Ultima Ratio Regum 0.11 Update #47: Official Soundtrack

I’ve been pondering much on an important question in the last few months. 0.11 is going to be the first URR release with a clear central quest, and a clear endpoint. This is a “proof of concept” central quest, sure – i.e. making sure the game can indeed create one fully completable riddle thread, which the player can make sense of and play through – but it’s still a huge milestone. It’s a huge milestone to have a complete objective in any game, but particularly a game which has been going for so long, has spent so much time on the world building required to make that central gameplay work, and where – on a slightly more personal note – I have always been inundated with those comments of “great world, but where’s the game?”. I’ve never taken offence at them, or anything close, but it’s very meaningful and important to me, personally, that we’re finally seeing the very first steps of the game, not just the world, coming into being. As such, this got me into a thought process along the lines of – this release is going to stand out, and I’m going to put some proper effort (and money, even) into making it as visible as possible, but… what else could I do to make it stand out? How else could I signal its difference from previous releases, and the start of the proper transition into a game, rather than merely a supremely detailed piece of worldbuilding software?

Well, friends, the answer is clear: it’s time to get a soundtrack. Now, visuals have always been important to me in URR – although this focus was there long before I began this project. All my earlier game design and modding projects as a child and teenager always had a very strong focus on the visual, with my mods always looking to meet the same visual quality as the base game that I was trying to mod – which is somewhat demanding, of course! – and with my own personal game design projects always striving for very clean and very distinct aesthetics that would make them stand out from other things around them. Equally, art direction is one of the things I look for most in a game when I play it. This doesn’t mean graphical “quality”, in the sense of number of polygons, or number of pixels on screen, but in terms of art direction. This is why I’d say something like The Curious Expedition or Rain World are absolute stunners, while other games are so aesthetically off-putting to me, and seem to be so lacking in in any actual art direction, that I can hardly look at them. Equally, although I’ve never shown this off here on the blog, I’m genuinely good at drawing and sketching by hand, although I don’t do a great deal of it these days. All of this is to say: visuals are my jam, both as an appreciator, and a creator.

Music, however… well, music has always seemed rather elusive to me. I struggled immensely in music class at school – the fact I was one of the archetypal “smart kids who do the bare minimum” in every class didn’t help, although it was mainly because the hopeless teacher assumed that everyone understood how to read music, and if you didn’t, he didn’t even bother to teach you – and to this day I’m not sure I could truthfully assert a competent explanation of what a note is, let alone a chord or a melody. I don’t play any instruments, and there’s very few musicians or bands I act really listen to on a regular basis. My musical ignorance (especially when contrasted against other creative forms) is actually quite striking whenever I get into conversations about music with friends. Visuals have always spoken to my soul – they’ve always been able to grab my attention, evoke a world so completely, and immediately place me fully within a fictional setting, or at least give me a sense of aesthetic satisfaction and interest in the abstract. By contrast, music – outside of a truly minuscule number of bands and musicians – has always struggled in that regard, for me. I do, though, get a lot out of game soundtracks, and that’s a good 50%, if not more, of the music I actually listen to. A good game soundtrack really can do a great deal to position even me, even someone as non-musical as I am, into a game world and a setting, and successfully suggest what the developer is looking to suggest.

The point is, then, that music composition is not exactly my area of expertise (although one day, probably in retirement, the idea of seeing whether I can actually learn an instrument does hold some interest for me, but that’s 35 years away), so once I’d settled on the idea of getting a proper soundtrack in place for the 0.11 release, the next task in front of me was clear: let’s find a professional musician, pay them money (because paying creatives is good!), and have them make a dozen tracks for the game. I’ll then figure out to implement these and integrate them into the game, develop the prompts for changing tracks, figure out how all this works by using an appropriate Python library to help me, and then suddenly we’ll have a game that possesses an actual soundtrack, and hopefully in doing so, will really stand out as being a major disjuncture and change from every previous release of URR up to this point. When I made this plan I confess to being a little bit intimidated about the possibility of music integration, especially as this was something I had no experience in, but I’ve recently been coding some of the grandest, most complex, and most novel stuff I’ve ever done, so I’m not too worried about that. Indeed, some internal and psychological shifts I’ve been having in this last year vis-à-vis programming as a practice and my personal relationship to it have also helped here (though this is a topic for another blog entry). Confident I could implement it, this idea was immediately so exciting that I had to get into right away – and thus, the quest for a musician began…

