All soundtracks stem from ideas and references too multiple to count. On a snowy day amidst the dark Finnish winter, my boss, Kalle, gave me a big list of references and ideas for what would become the MindSeize soundtrack. For the next few weeks, I listened to hours upon hours of psybient, ambient, synthwave, cinematic sci-fi music and everything in between, frantically researching each genres ins and outs, as well as chilling to the soundscapes my boss had sent me.

He wanted the soundtrack to be fresh, with a tad of retro. Something old, something new, just like the rest of the game. Something a bit psychedelic, sometimes eerie, sometimes epic. With that in mind, I slowly conjured up the bigger picture of what the soundtrack to come would be. I had not composed psy-genres before, be it psytrance or psybient, but I had a lot of experience with both ambient and synthwave-influenced genres. With a lot of time and effort, I made a list for myself of elements I would lend from each genre, and in what gameplay environments they would be used. I had several deep discussions with the rest of the dev team, giving them demos and prototypes of different possibilities, and devising a coherent plan for what kind of genres would have their strong points and where. In essence, I was creating a kind of sub-genre for the game, an articulate mash up of what we wanted to tell with the games soundscape.

We wanted to give a lot of playtime for ambient and psybient tracks, to give the game a thoughtful, eerie feel; to set the games general mood to something the player would stop and listen to. Even though we had to cut most of the gameplay out that would have had ambient music in the background, we still had the opportunity to open the game with a tone-setting ambient track, which really set the games mood to the right spot and was a respectful nod to sci-fi epics such as Blade Runner. We were telling the story of someone skulking through the melancholic rooftops of an old abandoned factory on a long dead planet.

The games main theme was to become a mix of synthwave, psytrance and a tad of cinematic sci-fi, to really culminate what the rest of the soundtrack would become. With my research in mind, I hand crafted a lot of the audio samples and sounds in it. I also decided to tie the soundtrack together by using versions of the same samples in the rest of the tracks. For example, whenever you hear a kick drum in the soundtrack, it’s a version of the same dark, psychedelic sound I hand crafted for the main theme. It could have been longer, but sadly after making the shorter cut for it, its project file got corrupted and I didn’t have enough time to look into recovering it in time for the demos launch. All in all it still encapsulated my plans for it while keeping true to Kalle’s original vision, and gave an epic start for the game, which was what we wanted.

The main combat track and boss track heard inside the immense factory of Takomo 7 where made hand in hand. All though both are unique, I wanted to use a lot of the same base elements to give them a slight sense of similarity at least, seeing as they where to be played in the same environment, one only being heard in certain more extreme challenges. For example, the gritty industrial core for both tracks bass synthesizer is the same in terms of my audio engineering, for the most part. I wanted to tell the story of an old abandoned factory waking up and continuing with its orders, protocols given maybe even centuries ago. I used a lot of industrial percussions, recorded in real factories and scrap yards by the fine folks at Native Instruments, and combined them with melodies lending from a style of Finnish folk music that had in turn lent a lot from Russian tunes, giving it an almost soviet feel at times. As the assembly line deep within, the music had to be moving non-stop, kicking and clinking like it had never stopped. The boss track had to have the same story and feel to it, but we wanted it to be more at the same time. I made it faster, and made room for isolated epic elements that would be a nod to old sci-fi epics. The most challenging part was making the female vocal solo for the track, which took ages to make.

All in all I’m quite satisfied with the soundtrack, and can’t wait to be able to compose for the full game. I am always ready to listen to feedback and ideas, and was blasted away with the positive feedback I got. If you have something to say about how much music each kind of gameplay region should have or would like to hear certain kinds of tracks more, just come to our discord server and we can have a chat about what your vision for the final soundtrack would be! The pleasure is mine.

Tech talk for the interested: layering tracks to tinker sounds

Layering as a technique is something that is sometimes overlooked. If you’re looking to change or emphasize a certain part of a sound, a careful balance between strict mixing of the elements at hand and the careful addition of new, masked elements is key to making the perfect version of your idea. Many of the elements in the soundtrack, especially the synths, consist of sets of layers, ranging from three to even more than a dozen tracks, all masked to be part of the same sound. For example, the main themes melody instrument consists of nine distinct layers masked together, ranging from Skanner XT, a Beatmaker Atmos put through a 13-part guitar rig, several instances of Omnisphere and 5 different guitar layers with different sound sources. Ever wondered how I made the constantly moving, epic synth that plays throughout the games main theme, from the very beginning to almost the very end? Well, here’s a short explanation for you audio engineering geeks out there: I have two parallel instances of kHs ONE, wherein I have settings a kin to a synthwave type lead. One creates the body of the sound, the other emphasizing high-mid frequencies and bringing out the synths trancients. Both are put through a 20-part guitar rig, and then rigorously tinkered with iZotope Vintage, IMPusher, an optical compressor, a transient shaper, and a series of EQs.

This is it for this devlog, hope you enjoy the game and my soundtrack

Kind regards,
Adam Al-Sawad, MindSeizes composer