I'm stuck or you know just looking to mix it up that helps a lot and um did oh I think we forgot to use that no that's all right okay so just keep on actually no I'll just mention it bit there's this funny thing it's called Uh uh Teddy debach who's a programmer on on Hyperlite he uh he uh put this like the secret sound effect in the game called Shack Jack which confused the hell out of me when I found so when you're like when you're editing when you're using the game editor like it was kind of like maybe there's a 1% chance that when you hit the save the save button it would it would you would hear Teddy going Shack Jack so when I discovered snd Dore Shack Jack in the game maker thing I was like what the what is this I didn't put this here yeah so um I can't believe I forgot to put this in the talk but basically the uh I just I just just messing around with the sound one day and I was like wow

this is if you like pitch this down and start to mess with it like granular effects and stuff it kind of sounds like the boss yeah so actually when you uh in the boss room when you first open the door you hear Teddy going Ja Jack it works really well I think it works pretty well pretty funny so We snuck that in there thanks Teddy Wherever You Are have a okay all right so what I did what well kind of how how we kind of started to get uh better and better at working on stuff is just through trying and trying again again like not for me at least nothing was really right on the first try except for that one real gun sound so Alex was really really good at using super descriptive emotional Words which for sound designers is super freaking rad I really really like using that if someone says make this sound lonely or make this sound desolate or whatever it may be I'm a huge huge fan of that so for example

one of the sounds that we created was this kind of frog animy dying so I'm gonna play you version one so that's a frog dying um being stabbed ouch ouch but not ouch enough Rich so oh so what Alex said was something along the lines of like I want this to sound like agonizing I want to feel kind of sad or just kind of disuss it a little bit when when when this thing dies so again using my beautiful voice this is what ended up being the end frog death sound so just that thing didn't want to die but it did dang that's gnarly uh and then on the music side of getting better uh you know Alex and I had many many very long philosophical discussions about the music and kind of what he was looking for and what my agenda was and that was something that was really nice about Alex is that you know he had a very strong vision for what he wanted but he was ALS also willing to like you know for us to have these discussions

about you know how kind of how I saw the project and you know what I was bringing to the table and um we often found the right solution to things by just having these really long conversations and talking it out and kind of finding our common ground and reaching like the the better I understand stood what his vision was the the more it informed my vision and and I kind of allowed him to influence me and I think it was kind of you know a two-way street in that regard um and so you know one thing that we kind of figured out you know Alex wanted a lot of Melody in the game and I didn't really want any Melody I wanted it to be really subtle because for me as an art as an artist I'm very like I'm very uh cognizant of not wanting to do the same thing over and so you know coming from like a to me this was in some ways a spiritual successor for me to to to the work I did on Fez and but Fez is very like melodic and so I wanted to do something that was a much more kind of understated in in that regard but we kind of reached this compromise where you know for and it's not really a compromise because I agree with it now

but basically for like bosses and Vistas which are these moments where you know you might see a Titan like a big big dead robot way in the distance we'd have the music kind of sweep sweep up and kind of get kind of cinematic and have some kind of Melody and everything else is kind of more subtle so I think it helps to build kind of this this contrast and this kind of dynamism in the music and then also in that same regard you know one of the things I took from Fez was that we used Ambience a lot to create space and to give the player a chance to breathe between areas and things like that so there there are a lot of moments in the game where there's there's no music it's just Ambience just to kind of like give the player a beat give the player a moment to kind of catch their breath and things like that kind of play the game kind of get a feel for what the uh the momentum of the game is the the the the rhythm of the game basically and kind of see you know where where can I kind of push the emotions where can I like help the player like relax a little bit especially in a game like this that's so demanding and can get really kind of frustrating um it was

