Watch Dogs: Hacking it to 11

[Music] good morning thanks for coming in so early this is watchdogs hacking it 211 thanks everybody for coming over and we're really grateful to GDC had us and allowed us to come and do this stuff for you guys we did watchdogs and we shipped it about a year ago and we're really glad we can talk to you about a bit more about the music system and everything that's music in the game and how that came about for the game I'm VG ah I'm the audio director on a project and CHF and I'm the audio designer and the composer for the game so essentially we wanted to do a talk that covered the whole aspect of audio and watchdogs and we started writing in we figured that was way too much stuff to talk about so we decided hey we figured we'll stick to music which it is what proved to be the most challenging thing for us as we had to you know reconcile all the open world with our own creative objectives we're going to get to in about a second what we knew

from the get-go we got on watchdogs just when we finish a Splinter Cell Conviction about five and a half years ago and all we knew at a time watchdogs was becoming its own thing was we were establishing a new brand and all we knew is was a serious tell an open-world game focused on hacking and a concern raised by technology and all that so serious stone was basically all we got you know as a major direction from the game and that's gonna be reflected throughout the whole presentation because that that's the one thing we kept grabbing on to you know we want to do a serious tone thing obviously you know doing open-world games with a lot of driving and shooting there's a lot of other games happening at the same time and some are humorous some are goofy and all that and I think that was our way of trying to be different it was you know trying to stick to that serious tone it was a long the element cycle and was the first time for us to actually be part of a pre-production phase I'd been at UB for awhile and I've done a lot of crunches a lot of a lot of production phases but never in pre-production so that was a bit uneasy at first you know getting

into that rhythm of not actually you know always wrestling with tasks and all that to be doing but you know having deeper thoughts about the whole creative direction and the sound direction of the game also it was a very large team you I was used to working with five six people maximum on the project and then we got on watchdogs and eventually we were you know this team working just in Montreal and we had other friends as well working in the Paris studios we had friends in New Castle and we had people in Quebec City all working on sound and I think the the guys at the start control talk said it best yesterday they said you know they embraced standing on the shoulder of giants of other people and that's pretty much what we're doing here I mean we we get to be here today because all these people work really hard on the game and we wouldn't be here without them if we needed that many people just to ship the game in the state we want it to be so we're really grateful about that and also the relationship we had with our creative director Jeannette time on AI and our producer Germany GA who really enable

this to you know achieve our goals and really reach as far as we could with this brand new IP so we're really grateful about that as well so as I said a bit the other direction you know it wasn't like we came on board a project five and a half years ago and told this is what it's gonna be it was a there was a lot of iterations obviously because you know the game was finding itself or trying to define what we were going to be and we're trying to you know get in sync with what the creative direction was doing what the game designers were doing and all that but what was really really important for us on watch eyes and another thing we're really grateful about is we had full control and full authority over sound so it might not be so obvious when you know you you you you don't have it but to get that on a project is really important because we get to push our ideas and then we get to sell them to the creative director and they they can buy in or not into this but at least it comes from us it's a you know bottoms up perspective on things whereas other times you'll be on a different project and the creative vision is gonna be so strong that you'll

become a service to that creative vision on watchdogs we really were given a lot of a room - you know define ourselves what we wanted this game to be about from an audio perspective and that really helped us define exactly what watchdogs was about and what it was about basically as I said we were just coming off of strange Cell Conviction and we've done a lot of interactive music but also you know music that reacted really closely to what the action was and we really really enjoyed doing that with the systems for Splinter Cell and we decided you know well you know now we're doing an open-world game so in theory this wouldn't be the best approach but we decided to do challenge ourselves a bit and say how can we make the most you know tailor made music for all these moments the player is gonna live but still try to make it work with the total freedom promise of the open world so that was basically the challenge we put ourselves through because we really really enjoy those moments and we said you know this is the best way to get you know the maximum emotional impact of the game is to

