Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
Award-Winning Collaboration Congratulations on your 2024 MPSE Golden Reel Award for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor! What did it mean to you to be recognized for that project? CAG: Thanks! It's really nice to see something you spent so much time on recognized by your peers. I was lucky enough to work with an awesome team, including audio director Nick von Kaenel, music director Nick Laviers, and fellow music implementers Andrew Karboski and Kory McMaster. We had such amazing music to work on from our composers, Stephen and Gordy. I think Survivor has been one of my most fulfilling projects to work on in music, so it was great to hear that others enjoyed the work we did on it too. Creative Problem-Solving in Open-Worlds "It can be a lot of fun to figure out all the ways players could interact with a piece of music and try to make them all feel equally natural." –Colin Andrew Grant Can you walk us through some examples of the key musical or implementation challenges on projects that you worked on? Were there any standout moments that required particularly creative or technical problem-solving? CAG: I think one of the biggest, or at least first questions for the kind of games I work on is: What will your core music systems look like? Are there different sections of combat music, like sneaking around, enemies alerted, or full combat? Will any gameplay elements change what the music is doing, like the number of enemies, player health, or using a special skill? When players are just exploring the world, will music randomly come in and out to keep the mood, or will there be no music until an element of the game triggers it again? It works with other aspects of the game to create a sense of familiarity for the player. For the question of standout moments, there was a project where we were trying to have a certain piece of music play during specific parts of the game to reinforce two characters' relationship. However, the game was open world, so there were a lot of ways a player could choose to approach those moments. I had to make a bunch of contingencies based on things like the player getting into combat before the music ends or taking longer than expected between two narrative beats. It can be a lot of fun to try to figure out all the ways players could interact with a piece of music and try to make them all feel equally natural. Working with Composers, Designers, and Systems "We really get to touch a lot of different aspects of the game, which I think is pretty fun." –Colin Andrew Grant How do you work with the composer, audio team, and gameplay designers to support the game's emotional arcs and pacing? CAG: A lot of it is making sure you're embedded in the team and keeping in communication with all necessary departments. I feel like I'm always trying to find ways to collaborate more with the other audio departments, checking in with narrative intent to make sure we're hitting the right tone from beat to beat, and just making sure I'm learning about new changes as soon as possible so the music director and composer are in the loop. Since anything from combat to dialogue to the character's emotional state can trigger music, we really get to touch a lot of different aspects of the game, which I think is fun. When it comes to working with composers, it's highly dependent on the project. I've worked on games where all communication with the composers went through the music lead, and on others, I've been in close contact with the composer or composers. I think it's a lot of fun when you get to work directly with the composers and other departments on how music can be tied into gameplay. Tools and Techniques That Shape the Experience "Having tools that help you diagnose points of failure is essential for making progress." –Colin Andrew Grant Are there any tools, workflows, or adaptive music techniques that proved especially useful or innovative on past titles? CAG: I've had to be fairly tools agnostic because every project I've worked on has used a different combination of middleware and game engine. Even the DAW I work in might change depending on the team's preference. I always love it when I get to work with middleware that I'm familiar with, like Wwise, because of the flexibility it provides for organizing music and creating rules and transitions. In terms of tools in general, I think Colin with his colleagues speaking at Dutch Media Week for Audiokinetic (© all rights reserved Audiokinetic). M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 35