Hey there! I'm not listed as an "official" answer guy person, but my name's Fredrik Häthén and I wrote the music for the game. :) I don't know if Jesper (the sound designer) will pop in and add his 5 cents, but I'll tell you a bit about the music process!
For FORCED, it's been an interesting ride for me as a composer. I stayed at the old BetaDwarf house in Karlslunde for a week in 2012 and got a feel for the game, and I churned out a couple of early battle tracks (the game was very different from what it is now!). Then I stayed in contact with the BD team through Skype - I live in Sweden, and even though it isn't THAT far to Denmark it was still impractical for me to ride the train back and forth a lot (although I have visited their new office a few times!).
The main challenge for me was to lock down what the music of this game was supposed to sound like. The BD team had a very good idea of what they wanted, but I had to give it a few tries before we found something that worked. Since the game's look and feel changed quite a bit during the dev process the music had to follow suit. The main theme of FORCED happened almost by accident - I was writing the menu track and when I sent it to the team I got a lot of good feedback on it. That lead to a re-write of the track and in that re-write the theme just sort of introduced itself. :) My personal preference is to come up with a couple of themes (or motifs) first of all, and now I had a good melody that could follow the player through the story.
I continued writing tracks for the game and sending what I'd written to the team, got feedback and did re-writes. I also did a couple of on-the-fly tracks for promo videos, and the deadlines were always pretty tight - not that I mind, I had fun, but it could get a bit stressful! :)
Once we had a very good idea of the full story, and a good idea of the areas and scenes that would be in the final game, I went over to the BD office and we began discussing a final list of music tracks that would be required. Then I basically went back home and started hammering away at the list, in order of priority. I had a very, very tight deadline at this point and didn't have a lot of time to write the music, but I work well under pressure, so I pretty much just went on trucking! When you don't have a lot of time you're forced - ahahaha - to work on instinct, and you can't always abandon ideas you had halfway through because there is no time to rewrite anything. So I came up with ideas during the night when I tried to sleep, wrote them down, started writing when I got up and then threw the tracks at the team as soon as they were done. :)
I wanted to make sure that each area, and each guardian, had their own distinct music feel to them. As you'll probably notice, the guardians' themes are prominent when you fight them, for instance (and the final boss battle is sort of an amalgamation of all of them, plus the main theme of FORCED). Since I handled the recording of all the voice acting in the game I had a very good handle on the different boss characters and I tried to instill their themes and battle tracks with as much of their personalities as I could.
I hope that answered your question from the music side, at least! If you have any more specific questions about the music in the game, please tell me and I'll try to answer them the best I can. :)
SakimotoFanboy5 karma
Hey there! I'm not listed as an "official" answer guy person, but my name's Fredrik Häthén and I wrote the music for the game. :) I don't know if Jesper (the sound designer) will pop in and add his 5 cents, but I'll tell you a bit about the music process!
For FORCED, it's been an interesting ride for me as a composer. I stayed at the old BetaDwarf house in Karlslunde for a week in 2012 and got a feel for the game, and I churned out a couple of early battle tracks (the game was very different from what it is now!). Then I stayed in contact with the BD team through Skype - I live in Sweden, and even though it isn't THAT far to Denmark it was still impractical for me to ride the train back and forth a lot (although I have visited their new office a few times!).
The main challenge for me was to lock down what the music of this game was supposed to sound like. The BD team had a very good idea of what they wanted, but I had to give it a few tries before we found something that worked. Since the game's look and feel changed quite a bit during the dev process the music had to follow suit. The main theme of FORCED happened almost by accident - I was writing the menu track and when I sent it to the team I got a lot of good feedback on it. That lead to a re-write of the track and in that re-write the theme just sort of introduced itself. :) My personal preference is to come up with a couple of themes (or motifs) first of all, and now I had a good melody that could follow the player through the story.
I continued writing tracks for the game and sending what I'd written to the team, got feedback and did re-writes. I also did a couple of on-the-fly tracks for promo videos, and the deadlines were always pretty tight - not that I mind, I had fun, but it could get a bit stressful! :)
Once we had a very good idea of the full story, and a good idea of the areas and scenes that would be in the final game, I went over to the BD office and we began discussing a final list of music tracks that would be required. Then I basically went back home and started hammering away at the list, in order of priority. I had a very, very tight deadline at this point and didn't have a lot of time to write the music, but I work well under pressure, so I pretty much just went on trucking! When you don't have a lot of time you're forced - ahahaha - to work on instinct, and you can't always abandon ideas you had halfway through because there is no time to rewrite anything. So I came up with ideas during the night when I tried to sleep, wrote them down, started writing when I got up and then threw the tracks at the team as soon as they were done. :)
I wanted to make sure that each area, and each guardian, had their own distinct music feel to them. As you'll probably notice, the guardians' themes are prominent when you fight them, for instance (and the final boss battle is sort of an amalgamation of all of them, plus the main theme of FORCED). Since I handled the recording of all the voice acting in the game I had a very good handle on the different boss characters and I tried to instill their themes and battle tracks with as much of their personalities as I could.
I hope that answered your question from the music side, at least! If you have any more specific questions about the music in the game, please tell me and I'll try to answer them the best I can. :)
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