Gustavo Barcena – Systems and Gameplay Coding, Scripting, Design
Stephen Edwards – Art, Music, Design
Tom Tantillo – Systems and Gameplay Coding, Scripting, Design
Back in May, I was invited to attend the IGDA-Baltimore indie game showcase and ended up meeting a number of talented and passionate student and indie game developers. I have been continuously impressed by their hard work and dedication, and have enjoyed the resulting conversations over the last few months. Cutting past theory and discussing directly the practical processes involved in making games, I learned a great deal from what they’ve had to say about their work. While some of the games are not publicly available, I think each game and each developer communicated ideas and responses in their games to concerns that I hadn’t paid much attention to in the past.
Take, for example, Diorama and its art and music designer Stephen Edwards. Introduced as a “hand made” game, Diorama was the most aesthetically inspired game at the IGDA Baltimore showcase. With characters and environments rendered from actual grade school art materials, the game focuses on you, the player, awakening as a “drawn figure on a piece of yellow paper on a desk.” Using the [w], [a], [s], [d] keys and a point-and-click projectile combat system, you explore “small and enclosed” handmade environments while battling enemies. Your objective? To find the fire to light the darkened lighthouse on the southern shore.
The game, however, de-emphasizes action and shifts the player’s focus to exploration. While I found the play functional and uninspired, the aesthetic presentation—from the inspired minimal character and environmental designs to the appropriately lush and graceful score—elevated the game’s purpose and execution. The score, which sounds like a Carter Burwell track produced for an imaginary Spike Jonze children’s game, added a layer of whimsy and wonder lacking from the play. The game succeeds in pushing and motivating the player to explore the world in pursuit of the pleasures derived from the aesthetic presentation. Moving through Diorama is constantly compelling, if only to hear the rest of the score, or to dwell on the texture and design of each room.
The importance of art direction as a story telling tool is not a new idea, but it’s something that I had been thinking about after reading commentary from a year-end round-up from prominent developers about the games they liked and disliked. In the round-up, one developer from the Warhammer series mentioned that he found Bioshock exceptional, not for its story, but for its art design. While most game theories or blogging tends to focus on the theory of play and design, there is a genuine lack of attention as to the peripheral aesthetic structures that create a sensory and tactile feel for a game’s story-world and internal logic.
I spoke to Stephen Edwards, through a series of e-mail exchanges, about Diorama‘s art and his role and approach as the game’s composer. Through our conversations, he gave insightful comments and thoughts on approaching a video game score. He seems to have, at a young age, grasped the path with which to make the music and the art direction immerse the players and encourage the players to engage in the game’s repetitive tasks. I also think it’s useful to see the accidents and practical necessities (such as deadlines) that influence the final outcome of a game.
What is your personal relationship to games and gaming? How did you fall into it?
Growing up, I did most of my gaming on the PC and the Game Boy systems. My family didn’t really like the idea of video gaming, and forbade us from getting consoles. The first game I ever played was Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy, and I still view it as the absolute perfect mix of everything a game should be – a brilliant, complex story, smooth, intuitive, and fun game play, rewarding progression, and captivating and beautifully written musical themes. Holding up other games to Link’s Awakening standard was kind of hard, and I mostly found satisfaction in other Zelda games and PC adventure games like King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and Torin’s Passage.
I like games the most that have a feeling of personal immersion and accomplishment. I think that one of the most important things that the Zelda games (and others, like Half-Life) do in this regard is to make sure that you are the character – the character never speaks or does anything that you wouldn’t do yourself. For the longest time I didn’t know that Link was the main character’s name in Zelda – the manual never mentioned it and I was very young, so I just figured it was me. In the genre of action/adventure, I also like the Metroid games for similar reasons. As far as RPGs go, I was a Pokemon completionist (I caught and raised them all in Red and Silver – twice), and I really liked Golden Sun.
I’m a huge fan of Real-Time Strategy, and I think that the Total War games are sort of the zenith of that on the large scale. I like being entirely responsible for a massive campaign, from every thousand-man battle to the aspects of my economy and troop movement. Again, with the personal accomplishment thing. I guess all in all, I like games that I feel proud of myself for completing, either for satisfaction of story, character, or simply being happy that I commanded victorious battles. My favorite games these days are The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Medieval II, and Rome: Total War.
So, what should a score accomplish in a video game?
For me, the best music for video games is part of the world, not the action. When one writes too close to the story, one risks becoming canned. [So], I like video game music that is part of the world. Not background or foreground, but just ground – it’s what you’re moving through just as much as the real ground your character walks on. It should be impossible to ignore, or to separate from the surroundings. If you turn off the music, you shouldn’t just be missing something from the game – you should be paralyzed.
What are some general video game scoring tropes you try to avoid?
In my opinion, almost no one has written a good “battle theme.” Most are annoying and hyperventilating at best. The best ones are the ones that ignore the battle entirely, and focus mainly on the concept of the enemy. One thinks of people like Uematsu Nobuo, who have written amazing “boss themes”. These work because they call to the mind specific moments and characters and environments. However, I can’t think of a single standard “battle” theme (for things like random encounters) that I didn’t get sick of. It’s a difficult thing, to be sure, to make a piece of music that has to be good after the 200th listen. I think minimalism might be the ticket here. Steve Reich and John Adams have the answers.
Is there a particular videogame soundtrack or composer that you look up to?