Choosing a Musician

The first step was to reach out to a lot of game musicians whose work, I felt, hit some of the notes or at least one of the notes that was going to show up in URR. Interestingly, as I write this blog entry, I realise I’m not sure that I should give too much detail here about responses and discussions, because inevitably some of those who reached out to responded, some didn’t, but also some of those who responded I had to turn down in favour of the one I went with in the end (alas!). These are all game musicians whose work I tremendously like and tremendously respect, but in the end, we could only go with one, and I don’t mind saying that all the unsuccessful negotiations came down to fit, time, and money, rather than anything to do with talent, style, or vision. So, I will say: I reached out to the people who did the soundtracks for Rain World, Skald: Against the Black Priory, Blasphemous, Axiom Verge, HyperRogue, Escape Goat, Eldritchvania, Roadwarden, The Curious Expedition, Noita, Environmental Station Alpha, and a number of other really strong indie games as well, asking them whether they were actively looking for commissions at the present moment. Of those, over half a dozen said “yes, I am” and with all of them I then had a bunch of Zoom meetings and email discussions back-and-forths and all the usual, to get a sense of what I understood URR to be (now and in the future), what they might be able to bring, pricing and practicalities and all that, and steps forward. I’m not someone who makes big decisions like this readily, so I took a full month of consideration before I decided to go with the musician – Nik Sudan – who did the music for Eldritchvania! I adored the work he did on that game, and although URR has a somewhat different tone (and is turn-based, of course, so we’re looking for a slower pace), I was just so impressed with the samples he sent along, and I thought he’d be a fantastic pick for hitting the notes I want to hit with URR (mystery, exploration, reflection, and just a little bit of strangeness). Once this decision was made, I then needed to actually know what tracks I wanted, and how they would fit into the game – and this was some pondering I did beforehand, which really helped inform my discussion with all these lovely musical folk.

The Soundtrack

So: what track list would URR require? I found myself giving this thought, and of course running up against the classic issue in a PCG game, which is that I can’t predict what the in-game nations will be, what the locations will be, what the religions might be, and so on and so forth. I briefly considered going with something insanely ambitious here by having particular musical aspects or instruments be procedurally interwoven based on the traits of nations or the traits of religions, but a) I haven’t even the faintest clue how to do that because I barely know what a chord is, b) the cost would be vastly greater than just a normal soundtrack with some tracks on it, and c) ultimately I just didn’t like the idea all that much – it felt a bit over-involved, and just unnecessary, honestly. If absolute stand-out games in this area like Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud or Crusader Kings and the like don’t feel the need to do this, then I really don’t see a good reason to buck the trend. So the idea was going to be instead that we would have loops which are playing in the background when the player is in particular categories of places, rather than specific places. After some consideration, I settled on 12 tracks. These are not just appropriate for the game as it stands now, nor even for the game as it will be in 0.11 released hopefully at the end of this year, but rather thinking long-term towards features that aren’t present yet, and won’t be present for a couple of years. Both for my sake, and for my musician’s sake, I want to get it all done in one block, and then just add the tracks into the game as required over time.

As such, we’re going with twelve tracks, which are as follows:

-Menu and world gen (world generation takes 1-2 minutes, so I need to keep the player “occupied” during it, aside from the visuals, and to evoke interest as well – so this will be a more active track, and a particularly important one, since it’s the first one the player will encounter, and will have to listen to for perhaps 120 seconds while the world is being created – though as an aside, this is a length of time I intend to address in 0.12 and beyond, since so much of that code is so old, and can surely be massively improved)

-Walking around outside in a settlement (an obvious one, this’ll play when you’re walking around outside when you’re in a settlement – so it needs to be appropriate to potentially a nomadic camp, a great city, a town, a tribal settlement, a university, and so on)

-Walking around outside in the wild (originally I thought this would be the same track as the above one, but I soon realised that this made absolutely no sense, and this will now be a separate piece of music, which again needs to be appropriate to many different sorts of bioregions, and to imply not just exploration, but also potential strangeness and intrigue as well, e.g. unusual plants and the like)

-Inside significant buildings (palaces, parliaments, mansions, fortresses, etc – generic buildings we’ll keep the outside but in a settlement music, I think, in order to in turn emphasise the importance of the important buildings)

-Inside religious buildings (this will be a separate track from the above one and just for religious buildings, again to emphaise their importance and difference from everything else)

-Inside secret places (i.e. every time the player finds a secret and goes down the staircase / through the door that they’re revealed or unlocked to take them into that area, this is the track that plays until they leave)

-Travelling on the world map (pretty self-explanatory!)

