Dev Log #3.7 - Music ! 🎵

Niwl Games

July 11, 2024 - 3 minutes read - 456 words

Soundscape and music sneak peek.

For music expertise, we needed help. Julian Bohn, FRÉ are two musicians that were introduced to me by the documentary filmaker Bobby Buenig.

Fré is someone who helped organize music declares a climate emergency and “No Music on A Dead Planet” concerts, so it felt like a natural fit for a game about the herculean task of decarbonization.

More musical contributors may be joining aboard and announced in a few weeks (August).

Here are a few elements of Breton Music that will have an influence the game’s music in some way:

Bagad: Traditional Breton marching band, mostly wind instruments and drums.
Kan ha Diskan: “call and recall” singing typical of Breizh/Breton singing where the lyrics are repeated or continued by the other singer. A musical relay race of sorts. This tradition also influences instrumental, so you can think of it as a duet where it’s short, alternating solos. The idea of Kan ha Diskan is to motivate people to dance and create a sense of movement.
Gwerz: A musical lament. Example; in “BlackHawk down” a lament by Denez Prigeant was used for the crash scene. Note: In the lyrics of “Gotoz a Ran”, Denez was actually singing about a dead horse, not a helicopter crash. Watching the movie must be a tad jarring for the few fluent Breton speakers out there.

Listen below to the first music test we ever did for The Shipyard, with Julian Bohn on the piano. This will serve for the loading screen during the demo and until we have a final game OST album, and this piece will be one of 12-15 total songs. Some of the songs will be all about evoking the anticipation as you brace for a category 5 storm, while others will be our “rainy day shipyard lowfi” song (same vibe as Persona 5 beneath the mask), an expedition/sea adventure song, etc.

According to the Godot Engine documentation, .ogg, .mp3, and .wav all have different levels of compression and CPU usage. Due to this, the idea is similar to photography where the raw or negatives contain more dynamic range than the final print or jpeg.

Thus we record in uncompressed .wav, cut and do fx in something like Reaper, then export to .mp3 with the desired compression, for medium file size and low CPU.

Enora started recording sounds and making loops for things like rain, waves, and shipyard construction noises. We made a list of the “most wanted” sounds, such as picking up an item, assigning yardies, clicking on the backup generator or spar lathe, or the ambiance of ship going through a rough vs calm sea.

Hope you like this music test, and see you around for the next dev logs!