Kondo Koji is a favorite of mine, especially for his work in Link’s Awakening. I think that that game has near perfect music, particularly the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” and the “Tal Tal Heights” themes. I’m a sucker for a good melody. I also find Minegishi Toru’s work in Twilight Princess to be another watershed of game music – nearly every track in the game is a variation on one of two strong leitmotivs. With the exception of the “enemies are near” track and the somewhat weak “Hyrule Field” track, I find the music in that game to be stellar.
The old Castlevania stuff is [also] admirable. The cool thing about old video game music is that they had usually only a few midi tracks to work with – I know Castlevania had only three. You know your counterpoint, and you know it can be hard to get solid harmonies out of just three independent lines all the time.
I also like the music from Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, particularly the theme for Juste Belmont by Hokkai Sōshirō and Yamane Michiru. The theme is filled with a lot of distinct character and dramatic, yet not overdone, gestures.
Why is Kondo Koji your favorite composer? Why, in your opinion, do you think Link’s Awakening has near perfect music?
Well, he’s not quite my favorite composer (right now that’s Saariaho) but he is my favorite video game composer. More than any other game composer, Kondo Koji makes music that the player instantly links to experiences. He’s also just really, really good at making exceptionally memorable melodies (a quick jaunt through most mainstream games will tell you that this is a rare gift). In Link’s Awakening, “Ballad of the Wind Fish” accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do- it’s a musical offering, essentially, and incredibly memorable without being annoying. The village themes in that game are in my opinion the best of their genre, with the “Mabe Village” theme being both comforting and a little quaint. Basically, I think that he completely succeeds in making the music a character in the game, in making it part of the world. When you walk into an area and hear the change in music, you feel what kind of place it is before you even explore it. “Tal Tal Heights” is filled with energy, and it’s and exciting and edgy remix of the classic Zelda theme. The moment you walk into the Mysterious Forest, you know what kind of place it is, even if you forgot to read the sign. He avoids a lot of “mysterious” tropes in that piece as well – it’s practically a rock track.
What about Minegishi Toru’s work in Twilight Princess speaks so strongly to you?
I suppose watershed might not have been the best word, as other game music has accomplished similar things before. However, I think that Minegishi Toru had a crazy difficult task ahead of him, and he pretty much nailed it. By this point, Zelda fans have a lot of expectations for Zelda music. They have their favorite melodies (like the “Hyrule Castle” theme from A Link to the Past, or “Zelda’s Lullaby”), and these are linked to very specific experiences. A new game has to, of course, create new “classic” melodies, but also address these expectations. There are two main motifs that dominate Twilight Princess – there’s “Midna’s Theme”, a heavy, meandering ballade, and the overall game theme. These motifs pop up everywhere, are varied, with the world theme deftly crafted to fit almost every circumstance appropriately, which was a risky move that I think paid off. (Not all tracks were winners – as I’ve said, I think the “Hyrule Field” theme was kind of weak.) However, he was also able to address the expectations of players to create some truly great moments – as is the case with most modern Zelda games, the original Zelda theme doesn’t pop up very often. Toru calls it up only a couple times during the game – it’s the “Hero” theme. Usually, Link doesn’t have much of a stage presence – Zelda games are about you, after all, not Link. When Link draws the Master Sword for the first time, the theme echoes and weaves through the main game theme. Also, in Hyrule Castle, a quiet, labored remix of the old Castle theme echos appropriately. The most important thing, though, is that he doesn’t overdo it – he makes the classic themes his own, and uses them extremely sparingly. I’m very pleased that he didn’t just appropriate the extremely popular “Title Theme” from Ocarina of Time for the Gerudo Desert, and instead wrote his own, which I actually prefer.
I love the theme you created for Diorama. Can you talk about the process of creating the score?
Well, this is a little embarrassing – although I originally signed on to do music, I ended up spending so much time and energy creating the art for the game that the music didn’t get worked on until very late in the process.
The first piece of the two I made for the game was “Ice Waltz”. My teacher at the time, Derek Bermel, was unfamiliar with game music but had written lots of film music. When I asked him for some general advice (he never saw the music I made for it – this was during our last lesson of the year), he advised that “for background music, consider simple motives and let them develop”. So I made my main motive from a simple two-note cell, expanding as it increased in pitch. I wanted to create an icy atmosphere without the tension usually associated with dungeon music in games. I used a glockenspiel, celesta, piano, and pizzicato strings to achieve this effect – it’s a cheap trick that plays on a pre-formed expectation, but it works and I was in a hurry. As the piece developed, I gradually worked in my bi-pentatonic language and added arco strings, building up to a fuller statement of the original theme.
However, I wanted to maintain a separation between the music and the player – the music is a part of the world, not the action. This is to maintain the theme of exploration and wonder. The music doesn’t much care what the player is doing in the world (The game is hardly about action anyway). As time ran out, this piece became the “underworld” theme of the entire game, playing whenever the character entered an indoor area.
Now for the “Overworld” theme. I rarely actively use minimalism – I like it a lot, but I just tend to do other things. However, I discovered that process music works when one is in a hurry. I wanted the music to reflect the whimsical nature of the world, without a big strong theme that would go with an epic story, but rather the continuous sounds of a world that knows that it is beautiful and wants to sing to you. I sat down at my piano and played some riffs to that effect, making use of a purer pentatonic language that the player would find slightly exotic (I am a bad man) and accessible, familiar and unfamiliar. I scored it for familiar (piano, strings) and exotic (marimba, soprano) instruments, using quasi-minimalist techniques to create a wash of sound.
A double degree student, Stephen is earning a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School and a B.M. in Music Composition from the Peabody Conservatory composition.
Download and listen to the Diorama Snow Cave Theme, the Overworld Theme and excerpts and full recordings of his other works on his website.