-Combat (the plan here is still for only very rare duels, where a player might only do a handful in a full playthrough, but each one might be fatal)

-Caves (pretty self-explanatory – this one is for crypts but also for caves and for mines, which I’ll be generating and filling with Interesting Things in the not-too-distant future)

-Underwater (we’re thinking here about getting hold of a diving bell and exploring the deep, so this might be played while you’re deciphering the mysteries of sunken cyclopean ruins, but also for exploration more generally, and encountering underwater creatures and plants)

-[??????] (this track won’t appear for a good 3+ years, but it needs to be in there…)

-Islands and Ruins (similar to underwater areas and caves and the like, these will be late-game areas that one needs to find, and take particular resources in order to explore)

And there we have it, folks – the track list. It’s of course not unthinkable that in ten years I’ll go back to Nik and say “hey, there’s something I never thought of at the time which I now definitely want to add”, but barring that, will be a complete and exhaustive soundtrack for the entire game.

Bloody heck – what an exciting sentence to write.

As a result of all this excitement, we put together a contract, signed it (the usual deal – Nik has the rights to the music, I have exclusive license for URR, and we’ll put out an OST at some point in the [distant?] future), and Nik has been hard at work on it for the last little while. We’re doing regular check-ins and discussions of the tracks, and I’m also doing a lot of playtesting of the tracks at the same time, by which I mean loading up the relevant areas of the game and exploring them or doing stuff in them while listening to the piece of music, or just imagining what they will be like in the future and trying to picture them in my mind in my mind’s eye whilst listening to the tracks. I’m not just saying this, but I’m really happy with the tracks which are already coming through here. Each one is very distinct from the others, but they also form a very clear single soundtrack with a single sort of sound being deployed, and capture beautifully the sorts of notes that I’ll be looking for – while also being catchy and enjoyable enough that if that they’d be fine to listen to on quite a substantial loop (e.g. if you’re really taking your time to delve into your books while remaining in one place), but not so invasive or foregrounded that they might become distracting. There’s a lot to balance here, but so far, it’s going great. It’s also very distinct from the standard faux-medieval classic-RPG fare – as it should be for a game that isn’t trying to do that – and is doing very well at hitting those notes that imply mystery, but also a slight strangeness, and even in some tracks a slight sense of the unnerving, which is really going to fit well for stranger places, stranger civilizations, stranger ruins filled with curious generated murals, and the like. It’s fantastic stuff, and the soundtrack should definitely all be ready to go once 0.11 is ready to release at some point next year.

What next?

So, there we have it, friends! URR is gaining an official soundtrack – and, from the pieces I’ve heard already, I can’t describe how well it fits everything I’m going for in the game. It’s ambient rather than active, as befits a turn-based rather than real-time game, and hits all the notes I want in terms of mystery, exploration, deciphering and making sense of things, discovering new things, looking deeply into things, and more generally just evoking a world which is very full and complete and alive, in a way that music is able to do simply by addressing another one of the senses beyond the visual. I’m honestly just so excited about this, and it really does make the game world leap off the screen so much more than previously did – I’m coming to really appreciate for the first time just how important music and sound design are. It’s one of those things I suppose I knew intellectually, but have never really thought about on a more emotional or experiential level, but it’s extraordinary the difference it makes – even something as simple as having one track fade out and one track fade in when the player transitions to a new place does so much in terms of pacing and articulating to the player that an important change has been made. I’m very confident also, as I say, that the track is somewhat unlike what some would expect loading up an “open world roguelike” and it’s my hope the soundtrack, alongside other things, will help to signal to the player some distinctions between other seemingly comparable games, and help focus in on the sorts of things the player wants to be actually doing.

Anyway – thank you as ever for reading (this unusually and perhaps painfully picture-free blog post) and if you think others will be excited by one of the world’s longest running and still-actively-developed solo game dev projects finally gaining a soundtrack (!!!), please do share this update around on the web – and as ever, please do leave a comment with your thoughts. Thanks for reading everyone, and I’ll see you all in a fortnight!