support these moments with as close as close to soundtrack because we can have that reacts with what the player is actually doing so you know if we realize that the player is you know taking a car and crashing it through windows and can we find a way to note that and can we see that and can we you know support you know the music can the music support those actions who are proud I'm not saying this is what we did in the end but that's just that was our reasoning from the beginning this is what we were trying to achieve minimal systems and more mission based custom tracks obviously we couldn't get you know too far away from systems because the open-world feel demanded a lot of feedback and still demanded a lot of attention because gameplay was kind of keying on watchdogs and we wanted to be sure that the gameplay was getting all the feedbacks it needed and a lot of times a lot of what was happening in the game like the vigilante system and all that was very subtle and since you know our character didn't necessarily have a spider sense tailing or whatnot oftentimes the the solution to those problems how do we bring the players attention to something that's going on you know very far away down the street

was to change the music or have a specific you play at a specific time or when the the police were chasing you and all that so a lot of the times you know we we didn't need those systems to be there just so we could have the proper gameplay feedback from the player so obviously that created you know a few conflicts in the game and you know how we resolve them is is pretty much you know the meat and potatoes of this talk so reconciling all these systems obviously there was technical concerns as well because we couldn't have you know eleven streams of music playing all at the same time technically we would have gotten a lot of angry engine programmers at our desk if we had attempted that and also we were cross-gen game which implied that you know however far we would push with the next gen technology the current gen guys would hate us that much more so we still wanted to be friends with them so you know we try to find a common ground that everybody was happy with what we were doing but also from a technical perspective there's just so many stuff he can cram at the same time through the streams we had a lot of really bility

concerns as well because it you know we could have a lot you know a guy with a boombox and then you're in your car with your own radio and then there's mission music playing on top and that just creates a mess of music really and if you have you know music everywhere then you can you get to the next point which is a density concern if you got music playing all the time the next time it comes in it kind of loses its impact a bit so you know we wanted to be sure that there's also some times where there's no music or the play can choose to have no music so something when it comes back in then it actually means something and also the open world promise obviously it was the main the main thing that we always had to keep in mind because every time we thought we had a good idea you know something we switched our brain to QA more like so what happens if the player decides to take an ambulance and and drive backwards through the store as people are calling the police is that still gonna work and most often that answer would be no and we would have to find another solution but that's everything you know that that's setting the table on the project for the next four years we had to do and the first casualty of that was the Muse ambience system when

when we started thinking about wash dogs we knew he was a serious game and we knew it was an open world so we started thinking about our favorite references and when that came up was obviously follow follow up and so we played a lot of fell out I'm like wow this this game really nails you know selling the foul out universe through music and through those small musical cues that come in and out of the environment they're not pieces they're just small musical phrases that come in it now I'm like this is brilliant let's try that so we had our composer and make a bunch of these things and we had you know a bunch of them for every act of the game and we were super happy with the system and then it hit us once everything was in place that you know a a dense living Chicago is not the same audio landscape at all as the wasteland so there's much less room in the mix for these small sort of things to come in and obviously we reach that density concern as well where there was always some kind of music playing at the same time so he said alright let's take all these very expensive things we bought and put them aside for now and see if we can do

something else with them later on so we you know we we heard we learned a hard lesson right there this is an example of these small musical phrases we had [Music] really objective there was really let's sell the flavor of the game let's say this is watchdogs this is new this is a serious game so hopefully that's what you got from this small piece but that was the direction we were going for obviously conflicts many systems trying to fight at the same time and we had to make sure all those systems existed together in the system was smart enough to realize when there should be a transition so when you see here is our

glorious music tree which was made by our programmers in Montreal which basically looks at the game and sees well what part of the game am I in this is the first act is this the later act of the game maybe what kind of what district am I in or in my in a mission am I not in a mission is the police chasing me is there a vigilante event going on and there's a bunch of priorities within all those systems and this is basically the overall I'd say music system because once you get into an actual mission of the game then this is kind of over rule and then in music the missions actually take over and they have their own music conditions that are set through scripts so let's say a mission had you obviously from let's say pick apples because that's very wash dogs but let's say a mission had you pick apples in an orchard then maybe we would try to hook ourselves up to the amount of apple in your basket and then the music would fluctuate around that so that was that that was the main objective and every mission had different objectives so we would try to find the objective and mission and make sure that the actual scripts reacted to that but when you were not in the mission and all the other system was were trying to play the

