Music & Sound

Background

I started making music in my early teens, when I developed the music software Musagi along with my brother. From the beginning I mostly focused on chip music and trying to master the NES sound limitations, but in later years I have expanded into many different genres.

Composing for games is one of my favourite things to do, since the important thing is to make something that fits the gameplay and create a mood that sets the player in the right state of mind (which can be very different between a safe village and a final boss fight, for example). It's so much fun to play the game without music and try to envision what the world sounds like, and then try to make that a reality!

Experience

I have made music for the indie games I have developed, for other indie developers and for most of the projects I was involved in during my time at The Game Assembly.

Equipment

I have a small home studio where I make all my productions, using FL Studio as my main DAW and various physical synthesizers, VST instruments and trackers to create the sounds I need.

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Dark ambience

Mistmore is a horror adventure game that aims to make the player solve a mystery, while constantly feeling a bit unsafe. Since the story is about an evil force that uses electricity and electronics to manipulate people and the world around it, it just seemed perfect to make a dark ambient soundtrack with lots of synthesizers and sounds of static and interference.

I sampled different electronics and tried a lot of new techniques on the synthesizers I have and ended up with a result where I think the human aspect is almost completely gone on some of the tracks (which is what I was going for).

Intro and Outro is composed by Hannes Rehnström.

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Cinematic storytelling

Beer & Loving in Transylvania needed a lot of different kinds of music in order to tell the story in the best way possible. From chill and scary lounge music in most of the gameplay sections, to surf rock, grind core and sleazy love ballads in the cutscenes. It was all done in a very short time period, so each song was basically made in a "First time's the charm" kind of mindset. The exception to that rule is the +5 minutes long Transylvanian post-punk song that I composed for the third act of the game (begins at 09:30 in the video above). I just couldn't resist going all in on the lofi-production on that one.

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Player feedback

The sound effects were important to us in Krypta, in order to fill the mostly empty crypt with life and give the player the feedback needed to make the movements feel satisfying. We unfortunately didn't have time to record our own sounds from scratch, so I used free sound effects found online and modified them with EQ, reverb and other effects to make them all fit together and sound like they belong in the cold, empty crypt.

Above is a video with gameplay footage where the music has been partially turned down, in order to showcase the sounds.

Music composed by Daniel Rosberg Drake.

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8-bit

When I worked on Genocron, I was in charge of both music and sound effects (among many other things). For some levels we wanted blood-pumping action and other parts needed a slower, more mysterious pace. I worked out a lot of riffs and soundscapes in different tempos and tried them along with different parts of the game and continued to work on the ones that fit the gameplay.

The game is inspired by the limitations of retro games – and while the graphics don't have any specific rules to follow – besides "Keep it limited and looking good" – we decided to go with the NES limitations when it came to sound, for the simple facts that we love the sound and enjoy working within the few channels that are available.

For this I worked in a custom tool called Nemus, which emulates the 2A03 sound chip and produces tracks that can be played back on original NES hardware.

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Adrenaline

For our First Person Experience project at The Game Assembly, my team wanted to make a game inspired by DOOM (2016). We identified a few key aspects to include in order to get the intense and rewarding gameplay we wanted. First of all, a weapon with satisfying feedback (a double-barreled shotgun), enemies that are fun to kill (lots of blood and physics-based gibs), and last but not least: Music that sets the combat mood by attacking you as violently as the enemies in the game.

I used a bunch of audio techniques often found in aggressive Drum & Bass-music to get the ripping bass sounds that flow through the song and hits you hard with low frequencies. Mixing that with heavy drums, dark synthesizers and dissonant strings and the feeling of escaping from a space prison should be just around the corner.

And finally: You did remember to listen to it LOUD, right?