Hey brewers! Yannis (CM at Hammer & Ravens) interviewed Clint Bajakian, composer for Ale Abbey with a long career to back him up! How did Clint joined the Ale Abbey team? What makes the music always fresh and creative? How a dog can become a co-artist? Everything will be answered! This blog is a retranscription of the one made on IndieDB
Introducing Clint
One critical constant since we began Ale Abbey's development has been the quality of its music and SFX that came from none other than Clint Bajakian, our Composer and Sound Engineer in this project. Clint, with a career that spans longer than 30 years and his talent influencing titles that introduced us to gaming itself, has been credited in titles like Monkey Island 2 (yes, the original, and the more recent Return to Monkey Island), Grim Fandango, Outlaws, Full Throttle, pretty much everything that has the LucasArts name on it, God of War, World of Warcraft, and many, many others...
And - finally - after editing it in for months (someone kept removing it from his Wikipedia entry), Hammer & Ravens are more than honored to have him credited in Ale Abbey too!
Get the soundtrack
If you like what you read or even more, what you hear, you'll be happy to know the soundtrack will be available directly on Steam as well as in a special Brewmaster edition on release! The soundtrack includes 16 carefully crafted tracks (MP3 & WAV files) that capture the essence of monastic life, from the quiet chants of the abbey to the bustling energy of a thriving brewery.
The bundle will permanently be 10% off
By buying this bundle you'll get the 65 minutes of the official soundtrack composed by Clint and you'll support the development of Ale Abbey toward the 1.0!
Now, time for the QnA!
QnA
- Having worked on Ale Abbey for a bit already (perhaps the understatement of the year), what were the parts of the project you were most excited to dive into and eventually did?
Yes, it’s been a long ride working closely with a great team of independent developers. From the first phone call, I knew that this was a great team, and what’s more, a fun and friendly group of people to work and interact with. On such a small team, I’ve served as a kind of one-person audio department, composing music, designing sound and dialog, and implementing audio in the FMod middleware audio system.
From the start, there have been two main aspects of the project I’ve been excited about diving into. First, the challenge of composing fun, enjoyable songs for a Medieval/Renaissance acoustic ensemble, organ, and choir. Expanding my musical instrument sample library and slowly developing a stylistic approach to the writing has indeed been a real pleasure. Secondly, I’ve been excited to delve into the raw, rural sound world that is Ale Abbey. From the start, we all agreed to keep all sounds natural, non-synthetic, and rustic. So I often went to wooden objects, musical instruments, glassware, and household objects for sound sources.
One particularly fun UI click sound was a recording of my dog Bodi catching a tennis ball in his mouth! Our rule was: nothing that sounds like most other video games that use electronic synthesizer sources – especially for UI – would be tolerated in favor of all natural real-world recordings.
Someone's getting more treats... and a spot in Ale Abbey's credits ;)
- Follow up: What aspects of your work on Ale Abbey are you most eager to share with players?
When I compose a piece of music or design a sound, I’m always thinking about a back story – some sort of imagined image or vignette underpinning the music. No one else needs to know it’s there – it’s mostly for me to derive a sense of emotion and drama from, and a sense of story-like flow in the music. The song titles largely give away the subject of the piece of music. The song titles themselves can create an image in one’s mind – likely the same image or scenario that I was picturing to help me conduct this musical narrative. Even going so far as to imagine being there, maybe on a warm summer day with insects, brewery smells, and surrounded by bustling people and animals. There’s always some sort of story lurking behind the music of each tune.
As one example, Wagon Wheel is pictured to be an old, abandoned wagon wheel leaned against a stone wall, overgrown with grass and daisies. But once it was a mighty wheel that hauled thousands of tons for decades before it just couldn’t hold out any longer. So it, too, has a story, a past, a pedigree. That one image can lift an entire piece out of the cosmic soup!
- Having worked extensively on major, high-profile titles, what would you say is the biggest difference and the biggest similarity you’ve noticed when working with a smaller indie studio like Hammer & Ravens?