music whether it be the source diegetic music whether it was the in-car music all that had to go through the music 3 and then the music tree would decide ok that now we can play this now we can play that so this is a bit of a closer look to it obviously it's very programmer friendly I wouldn't we weren't working too much in there we were just sitting down with our programmers and telling them what we wanted and they made this I captured it because I think it's really impressive but I wouldn't be able to remake it myself and so obviously now that this is the behind it and here what we decided to do as well is what we were doing on spare cell actually was you know the music was interactive and working on a layer system which would had different layers coming in and out depending on the action on screen and we wanted to work with parts for our music so we could have a better impact at any given moment so how parts worked I can explain a bit more it's more musically minded right now yeah no right now okay sure but the thing is with parts is it's very economical memory wise processing wise

it's it's a perfect solution for us I mean we can so basically constructed a piece chopped it up and then we can reuse the parts accordingly and but the best concern well I mean they the most concerning problem was really the the memory constraints because if I have a three minutes piece times eight layers three minutes it takes a certain charge on the processor and memory so exactly so basically the the the themes were calling them because that's our system call them basically the themes were being shuffled around depending on the action on screen so that's what you're gonna see here in this example and basically you see everything that's happening in the game and you'll see the system react to what what's happening and the theme thing is that is it since it's you know working in parts sometimes it's gonna work it's gonna wait until the end of a part to switch over to the next part so that's why sometimes you'll see there's a bit of a maybe of a bit of a delay between the actual action and when the music reacts to it but when it does it's not just you know a new layer fading in it's really there's an impact

there or there's a better [Music] there's a bit of editing going on for you know time sakes [Music] yo I got a message yo [Music]

[Music] [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so this wasn't a mission if you fall through the systemic that was the main right now somebody have noticed during the gunfight when the police are actually firing at you we cut out all the music and that was a conscious conscious decision on our part because we had this mandate to make the gunfights feel impactful and feel you know important and and be really really you know something very important for watchdogs so you know we watched we watched a lot of heat Michael Mann's movie and you know we dissected it and like okay so what makes this work and we

realize you know a lot of what made it work was that basically the guns were the music in those scenes there was no actual score on top of the big shootouts in heat and so you know let's try that and try to bring up the guns and the bullet impacts and the past bias and everything was there was a gun fight also it says you know the music goes away once the player is fired at because we also didn't want the player to be able to just shut off the music by shooting his gun in the air because that would have been a bit too obvious so you have to be fired at and then the music goes away and then there's a count there's a cool-down period and if nobody shoots at you again then the music will start back again our composure for watchdogs is whom we work with first was Brian Reitzell and it was a really great experience Brian worked on a lot of us Sofia Coppola movies he did the Hannibal series he did boss set in Chicago as well it was a great experience for us working with him and it was really interesting how we we we came about working with him because when we started watch out he had this very clear vision of what we actually wanted it was like oh it's gonna be very indie film noir

music with a lot of brass and we were super excited about our direction and we sent out kind of a pitch request from composers and we got and it was so precise and we were so you know very determined about what we wanted and very precise about what we wanted that what we got back was 20 times the same thing like ah yeah maybe that's not maybe we did we gave too precise the definitions of what we wanted so what basically we took those pitches and you know we there was a lot of good ones in there and then we got that through our creative director and he say what do you mean film Lauren breasts we don't want that I'm like oh okay so there was a bit of a disconnect there between us and the creative director and so we decided we let's go with an ambient approach and a more of a electronic approach ambient to watchdogs and we took a bunch of stuff from Brian Reitzell and just you know put it to the images of the game oh my god this this works this sticks so you know we contacted him and that's how we started working together and it was a fun experience but since well I was such a

long project obviously there was evolving and evolving scope to the project so what we decided that we were gonna get from the beginning that didn't necessarily fit the scope of the game in the end and that's how we had to be a bit more creative down the line and the the final gameplay needs often for the game I was like finally I would amuse ambiences there were no need for that in the end but then once you've bought those things it kind of stuck with him and your budget has been spent so you know there was a lot of good learnings for us in terms of you know how to deal with composers and how to when especially when to buy music from the composer and you know it was it was a lot of fun learning those lessons here is a Brian worked a lot on the cinematics for us and it is a wonderful work and this is my favorite cinematic for the game so this is an example of Brian Wright's holes work on watchdogs which I think really nails the emotional impact the music and having the game with the very specific watchdogs flavor he said I followed you because I idolized you

