I don't know, I mean to be totally honest.
Like, I'm okay at doing music and sound design stuff.
Anything else in life, I am the most hopeless human being you'll ever meet in your life trust me.
It's it's quite embarrassing, if I'm honest.
Hello my name is Danny and I am the composer for the Survivalists.
How did you get the chance to work on this game with Team17?
I mean I guess I'll start from when I was very young, when I was just three years old.
I was just a normal kid and my dad came home with a Sega Mega Drive and Sonic the Hedgehog and I just lost my mind.
it kind of started from there and then i also had a love for making music as just a hobby
as it started out to be and then i gradually went to university i studied music technology at the
london college of music one of my first music job was i used to make music for slot machines
for a little company in birmingham and then um i was there for about two years and then i managed
to land myself at team 17 where i've been ever since i've been here now for nearly three years
well the first trailer actually worked i i took and reimposed music for as like just like
a portfolio thing was it was for journey actually for austin wintry's journey i i was i'd make some
music for it i'd look at how at certain points in the trailer if a second character comes in whether
to bring music up or to to add more elements into it and i would send it to my friends and
see how they would respond with like musically trained friends and people who are just you know
regular friends and family and i just get advice from them and then slowly build and build and go
from there what i do for every game i've worked on so far is i make these things called rule sets
and they're basically they're like guidelines that i've used to make every piece of music
follow and so that keeps everything refined and my vision for the game is very clear the first
thing i did for survivalists obviously is set on a deserted island so i watched film cast away
and the key thing i took away from it when watching castaway was the entire time that tom
hanks is on that island there's no music that plays whatsoever so i wanted to do something
similar but i couldn't just give them like an hour's worth of silence and then call it
a day because that would be like the easiest paycheck i'll ever get so i thought right
i've got to make this somewhat interesting so i've i ended up making music as very minimal
and so that was the first rule set of this game the second one was like i love indie games i think
the reason why i love it so much is the same reason why i love classic video games and i've
i don't think it's just for nostalgic purposes you know you see an indie game it's got pixel
art and it's got a chiptune soundtrack i don't think it's just that i think there's more to it
my interpretation my theory is they're both products of limitation so take a classic game
soundtrack for example easily so stayed like i mentioned sonic the hedgehog zelda link to
the past pokemon yellow these all had technical limitations the hardware that they were working on
didn't have it is nowhere near as good as what we use today so in order for composers to make
something that's that's gonna like inspire the player to play their game and to entice them
to buy that product they have to be creative because and they have to think of how they're
gonna compose the music with those restrictions in mind and so it's and as a result of that it's made
these incredibly creative and unique soundtracks i thought what if i was to restrict myself in terms
of the composition itself so the notation and the chords so in the end every single piece of music
in the survival list is related to one chord and it's an f minor seventh the way that i interpret
an f minor seventh is it's a minor and major chord combines from playing at the same time so it's
an f minor and an a for that major playing at the same time if you combine those two chords together
it feels like it's neither happy or sad it kind of sits in the middle a little bit and what i was
trying to say to the player is yeah sure you're on this deserted island it's it's not that great but
if you venture out into the onto the island and see what's there you might find help you might be
able to escape and return home rule number three is to do with a get the gameplay mechanic so if
you play the survivalists the game is totally procedural so whenever you start a new game
the entire map can change its layouts all the labyrinths change how they're laid out the whole
game is uniquely different each time you play them to play a new game so it's in the top minecrafters
so for i could do something like a procedural soundtrack in some way so it's not like it's
totally random but it has it's like a controlled form of randomness which i guess is kind of what
procedural means in a way but um yeah and those were the three rule sets for the game i've been
doing this for every game that i've worked on so far so the overcooked series has its own rule sets
the worm series has its own rule sets and and so on and so forth that's kind of how i work
well a lot of the well all the composition is is done through reaper which is a digital audio works
workstation i've used on all projects and it's the specific instruments i used i used massive
quite a lot which is made by native instruments and to be honest it's quite a complex synth
when you start to manipulate all parameters but for the survivalists a lot of the sounds
are quite simple to make because the actual like style of the music has that 8-bit chiptune style
to it so a lot of the the wave tables in it are very simple it's just square waves sine waves
and triangle waves that's all it really is so the actual tonality of it and making it is very simple
there's that side which is a tonal side and then for the percussion it was all
real world instrument instrumentation so much more tribal percussion the different probably
the most difficult part of this was trying to marinade synthesis with tribal percussion
which is very it's when you put it in your head it doesn't really sound right
i guess it probably would be sonic if i'm honest just because it's just because for me it's like
it's the holy grail it's the biggest the best of the lot for me like it was the one that
kicked it off for me and it's i'd love to just go wild with it personally and the music in in
sonic series is so loud and bright and so full of life i'd love to do something like that