important to have to try to inject some moments where the player could maybe feel a little bit more relaxed yeah so we worked remotely rich and I uh you were in Berkeley at the moment I was in Berkeley at the time yeah and I was in Seattle so we were remote while everyone else was at glitch City in LA and we slack was the best slack was everything it was literally everything it was such a huge help we used Asana as well to kind of track bugs but it was not everyone use Asana really uh I don't really like Asana but we did use it to track bugs yeah I use it to track a few assets here and there but really I just made a Google spreadsheet and that's kind of the the best way to do it and at least on my end Alex and I had weekly calls to work this work stuff out even if we had nothing to update one another on we made sure to get on Skype or on the phone just be hey how you doing good cool anything this week nah all right see you like even if it was that that was really helpful to make sure as working remotely that I wasn't

forgotten or that I didn't forget them to keep working on whatever was needed and it was really helpful in case an enemy got cut or a huge feature got cut or something got added I was made sure to stay in the loop because in the early days of this project we didn't have that set up and that kind of led to some stuff like oh finish this sound for this thing doesn't exist anymore oh oh it was similar for me for a long time just having you know uh periodic calls uh which were really helpful but towards uh at some point I I you know uh the game was made in Los Angeles and that's not that far so I I was like you know I should I should just go there more more often and hang out and get to know the team and um it'll be you know I think it'll be good so I started doing that I started going for weeks at a time uh and and staying at Alex's house sleeping on his couch and uh you know I got to go to meetings with the team and you know hang out with the team and kind of get to know them um but I still kind of isolated myself so that I could focus

cuz it's hard to write music in a in like a co-working space can be tough when there's no like designated area for you um but it was good for morale uh I think and it was good for being on the same page and having I think having closer relationships with the people that you work with just kind of it it it boosts accountability for me personally and it it it makes me want to do a good job even more yeah so a lot of people asked me and I'm probably you as well like how did we kind of work together to get things done and we didn't um so in all honesty so we didn't we didn't do this intentionally we just we're not like oh I hate you rich Let's never talk again um what kind of happened is that we talked throughout at the very beginning of the project when I was brought on on a Skype call laid some things out here and there that I don't even remember and then uh throughout the rest of the three-year project we maybe chatted three or four times yeah very infrequently if it wasn't for Alex was kind it was kind of like a triangle like he was kind of you know he was funneling both of us if it

wasn't for him I mean we Pro we might have ended up with totally totally different yeah unrelated work yeah and looking back we should have we probably should have talked more it would have been good I think I think there was something where the the maybe the the whatever our connection was just wasn't quite jelling or something cuz yeah I I don't I know yeah but I don't know it worked out who knows it worked out okay so we used game maker for getting all of our sounds and music into the game which was a little bit of a challenge yeah we didn't intentionally use Game Maker but gamemaker is the software that was used for the game and uh you know they they were really helpful actually in kind of iterating on Game Maker itself to give us the tools that we needed to do a good job um and so they uh they helped us with things like adding aorus support and uh doing um doing things with like adding more uh memory support for like streaming multiple streams of of music and things like that and um you know we also had

two programmers who were super helpful uh ex extremely helpful and and wanted to you know do good by us and so um uh yeah so um we did we did a lot of uh um kind of mixing and kind of uh things where you know music kind of changes uh over time um by using um uh a script editor this is is a screenshot an early screenshot of the editor it's kind of nuts um it's it's not ideal but you know it does the job and um it it helped in the long run for everybody Yeah so basically we had this visual scripting language where you know we we uh we would Place sounds we would Place music in the world they were little boom boxes which was kind of fun was uh and you could attach them to different things like regions where the character if the character walks into this region you know you do a thing with the music you fade it in you fade it out whatever and also we had this we had group a group system for the music so you know you could have a bunch of different versions of the same track