Jackson does and I kept hoping that you will meet round eventually I just hoped that you would look back [Music] all I can say is I'm sorry [Music] I'm not following you anymore I know [Music] arian sweetie we're leaving now say goodbye to your uncle eight

you can live with us no wrinkles staying here by Jax [Music] we got a lot of amazing stuff with it from this collaboration and we're really grateful we got to work with Brian on this and now is the house time takeover absolutely so I would like to go a little bit more in depth from the technical side a little bit more musically of this thing so basically the first time we got to work on the music concepts for watchdogs was around the first III but presented

back in 2012 we got a lot of stuff from Brian it was all actually perfectly but as they demo progressed from the iterations we noticed that there were some lack in certain key moments will act with musical cues so we decided to give a shot and the first the really first integration of music from our part into the into the what those game was the the club scene in the e3 demo so basically we will Aiden had to go through the club club and we needed music to be played in the club so Olivier and Dave our audio artist went through a lot of tracks commercials and commercial tracks and everything and nothing really fitted the mood we wanted to create so and certain point Dave said what look I can I can handle it that's good let's try it out so he composed the

track put it in and people loved it so it was kind of a stealth thing as well for a triple-a you be saw game it's not something we asked if we could do we just you know like we were iterating trying to find the proper track but it wasn't something that we kind of did usually you know compose on the floor in-house but eventually you were just like all right you know this really works but we never really said where was coming from we just put it in and then once we got the you know very good reaction from e3 and then I as a producer so what does editorial thinking oh they really like it like that well that that got us thinking about what opportunities this was opening up for us absolutely on YouTube didn't made remixes of that track so we said alright we might be onto something so since we wanted to be really precise about the musical intentions the integration of music in watchdogs that fitted our kind of musical ambitions because we want to tailor make music for very specific moments to work within the systems were

tightly scripted for the missions and and since we would work with people in the engine to tools and animation everywhere we know how things have hooked up in the game so for us it was much easier to to just be part of the team and iterate with the team as the team made progress we were right there so that had a tremendous flexibility on our part salinity I mean we knew upfront what was coming in the next version of the demo so for the in-house production we were working with three people the word Dave Christian the gentleman on your right Peter Connolly on the bottom and myself so that three of us we have really different musical backgrounds and history so Dave is a mostly film composer and electronic musician for the

past 25 years Pete O'Connel is a hired gun he's very versatile he can do almost everything and I'm mostly rooted in rock and jazz a little bit of classical music also so with those flavors we always try to mix and match because Brian Reitzell gave us the first kind of vision of what watchdogs should be and then we kind of dried full his lead but bringing our own background and what it I think what it provided us because we wrote a lot of music for the for the watchdog's I mean with deal see we up to four hours a day four or four hours of in-house composed music I wanted to be so close to the actual mission sometimes we were so close to the mission once that that mission was done we couldn't necessarily reuse that track for anything else so we had to make custom-made tracks for a lot of the missions Oh and we wanted that I mean it wasn't constrained basically so we were mean they will work with the sonar and our in our mixing studio we will mix in studios

and I mean and we brought in our own musical instruments you know Dave works with the modular since I work mostly with guitar and amplifiers and effects so and it gave us really a more diverse approach so instead of being redundant we always kind of spice it up a little bit with different things this is how we can schematically represent the how we treated the music interactive music in watchdog's so basically only from left to right you can see we subdivided always in musical musical matters basic in bars so we got always starting with the with intro usually four bars skip into four bars and then we got a little let F one thing this is a what we call distiller so I feel it was basically a really short musical idea it could be rhythmic it could be melodic but it has to be really short one bar or less what it was supposed to achieve is that you will go through intro 1 into intro to look that

