Hi all! Chris Lucca here, composer and sound designer for RPG Tycoon and the forthcoming production from Skatanic Studios. I have been asked to outline what my experience and process was like while working on the soundtrack and sound design for RPG Tycoon, as well as a little bit about myself. Here goes!
However, I should start with two separate disclaimers.
First, I have never written a blog for anything. Ever.
Second, I never thought writing video game music would ever be an opportunity for me, though not for lack of interest. All of this was and is continuing to be a huge pleasant surprise for me.
So with those things in mind, let us embark.
Thus Begins Our Journey
This all started when Matt contacted me saying he would be visiting New York City and wanted to get together and show me a project he’s been working on. I had met Matt while on tour with my band Suburban Legends in the UK and we had bonded over our general nerdiness and ska music, which are not mutually exclusive in the slightest. If memory serves me well, we met up at a Starbucks in the Upper West Side of Manhattan one night after I had work and he showed me RPG Tycoon in what I can only describe as its pre-alpha stage. But the concept was there and it had some real promise in creating a unique atmosphere and being a fun management tycoon-styled game. I was interested in hearing how the project went and we made plans to get together a couple days later for dinner and drinks and talk business, and I made it known then that I would be interested in writing for the game.
Fast-forward two weeks, and I get a Skype call from an exhausted sounding Matt. In a brief call, he described that for him to be able to focus solely on development and design (which is a huge undertaking when working on a project like this as the sole designer and developer) he would need to bring someone on for composing and producing the music. I immediately accepted, and the rest is history.
Get the Lute!
I immediately started drafting tunes for the game, and initially I was just writing anything that came to mind. Any hook, any melody, any set of chord changes. It didn’t matter what it was, I would just sit down and pump out ideas for a few hours early every morning with a cup of coffee and some very confused kittens I had just adopted with my partner, Julia.
Something I should say before I get into the process of creation and writing is that everyone’s process is different, and I am still experimenting with how I produce to this day. Each DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is different and can be geared towards one’s tendencies and preferences, but it all comes down to you and your workflow. I was using Ableton Live 9 to get demo ideas drafted out due to its ease of use and quick workflow for getting concepts out AND BONUS the vanilla sounds were right on for the retro soundscapes of early 90’s tycoon games. They just screamed shitty midi (it rhymes!) that took me back to sitting in front of a Packard Bell tower with a CRT monitor messing around with my friends on early 90’s PC games. Then I would use Sonar Platinum to do my mixing and mastering and implement little bells and whistles with different softsynths or plugins. It was a decent process, but as I stated before I am still experimenting with different processes and workflow to see what works best for me in different writing and genres. For me, I have been enjoying Sonar recently now that I’ve gotten into how the program can be customized so easily and for each style of music you may be working on.
I would write up a demo in a couple days’ time. Just something short and then send it off to Matt to see how he was vibing on it. Then depending on how we both felt about it I would continue to expand on the motifs and variations I had drafted until the song had more of a story to it.
Writing for a game like this you need to add a bit of the environment and story to the music, as there really are no characters or story to get attached to save the one you create with your own heroes and kingdom. The music becomes a character itself. So in each of these songs I had to try to create a brief adventure for the listener without drawing them out of the game’s experience with jarring transitions, production techniques, or melodic/harmonic choices. I had a set of tests for this. My primary test was muting the in-dev version of the game Matt would share with me and playing the tracks I had been working on. If it stood out as too busy or boring, then it was back to DAW-ing board (I’m hilarious). My second litmus for this was to send Matt the tune and have him listen down to it. If he was still humming the melody while we were on a call a couple days later, then I knew I had done something right.
As I wrapped up the soundtrack I brought up some sound design ideas to Matt. At this point we had developed a decent long-distance working dynamic and were bouncing design and audio concepts off each other pretty regularly. In passing I said something to the effect of “I feel as though we should have more sounds to draw players into the buildings they’re dropping all over their kingdom.” Well this shortly turned into me crafting foley and sound design for many of the games sound effects. This process, once again, was a blast. At the time I had just lost my job at the tech support agency I was working at as a 24-hour on-call remote and on-site technician, so I started crafting what I can only describe as my command center and studio. I had been playing the game pretty extensively at this point to test not only the music I had written, but also to see where the game felt it needed sounds. At any given time, Julia would come home to me smashing our backing sheets, hammering on pots and pans filled with different levels of water, yelling and grunting, tearing cloth, and making otherwise ridiculous loud noises that out of context would really confuse our neighbors and cats. I would then take these noises, process them in different ways until I got what I wanted, and then move on to the next sound. All of my sound design work was done in Sonar Platinum and in all for this game I had created about five and a half minutes of effects and foley. These were then all leveled, bounced down, and sent to Matt for implementation with notes.
In Closing
I am a huge nerd, a professional performing musician and artist, and an avid gamer. I have always felt a huge tie to video game music and how much it draws me into a game and its world. Thinking back to games like Crono Trigger (I am a long-time RPG addict), Donkey Kong Country, Zelda:ALTTP, and Sonic Spinball I am reminded of not only the gameplay and mechanics, but also the music and where it took me. How different characters and locations all had themes that were interwoven into the game to give it more life, to create the environment we the player would then live in for a brief time. These songs gave depth to pixelated characters that were speaking using text (no voice overs back then!) by giving them a voice through their songs. You could hear the stoic sadness in Frog’s theme by Yasunori Mitsuda in Crono Trigger. In Donkey Kong Country it was the playfulness and excitement of Tree Top Town as you platformed your way through enemies and lined up barrel-shots. It’s that energy and those experiences that drew me to where I am today.
I will leave you with a quote from Ira Glass.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
–Ira Glass
If you enjoyed this blog post, the soundtrack to RPG Tycoon, or just want to support indie games and music in general feel free to purchase at http://chrislucca.bandcamp.com/releases
And of course RPG Tycoon can be found right here at http://www.rpgtycoon.com/
Thanks for hanging. It’s people like you who help make our work possible. See you soon!