Hi guys! My name is Leonardo Pietrowski and I’m a Brazilian music producer, composer and sound director. I worked on Reverie Knights Tactics by directing and producing all audio, including songs, sound effects and managing talents for audio production. This is just a little bit of my story with this awesome game!
For starters, let me say this: working on Reverie Knights Tactics was a blast! We started way back when (maybe 5 years ago?) with some drafts of how we were going to approach the game sonically. We were throwing a lot of different ideas around to see what we wanted the music to sound like and how we were going to create and implement the sound effects.
The first thing that we decided were the overall instruments and elements that we wanted to use. We tried to focus more on the anime(ish) aesthetics while still keeping the ‘fantasy sound’ that people associate with this kind of game. We went with string sections and also added distorted guitars to keep a fast pace. Well, maybe it was TOO fast at first. The drums were too much and we were walking into heavy metal territory, so we toned it down by cutting some guitars and adding more percussion instead of just fast drumming. I think that decision really paid off in the end.
To make the tracks more dynamic, each map has two variations of the same core melody: one, while the dialogue is going on, is more ‘peaceful’ and less intrusive.
The second, when the battle kicks in, adds the already mentioned distorted guitars, more percussion and usually amps up the speed. This keeps a cohesive feel to the songs while still making them sonically different and sets up the right mood.
Finally, for sound effects, there was a lot of head and floor banging (quite literally), effect research and foley creation. Probably my favorite part was designing the many, many skills and spells the characters have. The enemies were also pretty fun to do, even if a few here and there were quite challenging. This was mostly due to the game having some enemy variations that needed sonic differences while still keeping some sort of identity to them (such as in different hobgoblin enemies). This was a learning and rewarding experience, however.
I do hope that everyone likes what we have done and also that people enjoy playing Reverie Knights Tactics!
Leonardo Pietrowski - Composer and Audio Director at the Yoho Arsenal Studio
Don't forget to wishlist Reverie Knights Tactics:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1399690/Reverie_Knights_Tactics/
And if you have not yet, try the free Prologue:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1638140/Reverie_Knights_Tactics_Prologue/