movement and then it will loop on the filler 1 waiting for a trigger from decided game to be sent to the musical engine so basically since it was so short and looping so fast upon itself we can trigger something really fast and it will there will be almost no lag between the event that was sent from the game engine and the music reactant switching to the main thing then again for bars and let's say for for the main first main pass going into M & 2 & 3 & 4 and then 5 which are shorter than the sections of the main one with little development perhaps and that allows two to be again to be responsive from for the input from the game imagine if the player accomplished something boom we can chop a measure and let's say M 3 and skip to main 6 right away without going through m 4 + + 5 and also it's much more reactive and then usually we had after the whole main 6 which is usually a big development with themes so we didn't want to cut it up so we can

proceed with a more melodic development then we will go to into Philip - and wait for the outro usually a little punch or a cinematic or something like that so so this is a nutshell how it works yeah so the main consideration my part was established themes for the main characters in what dogs this is things I prefer to do because I mean it creates a certain identity to the game people can recognize the the characters by the themes and it creates a lot of interesting small ideas you can reuse elsewhere in the game and create identity because over four hours of music I mean I personally want to create it that so if a person randomly listen to whatever track on the internet and said oh this is a hardened watchdog and this is versus what might go so this is the really small redux of the main theme for Aden / watchdogs which is only an example on the example on the piano real

simple stuff so easily usable but I will speak about it later here's a development of that theme a bit more fleshed out this is from DLC so we have we incorporated DLC theming and mixing them together so it's it's kind of it's always useful to have things in game I think [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Music] [Music] right so this is one of the aspect of themes we use political themes also I think always in the thematic approach usage of clear instruments associated to each character this is my approach for Clara which is the the sidekick of a team throughout the game I wrote a little theme for in the usage of clarinet but the since Lee the watchdog's all about hacking and digital air and glitch and all that so I try to you know real little things I just processed the the the Clara that to make

it a little bit more aggressive a little bit more distorted so here's how it sounds [Music] and here's the today treated version [Music] so there's a little distortion little delay and it's sometimes since the delay catches the distortion kind of clashes with the following notes it's real subtle trick also within the range of the recognizable sounds we used a lot of sense of course since it's watchdogs and one of the main patches we use was this one which you throughout the game and it sounds like this I like that batch load

because it creates a rhythmical movement right away plus it sound really dystopian the game where you actually get to meet Clara so you're gonna hear a bit of everything and it's good we tried to tag what was going on at the top of the scream basically it's just all these techniques coming together and yeah you only written one clip yeah [Music] bad boy sim team Clara [Music] you don't look 17 to that car I hope I

don't frighten you what do you have a reason to frighten me are you being paranoid Am I someone is [ __ ] with my life threatening my family and at the same moment the mysterious bad boy wants to meet me and he is a she he is a lie listen I need to trust you Clara I wouldn't trust me if I were you but here's a reason to listen to text message you sent me I know where to find him yeah and we don't need to meet face to face for that no we needed a face-to-face for this by the way this wasn't a final mix of the game what we were preparing these clips we did we did a version with the music mixed up just a bit so it become more clear when we were presenting them yes another thing I'm really fond of is

to bring new stuff in the soundtrack something nobody else can have right something really unique to the project and I'm really do it yourself guys so a couple years ago I built a guitar which is looks like this hmm it's a fretless technical mishap it's a fretless baritone guitar I was saving him for a little special project and watchdog's was the one so it's kind of it's it's a guitar but I mean when you hear it it creates a really specific palette of sounds and it's it's a very nice useful tool to have and it creates a musical imprint you know something you can easily recognizable as being part of watchdog's again being part of the hacking and all that so this is an example of that guitar being used

[Music] [Music] another example from bad blood which is the DLC for the game [Music]

