Greetings Directors!
Music is undoubtedly a really important part of every game, even more so in a story-based sci-fi 4X strategy such as The Pegasus Expedition. Today's dev diary focuses exactly on that!
Previous installments:
- Investing in Infrastructure and Research - DevDiary 1
- Diplomacy in the Pegasus Galaxy - DevDiary 2
- The Story and the Setting - DevDiary 3
- Conquest and Conflict - DevDiary 4
- The Art & Graphic Design - DevDiary 5
A sense of wonder and discovery, in addition to a sense of epic desperation - the building blocks of the music and atmosphere of The Pegasus Expedition. From the beginning of development, we knew what we wanted the players to feel through our music, and went through many iterations to find the results we were looking for.
As a baseline, I was aiming for something ethereal, to further the sense of desperately drifting through space to find a solution for humanity’s woes. The soundtrack couldn’t be all cold and dark tracks, but at least we could keep both the emptiness and wonder of space without putting too much pressure on the game’s atmosphere.
The best technique for both doing this and achieving a unique feel for the Pegasus galaxy was combining classical minimalist techniques, such as a lone, echoing minimalist piano with deep synths and the occasional post-rock guitar. As an epic thematic glue, we contracted a vocalist, Vantorea, to lend her voice.
The game’s main theme is echoed throughout most of the game’s tracks, with each faction and subtheme having their own instrumentations and versions of the melody. The Tamanin melody, for example, is a cut-up version, featuring a clear, high synth to represent the empire of these birdlike people.
The highs and lows of a strategy game are always a unique challenge, since the pace of gameplay and combat are up to the player. Thus as our mechanics moulded into their final shape and testing progressed, we experimented with different levels of intensity, to try and find the right balance between a certain sense of epicness without making the player feel rushed with their decisions. For instance, we had originally planned our dynamic combat music system to have different levels of intensity with their own tracks and dynamic elements, but found that artificially trying to raise the epicness of combats ended up with many instances where the game’s music system thought a moment was epic, but players didn’t feel so. The option we found to create the best results was raising the bar of the combat music’s intensity a bit, and having the game not try to interpret combat’s intensity at all.
