Figment Dev Blog #3 - Creating a Dynamic Soundtrack for Figment

Come gather ‘round, people. Niels here - one of Bedtime game designers and sound guy. In this post I’d like to share my thoughts behind Figment’s dynamic soundtrack and get into a few practical details in regards to the creation of the compositions.

First of, the soundtrack is only like halfway done while this is being written so the things you read about might not make it into the final game or get completely reworked or maybe just changed a little bit or… Well, you get the point. It’s super-duper exclusive knowledge that only the lucky few with access to the internet can obtain. Stoked? Great, here goes…

So a year and half ago, when I became part of the Bedtime family and thereby also Figment, Back to Bed had just launched and Figment was still just a pretty early concept, a rough diamond, a turd in need of polish, you know. So I was very lucky to get the chance to help shape the game from pretty early on. Since I was the new guy, I had to impress everyone and got the idea that the entire world should be as musical as possible (including characters singing to each other, the elements in the game world producing part of the soundtrack and so on) - I didn’t tell anyone that I didn’t have a clue how to pull this off so they bought it.

I had worked on a couple of soundtracks before but the dynamics in those were more or less reduced to something like: play some track, the player reaches some trigger in the level and the music fades into some other track. A key part of Figment’s game play is exploration so to me it made a lot of sense that the player should be able to uncover and unfold not only a cool world but also the sounds and music within this world.

To illustrate how the typical in-game music is composed in Figment, I will try to dissect the main theme from Clockwork Town - a steam-punky, mechanical part of the game where clocks tick, cogs grind and logic runs through everything. I’m going to go a bit into nerdy details here so bear with me or skip directly to the video below if your eyes are already on the brink of bleeding.

To create the feeling of a machine that runs like a clockwork, the entire track is build around me beating some metal casseroles in a steady beat in 4/4 - with a simple bass line on top. This beat is the drive of the entire song with a few xylophone melodies thrown in here and there for variation and a bit of dark cello to create some Victorian texture.

On top of this 2 minute loop, I recorded additional instruments corresponding to the background props the player encounter in Clockwork Town - this includes some ticking gears, some heavy stamps, dancing springs (represented by a jew’s harps) and a guiro mixed with some sploinky percussion. The base loop plays all the time and the additional instruments are then turned up and down depending on where the player goes. So if the player walks close to a ticking gear in the level, the ticking gear track is turned up in the sound mix.

To add even more fun and dynamics, I’ve added leitmotif loops to the most important characters in the world. These work the same way as the instrumental loops described above - so when you are close to the villain, her theme plays on top of the base loop etc.

But showing is better than telling so I’ve put together a quick video where I’ve combined some of the different layers so you can hear for yourself. Enjoy!

So to conclude something on this rant; games are interactive in nature and adaptive music is one of the truly unique things about video games. It makes a lot of sense to try to take advantage of this when creating games and it’s a lot of fun as a traditional composer who has been brought up on radio rock and movie soundtracks to think about music in a non-linear way. Another and equally important thing to take away from this is that a guiro has a cool sounding name and might be the greatest instrument of all time. End of discussion.

See ya!

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