that kind of Crossfade between each other um uh and then we had things like uh um oh yeah like we did a lot of conditional music triggering So based on the position of the player camera events it's like special camera events like when you see the the uh the Jackal if you know the Jackal characters hands over spoiler uh uh enemy events like if all the enemies are dead do this or if one of the enemies dad do this special events Etc um you know no middleware it was all like directly in in the editor with everybody else we were all kind of working and the same tool which was interesting it was interesting good and bad uh and uh we we actually one one last thing that I want to say is that I had Teddy build this system um for positional ambiances so you know we were doing ambiences for the game but the ambiences were like General ambiances like wind that you hear everywhere and at some point I realized you know there were a lot of like these little sounds like like um torches like uh lamps uh

the things that are like like the hyperlight stuff that that that is all positional so you know he helped he helped build this system where you know you could have you could have sounds in the environment that you could walk past and they would you know get louder get quieter it's not rocket science it's been in games for a long time but it wasn't something that I don't think it was something that game maker really did so we had we had to build it so this question I'm sure will'll get a lot just so just so we can cover it now um for me on my end for software and sound design and all that sort of good stuff I use logic pro nowadays I use nendo and Reaper for all that sort of stuff but logic pro is great all the built-in plugins are fantastic lots of bit Crushers the built-in bitc Crusher in logic is what I used a lot of and that helped a ton it was actually quite good and for synths and a lot of things like massive and complete or absent and all that sort of stuff I use Native Instruments complete it's a great sort of all-in-one package for music and

sound design software I really really liked it I also used Reverb a lot that was my favorite effect and it still is to this day it's like the fairy dust of the music and sound design world just put more on and it'll be better um but I used um audio damage EOS EOS which was like the darkest most beautiful sounding Reverb with an infinite setting so I really like that cool um I use a lot of uh I used massive almost uh exclusively for the music um it's just a synth that I'm really comfortable with and um I wanted to do something different than what we did with Fez so I very early on decided I don't want to use any bit Crushers at all um so we kind of went for a more tape analog kind of sound um and so I you know kind of played a lot tried to play a lot with um saturation and Distortion and also baking things into the signal chain to kind of like uh you know if you you you can you can put Reverb at the end of a the signal chain on a sound and then it sounds like it's in a room but if you use it early in the signal chain and you mess with the stereo Imaging like you can you can put

like a mono rever Bond a sound and then you can bake things on top of that and then it becomes a texture and so uh I tried to use raver bot as a texture as like a tool to kind of paint and create like different textures for sounds yeah and um oh we already said that oh okay yeah I think me not using bit Crushers and you using bit Crushers yeah kind of helped it made the sound stick out separately from yeah so lastly before we finish up we just have a few takeaways for for you just kind of lessons we learned on how to work with us audio folk so the first thing is hire early as as early as you can and that's always a nice thing to have it is a little bit typical to see audio kind of brought in at the very last moment and that's no good um having the ability to kind of fail upwards with the rest of the team is always really appreciated for all disciplines I always like to say that game development is nothing but a whole bunch of people failing until something happens um so make sure that your audio people also have that ability to fail and grow upwards with the rest of the

team I mean this one I don't not sure I agree with but it's okay it's all right go for I mean have have opinions ready but don't micromanage I think that I think that's nice if you can if if you're someone who has strong opinions but it's also okay to be someone who you know it's okay I really like what you what you do and I I I want I want to see what your your vision is for this project to bring someone in and have them self-direct is also okay um but I think in general micromanaging is something that nobody really likes yeah so agreed so like we mentioned allow a lot of time for experimentation that failure and all that stuff because you can get a lot of weird results of letting that kind of time really C cook and bake and all that sort of stuff um especially if you're like hey AOS here's a week where you can just record some stuff I'm like I'm going to build a stethoscope microphone um so if you give enough time that sort of nonsense starts to happen and it can be for the better of the game uh and don't let don't let us work