The biggest difference between developing a huge game versus a smaller one is, (perhaps obviously), sheer scope. AAA games, especially ones with a strong narrative thread (like Uncharted, Assasin’s Creed, or God of War), have thousands upon thousands of sound files and immensely complex layers of logic to organize them all into a cohesive, good-sounding audio experience – not to mention massively complex team workflows. Similarly with music – at Sony for Uncharted for example - we would produce two hours of original score but the game would ship with up to eight hours of uniquely different pieces of music derived form the multitrack source through editorial offline and implementation schemes in game. In a smaller, simpler game I’ve found that the sound and music to-do lists are far more manageable. For example, they can be organized and tracked with a “flat” spreadsheet rather than a large “relational” database.
On the other side, there are many similarities. One of the most important is the need for organizational practices and clear workflows to enable everyone to stay on the same page. While much smaller than a AAA title, Indie games like Ale Abbey are still richly complex projects. So defining, pursuing, and achieving agreed-upon goals requires excellent methodology, coordination, and communication. An important aspect of this is a sound list that not only lists the needed sounds with a description, it also supports tracking the status of every sound in the game such as “in Fmod”, “delivered”, “implemented”, “issue”, “final”, and so on. It’s been a real pleasure working with Emiliano, Yannis, and everyone on the team. Our team uses Discord as a kind of forum-like platform. It supports development communication and also a good amount of clowning around (critically important!), and has a way of forming a virtual in-person gathering despite everyone being in different places, even different countries!
- Speaking of your experience, some people believe that too much experience can sometimes keep you inside a creative box. However, you used your experience as a springboard while working on Ale Abbey, ending up creating something fresh! How do you stay creative and “break the mold”? What advice would you give to other creatives looking to do the same?
As a classically trained student of Western music history, I’ve always been intrigued by the music of the Medieval and Renaissance ages. At that time, there was a marked difference between sacred and popular music forms. I like to imagine music in ecclesiastical settings versus a band of merry minstrels on a street corner. The latter style (John Dowland being a lasting composer in this realm), is especially endearing as it combines simple, relatable melodies in arrangements that are both instrumentally diverse and structurally fulfilling. The use of more “serious” compositional techniques like counterpoint, imitation, hocketing, counter melody, and motivic development are all in force in this perhaps deceptively simple genre.
More fun have been the occasional choral passages that broaden the Ale Abbey world and remind of us our setting and time period. I have been so excited to compose a score in this style, mostly because it calls for memorable melodies arranged in an ancient ensemble, with time honored polyphonic song writing techniques. What’s not to love!
So all this has automatically led to a fresh approach to music making on my part – I had never composed a score in this genre before. Given these aspects and challenges, the Ale Abbey world I’ve wandered into is a new and inspiring world to be sure.
- Lastly, let’s talk beer! You’ve been sharing some fantastic brews in the team’s Discord server recently. Is there one you’d highly recommend?
I’ve always loved beer, and I appreciate the subtle differences between different cultures and styles of beer. When I was young, my brother and I brewed beer but we never got very good at it. This kept us brewing mainly heavy porters and stouts because clarity and subtlety were never within our ability! We’d add everything under the sun to the wort, you name it – molasses, fruit, chocolate, anything with sugar that the yeast could devour and do its thing. Hence we called these beers “rumcakes”.
Now one real resident genius in our midst is Emiliano, the creative director of Ale Abbey. He’s an expert brewer not afraid to take on any style of beer or ale, bottom-fermenting, top-fermenting, a clear lager just as well as a dark porter, and everything in between. I always enjoy our talks about brewing and have a mind to get back into the craft myself.
We can definitely vouch for these ones ;)
That's it for the QnA!
Thanks again to Clint for answering all of our questions and Yannis for writing this article! See you all tomorrow for our next stop, the release of Ale Abbey in Early Access!
- Ale Abbey team
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2789460/Ale_Abbey/