How Untitled Goose Game adapted Debussy to its dynamic soundtrack



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One of House House's strong points Untitled goose game, the game of "slapstick-stealth-sandbox" in which you play a terrible goose that wreaks havoc in a charming English village, is the adaptive soundtrack of Debussy Preludes. Playful piano music almost gives an idea of ​​the spirit of the goose: the melody is played by small silent bursts when it is useless, crawling towards its next victim. When the goose is in chaos, standing aside from the gardener who only wants to recover his keys, the melody of the piano is played in full, encouraging the player to keep pace with the shenanigans.

Surprisingly, the studio was initially turned to the absence of music in the game until the release of the first trailer in 2017. The composer Dan Golding, who had previously worked with the studio for the soundtrack of his first title Push me, was brought to mark the trailer, which contains "Prelude No. 12: Minstrels. " But the music has been changed so that the music starts when the goose grabs the gardener's radio. When the trailer immediately went viral, she hit a nerve.

"Please tell me that the score is dynamic and aware of the situation, not just in the video? This would make this game the best thing to do, "wrote one commentator, with the agreement of many others. The reactions to the music in the trailer were so strong that the studio felt it necessary to compel. "We all got together and said," Well, we have to find a way to do that, "says Golding.

To begin with, Golding started by recording two versions of the "Prelude": one played normally and one with a much lower and softer energy. The tracks were then divided into different "stems" or sections, located in the same places. Although he began by splitting the song into about sixty stems, that did not prove sufficient. "The game was going to start and crash through the kind of micro-narratives of the game, so I thought, let me see if I can force this brutally," he says.

Using Logic, he divided the song in two steps, ending in about 400 stems. And although notes can sometimes cut halfway to musical phrases, songs avoid chopping by using reverb. "I've exported each of these rods so that the reverb sounds as much as it can," he says. "Each of these branches does not have the same length, even if they have the same musical length. You can play them on each other, and it just looks like the piano that holds the sustain pedal. "

The stems were then paired with the game, which operates in three states: the first is a silent state, where the goose only hangs, does nothing; in the second state, the "low energy version" is executed while the goose is planning and plotting, approaching its prey; and the third state is when you are actively pursued, which is the performance you hear on a recording. The game chooses the version to play based on what is happening – so, considering all the ways in which the stems may be associated, it means that the number of different versions you can hear is "a number with, like , 52 zeros, "Golding says. "One of the beauties of the game is that no one is going to have the same performance."

Untitled goose game could use six of Debussy's products preludes through copyright laws, which require that tracks become public domain 70 years after the death of the composer. "That's why the copyright system exists to expire. In 2019, this allows people to experiment and play, and to give a different context to such vital musical pieces, "he said.

Since different recordings of Debussy are already available, if a Untitled goose game Golding announced the release of a set of selected tracks incorporating its slower and less energetic performances with the more normal sections. He also plans to release music from the gardener's radio, which includes six original compositions covering different genres – tracks "irritating enough that you know why the gardener would rush to turn it off, but not enough for the player get really irritated. "

Untitled goose game is available for Windows and Mac via the Epic Game Storeand Nintendo Switch. The game is reduced from $ 19.99, for a limited time to launch, to $ 14.99.

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