together because it's bad no just kidding just kidding we should have talked more for sure so that's it thank you so much for coming we'll have some qu time for questions now so yeah we have time for a few questions if you have a question come to the mic in the center aisle please come up to the mic hey how's it going hello uh so uh this is generally more towards like the music side of things but it can definitely be used for both um during your your creative processes I was curious if you find yourself getting into any patterns and you finding anything similar that you do in your ideas and how you work around that um that's an interesting question I think I think it's important to uh acknowledge patterns um and kind of lean into the ones that you like and kind of try to work your way out of the ones that you don't like and one of the things that I've always tried to do is to iterate on the creative process

itself so if if uh if I find that what I'm doing is stale I'll I'll I'll try to go back to the drawing board and be like you know may maybe I should um maybe I should change the actual way I'm writing so if I'm writing at the piano maybe I'll write at the guitar if I'm writing at the guitar maybe I'll use flashcards like I did or I'll I'll use uh I like to build um like generative music tools so you know I try to have a lot of different options uh so that I can just keep it fresh cool right thanks yeah sure yeah hi um I was wondering so with the shotgun you had nine separate sounds what was your process they were all different yeah I doubt you just randomly said hey here's nine sounds how's that sound like how did you make that what why did you decide that ah good question so basically how I kind of decided for all the weapons basically let's say it's a shotgun I made sure to know that okay my seed is a shotgun so I'm going to have some sort of gunshot sort of layer in here at the very least that's a good

starting point then from there I know okay this is the diamond shotgun I should make this sound really crystalline what sorts of crystalline sounds can I get cool okay so I'm going to start recording like me I I bought a belly dancer scar for like a dollar on off of Amazon Amazon's the best um for a dollar and just shook it around and pitched it up so okay there's a crystalline sound now I want something that sounds kind of Bassy and thuddy so it has some impact to it what sort of Bassy thud could I get and then I kind of go from high middle and low frequencies from there to see what I can fill out that's usually how I approach this sometimes it is like I'm going to put a tiger growl in here and see if it sounds good there's a lot of experimentation when especially when I'm stuck but in general I I break things out into frequency spectrum kind of a seed that I'm starting with and then go from there okay thanks yeah hey I actually have two questions now follow up to that with a shotgun you mentioned you want to use all the frequency is that mainly because it's a weapon or do you do you want certain sounds to not occupy the whole range

yeah so for example I don't want the footsteps to occupy the whole range CU that would drown out it's like a giant monster unless it's a huge monster or something very important right um so when it's something that I need to just sound like oh that's cool or that's impactful I feel powerful that's when I want to occupy not necessarily all but a good chunk of them especially bass okay so that's how I kind of play with it cool thank you my original question is in the project I'm working on I'm fighting music with my room tones or Ambience like they kind of either don't go together like the music might be happy but you're in a cave and maybe that's just a bad way to do it is it do you guys use effects like stereo isation to keep things separate like you have the bit Crusher and that was good difference I for for music and Ambience um uh I think part of the reason that I I kind of pushed for doing the ambience is I I knew it would be easier for us it would take less time if I did both um when you're when you're trying to make music and Ambience fit together um it's I think it's important create Ambience like an element in the mixx of your music um and so you know a thing that I

tended to do with with ambience is um like you said you know do stereo stuff where you push the ambience really wide and also um use uh pretty much always would use um uh high pass filter okay great thank you you're welcome thanks hey thanks um I wanted to start by Rich you had said earlier that you I don't know if this was true of all of the soundtrack but you were talking about creating a music system that would cycle through all of the different key signatures so my question is for a cash in Thea in in that case when you're doing um musical sound effects how do you make those not clash with a constantly changing key signature yeah I actually remember asking you what key is this in you're like I don't know that was your response yeah I mean most of the music is kind of all it's all over the place so because it was all over the place it never I think we just decided why don't you just do just do what you're going to do and then we'll just listen and if it works it works and I think ultimately that's the most important thing is using your ears yeah

and it didn't Clash when we put if we if it did Clash when we put it in I would have changed it right um but when it came in it sounded totally fine so we just left it awesome that's kind how it worked all right thank you so much for coming I'll be wandering around so feel free to come chat and all that