MAKING THE MOST OF AN UNSHIPPED GAME

BY ADAM FLIGSTEN

I WROTE MUSIC FOR A PROMISING INDIE GAME WITH TALENTED DEVELOPERS, GOOD FUNDING, AND A GREAT CONCEPT IDEA, ONLY TO REALIZE THAT IT WOULD BE SHELVED. – ADAM FLIGSTEN

In 2016, I was contacted by a small independent game development studio who were working on pitching their biggest project to date. They had previously shipped a few mobile games, but were feeling much more ambitious this time around. They had found some of my music on the Unreal Asset Store and were using it as temporary music in a prototype to pitch to investors.

I agreed to help them out as they needed music for a trailer and a few more custom cues for the prototype. Fairly quickly, they found an interested publisher and were in talks about getting the game development funded. Because I was on the project early, I was included as a line item in the budget to the publishers. Often music and sound are somewhat of an afterthought this early of a stage in development, but I was able to negotiate a reasonable deal for the music.

“EVEN THOUGH THE GAME NEVER SHIPPED, SOME OF WHAT WE AGREED UPON STILL MATTERED QUITE A BIT.”

I was given a lump sum fee, which would be paid as they hit their milestones of development. 50% was up front and 50% about halfway through the project. The idea of this would be that it would be money to live on, as well as any music related expenses for the game. Even though it was a reasonable fee, over the course of development, I could not have afforded rent and basic expenses on this fee alone. So, like all freelancers, this was not my only project at the time.

I kept soundtrack rights, which meant that I would make all of the money for any sales or streams of the music. I seem to remember that they would take 20% of the soundtrack sales through Steam, which seemed fair to me.

I also had full ownership of the music and publishing. I gave them a 2 year exclusivity clause, which meant that I wouldn’t license the music for any other projects within the first 2 years of the game’s release. But also, this music would be legally part of their game in perpetuity. So they wouldn’t need to renegotiate, as long as it was a part of the game.

The game took place entirely on a Soviet spacecraft in the early 1980’s. Stylistically, the art leaned on a sort of 1970’s to early 1980’s Soviet technology aesthetic.

Lots of cassette tapes, physical knobs and blinking lights were to be found around the ship.

The story was about space aspirations broadly, as well as the specifics of the time and place in a Soviet spacecraft near the end of the Cold War.

After a number of musical experiments, I decided to score the entire game using entirely Soviet era synthesizers. Every noise, drums

and all, would come from just two synthesizers manufactured in the former Soviet Union (an Aelita and a Polivoks).

I even wrote a fake Soviet pop song which would be found on a cassette on the spaceship. The song expressed loneliness and a distant feeling from the world.

It is impossible to say how much the finished product benefited from synthesizers built in the former Soviet Union. I’ve been asked, “Why didn’t you just use software or an emulation?” And to be clear, there are really great software synths and emulations that would’ve sounded great on this project. But when we compare gear like one synth to another, we are really talking about marginal differences. Can you hear the difference between two different square waves? If you can hear a slight difference, does it matter musically? Maybe not in a 1 to 1 test, but as the sounds get added up, the differences begin building on each other. The final product has hundreds of specificities and imperfections embedded into it.

I am going to shy away from essentializing any aspects of Soviet manufacturing. But I will say that these two synths definitely have a world and character of their own. The Polyvoks has a notoriously brutal filter that saturates very quickly. The Aelita is a lighter, paraphonic synth which seems a little more geared towards organ players. When I put them against the game, they just felt right. The specific workflow of these synths pushed me towards making sounds and tones that I probably never would have, if I were using other synths. line, probably in conversations that I wasn’t a part of, things began to slip away in the development process.

The developers missed a few milestones due to unforeseen technical hurdles. I remember specifically, one where they were trying to program and animate hands as the player traverses the outside of a space station. This might have been a relatively solvable problem in a AAA game, but this was a small team and it took weeks of precious development time to resolve.

I was actively writing music for roughly a year and a half. A new section would be developed in order to hit a milestone for the developer. I would usually have about 2 weeks to score the new section, then about a month or so of downtime as the next part was being worked on. I would usually use that off time to work on other projects.

For a year and a half or so, the project kept growing. More animators were hired, set pieces created, and the publisher was getting excited. But, somewhere down the Meanwhile, these developers had bills to pay. If they didn’t hit their milestone, they didn’t get their next chunk of funding, but they couldn’t hit their milestones with some of the deep technical problems that they were running into.

There was never a formal moment when the game was canceled, but we did get a notification that progress would be “slowed” and that some of the developers would begin taking other contract work. I had other projects to keep me busy, so I did my best to forget about the project and hope

that at some point I would get another call to start up on it again. (I never got that call)

After a year or two, I decided to just release the music on a soundtrack myself. My contract said that I owned it, so why not let people hear it?

“HOW MUCH ENJOYABLE MUSIC IS OUT THERE GATHERING DUST ON A HARD DRIVE, LOCKED BEHIND A CONTRACT?”

With care to not use any existing IP, I renamed the project and released it as: “We Will Open The Distant Worlds.” The title comes from a Soviet poem regarding space travel aspirations.

I spent a little bit of time cleaning up and sorting the music that I had written. Some cues were good to go. Some needed to be remixed. I spliced a few cues together and reworked a few others to make them more “song-like” and flow better as a soundtrack.

Working in games can be a bit of a gamble for all of us. We never know when the next gig is coming, or when it does come, how it will work out. We only have control of our little slice of the project. So we can only do our best within our position as a sound person. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Fligsten prides himself in blurring the line between acoustic and electronic sounds.

His career began in the independent electronic music industry in Brooklyn, New York. In 2008, he moved to Los Angeles to complete the UCLA Film Scoring program and transition into the film and video game music industries.

In 2016, Adam founded Silen Media, a full service video game audio house that provides music, sound design, implementation, and voice recording.

I’ve already gotten work out of connections that I’ve made through this project. Plus, I was able to write music that I am proud of, and play with strange new synths.