![]() I played the game early on and I had a metronome going the whole time and I would look at what felt right to me. There’s nothing faster and there is nothing slower. In the case of Ori, all of the game music, the actual regular gameplay music, is between 90 beats per minute and 128. ![]() And that’s when the truly creative stuff can really happen. “Sometimes you’re coming in at the end of the project, but the earlier the composer gets on the team, the more time there is to experiment, the more time there is to fail. “Sometimes you don’t have the time to experiment,” he says. He’s a core member of the development team, despite working as a freelancer in the virtual office, and has access to game builds, assets and feedback from the team. ![]() Luckily, Coker’s relationship with Moon Studios on the Ori games gives him that opportunity. But it really works very well.”īut composers aren’t always given the time or freedom to really innovate in this way. Music that ties into a combo? That’s nuts. So he is an example of the composer who is really getting into the very specifics of what the gameplay is actually doing. There’d be stings in the music that were synced up to the punches and as your combo increased, the music would increase in intensity, and if your combo breaks the music completely drops out. With his score for Remember Me, the music was synced to the fighting engine, including the punches, and the tempo of the fighting. He did Remember Me and recently Get Even, which was Bafta nominated. But there are few composers who are doing really really crazy stuff, interesting stuff. “That’s a very crude way of breaking it down, but I think if you were to look at most games, that’s how they’re scored. If there’s a fighting game, for example, you start off with the music at a low intensity, then as your health gets lower the music increases in intensity. Most composers are writing music either horizontally, which means the music changes according to exactly what the player is doing moment to moment – that’s how Ori is scored – or vertically, which is more like an intensity. ![]() “There’s only a handful of composers, and I don’t include myself in this, who can really break down music and get it to play back in a way that’s implemented in a really unique and original way. Renowned composer Gareth Coker (Source: ) That’s not because the tools aren’t there it’s because composers are wired to write music in a certain way. So in that sense, just on a musical level, we’re barely scratching the surface with what we can do in terms of implementation. At 17 – 18, there’s some really cool stuff coming out of the industry, it’s like the super talented, precocious teenager. I feel like in my early 20s I still didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t start figuring things out until I was 26 years old. “I feel like we’re still in late adolescence, like 17 or 18. “Fundamentally, I still think we are not in the golden age of video games yet,” Coker says. There’s only a handful of composers, and I don’t include myself in this, who can really break down music and get it to play back in a way that’s implemented in a really unique and original way. Coker feels that there’s huge room for improvement when it comes to implementing music into games, but that’s going to take time - both within the development process itself and in the wider industry in general. Experimentation is rife and will continue to push the medium forward, even when it comes to the ancient art of music composition. Though it may not feel like it, game development is still a very young industry. With music often being left to near the end of the production process, composers can have a hard time creating meaningful work that really integrates with an overall theme and story. But development has to allow for this to happen. So argues Gareth Coker, composer of the soundtrack for Ori and the Blind Forest, as well as its upcoming sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. A game’s music can not only add to its atmosphere, but elevate elements of game design and narrative.
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