GA M E AUDIO NETWOR K GUILD
STEP LOCKED:
COMPOSING IN TANDEM WITH GAME DEVELOPMENT BY CHASE BETHEA Many of us don’t get the privilege to score an alpha prototype. You look at the build with beautiful customized art and functional game play. You may ask yourself, “what does this sound like?” As you play the game for 30 minutes nothing musical comes to mind. You play longer, and an hour passes, two hours pass, three hours pass. You decide to turn the game off and return another day, return the next week and still nothing musical has come to mind. After a month without a note written you start to wonder is this game a gem? You say to yourself, “I’m having fun but I’m not hearing what the game is telling me to write for.” This is how it all started when I approached the music world for Aground. Aground is a game about mining, crafting and unlocking new areas. In the game, you dig for resources and use those to upgrade your character 18
and get better equipment. Survival is only the beginning. The only way for humanity to have a future is to return to the stars and confront them. However, it will require a lot of ingenuity and help to recover everything that was lost and even that might not be enough. It took three months to write the main theme for Aground ,“No Sky Limits/ No Boundaries.” I put a lot of nisus
into creating the sound palette. I was concerned that nothing would come to me but the duende that came from the team was strong and that energy pushed me to think away from the game. The challenge was not to have it be an opuscule but rather a larger piece that could be digested subconsciously while the player was collecting resources. Perhaps this was the challenge that I had faced which is why it took so long to compose.
