I wrote a title piece early on, and it was nice but didn't turn out to be the right fit for the game. That helped to figure out what kind of music we need and where, and in coming up with themes. Alex, the creative director, and I went through all of them and made notes about where we thought certain pieces might work. It became harder to make progress late in the development, so I amassed about 100 piano ideas that I felt could fit in the game. What does that sound like? What’s the sound of a crystal forest, or the sound of ascending a mountain? Thematic Development I had to figure out the sound of a post-apocalyptic desert where it’s raining all the time. I used that process with every region of the game, more or less. I had some semi-intuitive notions of how that type of region was supposed to sound, and I tried to lock into that. In the eastern water region, the music is placid and serene, but with a tense edge that comes through at different points. #Hyper light drifter fire pads trialThere was a lot of trial and error, naturally. I improvised at the piano often as I was trying to hone in on some very subtle feelings and vibes for different areas of the game. I stumbled into an impressionistic way of approaching the music for Hyper Light Drifter. That definitely helped me down the stretch. I also got really into Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga during development. I was absolutely inspired by the visuals, as that was the first thing I saw and reacted to in writing some of the earliest pieces. We landed pieces like 'Titan' and 'The Abyss' pretty early in development, which I think helped the team's creative process. There was definitely some cross-pollenation when it came to influence. By the end, I was reaching back into the past to try and channel how I used to feel, because I think I’d already kind of moved on from it. I often felt like I was using my emotions to figure out what was working and what wasn’t, and that ended up being taxing over time. The level of trial and error in finding the right sounds for this game was quite high, and required a lot of energy of me to stay engaged and working at my highest potential. It's odd - the very first thing I wrote for the project ended up being a seminal representation of the spirit of the score, and yet the general experience of writing the music proved to be quite a struggle.īeing on the same project for three years is difficult for someone like me, where I feel like my taste and my interests are always changing. The game kept shifting over my three years of involvement, and I didn’t feel like I had a grasp of the game until the very end. I ended up trying many things that didn’t work, and so I often had to start over in the middle of an idea. Hyper Light Drifter was a very emotional project to work on, and I think part of that was because of the creative approach I took with the music.
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