[Music] yeah but of course all that is nice but when you have to compose for interactive project or interactive music system you always have to be composing with constraints within constraints and I really like to approach composing backwards kind of so I start with the main thing but the main theme and incorporated into the game and see how it fits what are the main challenges what could cut it what what basically what's the worst that could happen within the usage of that music and then I try to compose the the so I started with the main thing and go back to the intro or to the ending and starting with like with the main course so it helps a

lot to really tailor make music so basically you know how many bars you will need to fill that gap and all that you know so it really helps a lot another real trick would like to share with you this is personal observation is the for me it's the what I call the piano validation is me as a guitarist I mean I always try to compose new cars and all that but no sometimes you find that cool riff that really sounds amazing with the distortion effects and you really groove and all that and then you try not to establish more of the aromatic content and you say if you notice that your riff is really charged and it's too many things going on at the same time and you kind of find yourself squeezed and you kind of Bend on the idea so what I really like to do is to find the whatever grip on the synth sequence over guitar or whatever and then reproduce it on the piano clean piano sound and see if it works if it works I can proceed I know that automatically it will be stable and I couldn't elaborate on that but it's

really just bringing to the simplest expression of the music through the piano and see if it works and if it does you can proceed it will avoid a lot of death traps from the music point of view yeah so we're going in a little bit more a little deeper into the harmony aspect of watchdog's production here's the few examples I prepare for you and so the first example and the example the first point is being keeping the harmony really simple this is I cannot stress it enough well this is for my behalf I think it works better especially for within the watchdog's and here's the example itself this is the watchdog theme a little performance going on here so we can really stress out how it works and how it's gonna take you through it yeah so here's the the quarter right for the progression it

goes through starts well another thing while I'm at it it's the whole watchdogs I always tried to keep everything in the same key so we chose C minor as the key dominant key for the whole game and there's a lot of advantages it's really simple and the main advantage is that you can mix and match different systems and they all will kind of fall within themself because right you start let's say a vigilante event in the game then suddenly something else happens in the in the systemic world boom you have your trigger felony but if your musical cues are in the same key the transition will be much smoother fool it's kind of really basic but it I wanted to stress it out so back to the watchdogs team it really goes like C minor this little trick progression thirds minor thirds

[Music] he's be used throughout the game I mean every cue almost that I did have this incorporated in some way because I think it's it's one again we're going back to the theme approach for the for the game and I think it's really part of it and this creates a kind of mysterious sound a little but you don't know what to expect because it's two minor chords not really related totally and it goes both ways you can go [Music] [Music] you

you [Music] so while it's playing you can always and of course you will need to add a little base in the thing because it's only so you can stay and see but I prefer to follow the they the progression through the root swing both examples

[Music]

and there you go right there this is the melody for the world the whole main theme to party time thank you it's it's really basic stuff you see we always repeat the same almost for note this is a part of the main theme which is a flat

in there but since the melody and the theme is so simple it's really primitive but while it's being so simple it's really versatile you can reuse it everywhere or use it through different harmonies different keys and mix-and-match you know it's it's it's really really fluent and since it's short you can reuse it within the context of the interactive music so it's recognizable short and reusable I mean you've got everything in there here's another example they what I call the bottle cords or model interchange this is the Clara theme again real simple four chords nothing more see again this little example I told you about the C minor go into E flat minor [Music]

[Music] you can stay [Music]

so while being extremely simple this melody again is very repeatable I mean it is easily integrated into other themes and it is interchangeable the there's a few little tricks I prefer

when I change chords like this from going let's say from 2f I prefer to highlight the most well we'll just approach you know I mean you can highlight the most important notes of that chord you play in a puff so basically you know in this case you know we're doing like it started in measure 1 going on the route of the e-flat and you know will diminish bass that's going on the F chord strain the notes from the trial of the F chord and we go into the two so it's real simple and the chord inversions another real fast example here's another really simple progression again you will recognize that sound know a minor going to F minor

