Oxeye Game Studio’s action platformer Cobalt has received honorable mentions in the technical and visual arts categories for the 2011 Independent Games Festival. It is also a finalist for excellence in sound design. IGF’s judges had this to say about Cobalt:

“The soundscape in Oxeye’s Cobalt was also praised for “giving it the amount of life it has”, with “immersive sound effect work that absolutely sells the atmosphere,” and a soundtrack that “stays away from melodic motifs to let the overall ambiance take center stage.”

DIYgamer had a chance to speak with Mattias Gerdt of Anosou Music. Some of the highlights of this first part are sound effects, looping music, and an awesome extended cooking metaphor.

DIY: Is it common to have another person work just on sound effects (SFX)?
Mattias: It ultimately depends. In some cases a programmer or graphics guy does SFX too. Many times the musician and sometimes a guy do “just SFX”. The latter is, in my experience, least common.

DIY: That brings up a possibly interesting point. Outside of music games, do you feel SFX “fits the atmosphere” of a game or are they just functional?
Mattias: I dunno.. again this very much depends on the developer, but I think there is some thought behind what’s used.

DIY: Do you ever work on SFX?
Mattias: Pretty much never. I sometimes do more “musical” effects like small jingles when you pick up items and little bleeps that go with the music or just atmospheres that are less musical and more ambience, but hardly ever SFX.

DIY: Do people ever talk about the importance of looping tracks? The first generation of CD based gaming on consoles sometimes didn’t have loops.
Mattias: Looping is pretty much mandatory; it was in the 80s and it is today. Interesting, though, I haven’t thought about that. How horrible to have awkward silence all the time!

DIY:  I like the “club on demand” inside and outside tracks. Was it just a simple filter or effect applied to make the second version?
Mattias: To be quite blunt, yes, yes it was! There was some additional use of EQ to make it just distant enough but nothing more spectacular than that. It’s kind of the throbbing heart of Trunkopolis, the City in the Cobalt IGF demo. You couldn’t actually venture inside the club in the demo, so nobody playing that heard the “inside” version.

DIY: Does the filtering have a specific name?
Mattias: The outside version just has a simple low-pass filter, staple of all synths ever. The track was actually quite different first, this version is based on talking to my fellow Oxeye colleagues. I specifically got some amazing descriptions of what Daniel “thewreck” Brynolf imagined it sounding, and I found some references in Jens “jeb” Bergensten’s musical taste, EBM/synth music. (Jens is one of the developers at Oxeye Games who’s developing Cobalt. Nowadays he’s also an employee at Mojang, makers of Minecraft.)

DIY: Did you intentionally avoid “melodic motifs”?
Mattias: Well, yes and no. I naturally wrote more ambient, mood-building music for Cobalt because I think it really fits the mood. It’s kind of Bladerunner-ish at times. I did write a “main theme” of Cobalt though, a really short little theme. I think it’s not instantly memorable but it gives many tracks a sense of unity because you can spot it appearing everywhere.

DIY: Was the idea or “thesis” behind Cobalt’s main theme yours?
Mattias: There was no real collaboration when it came to the theme itself, though I do tend to show a lot of “work in progress” versions and similar to my colleagues. The actual melody I call the “main theme” just kind of happened when I composed the menu track. Then, I grew so fond of it. I re-visited a few tracks that I considered finished and added this little melody. Later, I also based the elevator music around the theme, which was the last track I did for the demo before IGF.

DIY: Can you walk me through your creation of the theme?
Mattias: Well, it’s hard for me to elaborate how the actual theme came to be.. especially since it’s in different settings each time it appears.

For the creative process in Cobalt, we have a private IRC channel and a dropbox which are my main channels of communication with Oxeye. I personally really like hearing what the developers are expecting and thinking about the music, so we had a lot of long talks about that. I got pretty much free hands though, even though they had personal preferences that I could either adopt or ignore.

For a level track, I basically start by pinpointing its function in the game, the back story. Simple things like “jungle or city?” and when in the game it appears. Then if there is concept art, I usually have that as my desktop background for inspiration while working on the track. I love having a reference picture around like that. I even set up a big whiteboard behind my desk for that specific purpose!

When the background is relatively clear to me (including things about the game like speed and genre etc.) I just sit down by the computer, find a sound I want as a starting point and start improvising on my MIDI keyboard.

DIY: Sounds mythical!
Mattias: From here, it’s pretty much like cooking. Once you’ve decided the main ingredient, you can try with different complementary ingredients until it’s just about right. But in the case of music, you can actually remove ingredients that don’t fit.

I tend to really focus more on finding a good sound than writing a kick-ass riff though, especially in the case of Cobalt.While game music has a history of being very melodic and catchy I’m not sure that’s always the best approach, it really depends on the game. In any case though, when we have these amazing tools and crystal clear audio, why not spend the extra time to work on the soundscape?

DIY: When you say complementary ingredients, that to me almost seems prescriptive. How do you innovate?

Mattias: A certain instrument or synth sound might give just as much to the game’s mood as to a melody. In keeping with the cooking analogy: if you go ALL over the world, how many dishes with chicken are there? I would bet there are quite a few. And perhaps more interesting there are chicken nuggets and “chicken” dishes that hardly have any chicken, just synthetic flavors. Even if you approach it from a “recipe” stand-point, you can endlessly vary it because the ingredients available in modern music production are so many it’s nearly impossible to understand.

Innovation is a word that’s often very positively looked at; everything needs to innovate. Then look at the chiptune renaissance. That’s basically innovating backwards, still chiptune soundtracks are extremely popular.

DIY: With all these ingredients, are people making any new sounds or just borrowing from the cupboard?
Mattias: Well, that’s the fun part. It’s a combination of the two! You can grow your own mutated vegetables or buy a plastic-wrapped head of lettuce.

I tend to search through a lot of pre-made sounds but then alter them to really make them fit what I’m going for. Then I might also use some sounds I’ve made myself using, for example, the Thor synthesizer in Reason.

But again, the desire for innovation might be overstated. Compare it to the orchestra, which has retained a similar shape for ages and the previously mentioned chiptunes. Just using a not-well-known sample library will give you a pallet of sounds nobody has ever heard. But even if they had, I don’t think it would matter that much if it worked great in context of the game.

DIY: Do you ever have game development ideas for Cobalt or any other games you’ve worked on?
Mattias: I’ve played quite a few games, and I like thinking about how they’re built. I pretty much always have opinions and thoughts about game design, level design, systems, and story, if developers want to hear me out. I’ve even mocked up a few design documents myself but I’m not confident enough to contact a programmer about anything.

[Check back tomorrow to see the conclusion of our interview with Anosou Music's Mattias Gerdt.]