[Music] what it gives us you see the the the the bottom line is always a straight seat so it goes like so we create a little baseline let's say this is a symptom of they do whatever is good it stays and see it plays throughout the whole whole duration of the song right since we using the chord inversions in this example so it's oh we always keep in to the C note on the bottom in the root position of the court you can reuse being one of those towards in the

interchangeable matter and it will flow still fullness in over C I can switch quartet let's go let's start with a minor its etc you can do whatever those chords and it will kind of still be acceptable for the human ear but then again this is what dogs I mean so the game is all about hacking the game is all about the glitchyness so I kind of tried to integrate the the the the theme of glitch into the harmon itself so sometimes you know I mean the changes we would play through they're not really saying it's not top forty material right but I mean within the if you if you use them a lot through the whole soundtrack

the the players ears get used to it and when sudden changes arrive I mean something you didn't expect arrives it will not surprise the player as much because he already kind of used to the bit sharp and ambiguous quality of those chords then we're gonna have to move on soon to the music licensing aspect alright now we're really speeding through this there's there's not much time left here my bad so we basically used the odd time signatures through game also to create the sense of instability again I can approach here's blue example I won't play the whole thing for you [Music] [Music] you

[Music] odd number of matters per musical phrases another trick we used so basically to do this balance the musical straightness of the whole thing right so basically when the player used to the subdivisions of four matters we kind of mix it up make five magic progressions seven metal progressions just to make things a little bit so again when the changes sudden changes arrive people are ready used to that kind of feel common notes through throughout progression we will quickly see those chords again usage of the the minor minor C minor back to E minor again with transitions for B major I always love to arrange the chord so we always keep one common note through our progression this in this case is really flat and by keeping that

'flag through out chords I mean you can launch an melodic phrase let's say the the the musical theme from Aidan or watchdog's and it will work right on top of any of those chords and without any constraints here's a very quickly an example of in-game music integration where we try to blend all the systems and so basically in this mission you're about to see where there's a bit of editing going on as well so for brevity's sake but what's going on as we go from diegetic music coming from the club which blends into music inside the club and then it becomes a composed music that's been made to sound like it's from the club and then it escalates into a mission music so you'll see the example here and this is the type of things we did to try to blend all the systems together and try to reconcile everything in the world and we're pretty happy how it turned out for this

was coming my night now your there's a different perspective as here in the lobby [Music] [Music] jeromy's again look at that exact into the profiler system [Music]

[Music] we've got club music and pull off for right now [Music] [Music] and eventually through that mission the music then becomes even more there's even more parts of that music coming on down the line when it works well you know we didn't invent anything there but when it works well we can blend all our systems together and it really elevates those missions here I have a higher level and we're really happy doing that and we did that a few other times I'm gonna skip one example here we had which was basically the same idea we're actually digesting music coming

from somewhere in the mission and then becomes the score music for that specific mission we had a Luton client mission and that we call it that had the moon client song and I really liked how it turned out we had another one in a junkyard with ministry playing through the speakers which was really cool as well and now I want to touch a bit on music licensing just before we're done because there was a big one for us it was the first time we had to do that to such an extent in a game and try to get all that music in and it we when we started thinking about licensed music we thought about all the open world games what we did what they were doing and you know the first answer today I saw what they're doing radios they're like well you know radios have been done and the watchdog's flavor is not about radios it was about your you know your telephone your PDA what you've got in your pocket and we figured you know that's that's how I listen to music in my car it's my playlist so we figure we're gonna do a playlist for the player that he's able to fill out as he progresses through a game but our angle on it was that we wanted to be meaningful as well we wanted to be sure that that playlist had

something to say about the game and since Chicago was such a big part of watchdog we decided we're gonna make our playlist Chicago centric it was it ended up being about 80 percent bands and artists from Chicago and we're quite happy about that but it's not something that we sold well I think it's not something that we communicated enough because we were really happy with the playlist I don't think it really necessarily said the world on fire but if it was to do if I were to do it again I'd do the exact same playlist and we had a lot of help from the the whole Ubisoft studio in acquiring those licenses and we were really happy how it turned out there was a bit of everything for everyone in it in the end you know the diegetic music existed in the world and we had to be sure that that you know for the conflicts there was always clear rules about what was going to happen and as I said earlier on gameplay was king so we always had to be sure that you know when there was important gameplay feedback the eject music would go away and when mission music would come in diegetic music would go away as well so that was basically the rule we had and it ended up working well for us this is our cutting edge license management tool

at Microsoft Excel so we kept track of everything in there just to be sure you know this is the ones we've cleared and this is the information do we acquire this at the very start of the game this would come in later etc etc so we had this very powerful tool to keep track of everything as I said you know you could you know build up your music musical playlist as you progress through the game you could edit it there was a lot of you know hidden information about the place which we we thought was really cool we got artist BIOS in there if you want to learn more about the artists and all that you could actually hack the music away from the speakers in the world if you didn't already have it in your playlist we had a Shazam like app in the game as well so that was uh it was a lot of fun to set up and the way it was working the hole that the whole licensed music system is every time we had a song playing we had three versions of that track that were pre processed and the system was switched between which version of the track should be playing depending on where it was playing from so this is how it sounded within the same within the different emitters

that's what a vehicle is driving down the street that's the version you would hear that [Music] listen yourself your music player if you're sitting in that car that's what's gonna happen that's the dilgar there's very different versions and we we chose that system instead of having real-time processing on the tracks because it was much easier to handle for the current gen guys so that was the the main reasoning behind this technical technological decision we also had an additional filter on the music to account for the wind the vehicles and how broken they were so she would break the windows filtering would be different on that very specific version of the track and to wrap it up very quickly go think we're going over time what we learned about doing watch on what we learned doing it structure and planning is important and but as well the relationships you're going to forge within the other people on your team and especially the other teams whether it be animation programming and all that those

are the ones that are really gonna pay off down the line we we bought ourselves a lot of goodwill from the engine team and that allowed us to do a lot of stuff and you know work well beyond where we could have been expected to be locked out of the data so that's really important to keep in mind play nice with the other teams also doing in-house music allowed us to reach our you know critical and our creative objectives which was really have that tailor made music to the missions I think we you know we we aim pretty I and I think for us we reach our objective as close as we could get it with this project and we're really happy we got to do it but it wasn't you know there's some tough lessons learned as well we still having a hard time reaching polished phase at the music for the last mission came in as we were doing the final pass on the mix of the game so that what are you hear in the game in the final mission is the actual first draft of that music thank God it worked well as you could as you can see pellissery you know is a very rigid and rigorous guy when he makes music so that worked as it was but you know it got in just as we were mixing it so we didn't have a lot of time to iterate on it and we can manage

the conflicts within the music system but it's not always seamless transition as you can see for example with the vigilante systems we still haven't found the perfect formula but it's gonna be a lot of fun you know trying to refine that on different projects but you know we were happy with the balance we struck on this one and a lot of needs for a project this is only materialize close to the end of the game so you guys always I have to keep that in mind and be reactive to what's going to happen and maybe try to keep a bit of buffer whether its budget or time close to the end of the project to be sure that you're able to react to these things if we close on a light note this is this is it for our presentation but there's one thing we like to try I've got a few Easter eggs here but I'm just gonna play one which is my favorite one during the course of the production something got less on a cutting room floor which involved a very thorough narrative aspect which was you know there's this cartoon playing in the world and kids are really into it and it's all about these pokemons like characters and we really got carried away trying to imagine the theme song for that cartoon which was really like this 80s song for

an 80s cartoon with a bit of a Japanese flavor to it so I'm gonna play this song and the this got you know this didn't make it into the game but what didn't make it is a small three-second portion of that song I'm gonna raise my hand when it plays and that small portion is was we reused as the news jingle for every news broadcast in the game so you're gonna hear it that's that's the story behind that [Music] sigh and to form on the planet forces of nature a lot each other inside [Music] fragrance or know that that was a news broadcast dingo right there and his I really could've short that was that there was a lot of fun and who's singing right now is an AI program around farcry actually so we you know we got to work with other teams as well it's like I failed that and we're really grateful he lends his voice to the whole project so that's about it for us thank you so much for coming to our presentation we really

appreciate you guys coming [Applause]