Project Dreamscape's Soundtrack Story: A Lesson in Scope, Style, and Studio Teamwork

Brynn Peters and Daniel Foulen are the audio producer and project manager of the audio team, respectively, on Project Dreamscape, this year’s video game created by Studio Aspen, or EGD’s AAA simulation studio within its Fellowship program.

Funny enough, landing these leadership roles within the studio was not something either of them had expected at all, but it ended up being incredibly rewarding.

“I kind of thought I was going to be on the 3D or tech art team, but being a project manager was really really fun, and I realized that I already had a lot of other experience in coding, narrative, design, and tech art, but I was really missing stuff in management… You can understand what everybody else is doing and align scopes and deadlines and really look into their ideas and understand them,” Daniel stated about their thoughts on being in a leadership role.

“I've done music production before, and I've worked in music my entire life, but this was really different for me, especially because I came in just being a member of the audio team, and a month in, I got put into the producer role out of nowhere. I was also new to the program in general, so it was a lot, but I really do enjoy it,” said Brynn.

Their roles involve checking on the audio team to see how they’re doing and coordinating with other departments to understand the direction they’re taking with elements of the game, as well as planning around that.

“I kind of have to just go in and find animation clips, gameplay clips, talk to different leads about what types of sounds we want, what kind of movements different characters or enemies are going to be having, what environmental factors there are, and use that along with playing the game and talking with other leads about how the mechanics are going to work to determine what the best course of action for creating specific sound effects is, specifically about what kind of vibe we want from the game; something more silly or something more serious. That also helps me direct for score composition, and in general, what sorts of instruments and sounds we're going to be using,” Brynn explained in regards to her work as a producer.

For both leads, their time in Studio Aspen was their introduction to working in an AAA environment, and it was an excellent way to master collaboration. 

“I’d say the best part of this AAA environment for me is learning interdepartmental communication: effectively talking to Programming, Narrative, Art, etc. We need to make sure the assets align because we have to get the size of the golem to understand how weighted we want the sounds. Then, I have to talk to Programming to understand how we’re going to implement this, how we’re using flags, what our combat loop is, how our soundtracks should look, and all of those different aspects of our deliverables and making sure that we keep on track,” Daniel said.

When brainstorming early ideas for the music in Project Dreamscape, Brynn and Daniel had previously planned to go down a fantasy-themed, grandiose route.

“Originally, we had this giant, scrawling notebook page of all of the ideas and inspiration sources we wanted to draw from, and we were like "Yeah, we want the game to have this really big, epic-sounding score!”. We wanted it to sound really gorgeous. We were throwing in Skyrim, Hollow Knight, Breath of the Wild, and all these really big scores and instrumentations that we were going off of,” according to Brynn.

However, they soon realized that this wouldn’t fit too well due to the game’s smaller scale and how certain functionalities within the game ultimately worked, so they needed to make changes.

“We were working off of concept art, but then the concept art was programmed in differently, modeled differently, and the size of the tiles changed from the player size, and so we had to work from that and start doing audio. It was more into the middle of the season that we started having concrete details to work off of,” Daniel recalled.

“I think it was also helpful to realize that not having such a big scope is okay. This game is not as huge as all of the others we were pulling inspiration from, and it was really good to sit down and look at some other games that were smaller in size, had a smaller map, different mechanics, and not this big, open world, high fantasy stuff,” Brynn noted.

Project Dreamscape is a game developed by audio designers of unique abilities, each of whom brings their best foot forward into the dreamworlds, which everyone should check out on Steam.

The audio designers of Studio Aspen, each equipped with unique abilities and levels of experience, all put their best foot forward to create an awesome, one-of-a-kind soundtrack for Project Dreamscape! Give the game a go on Steam and listen for yourself! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3569570/Project_Dreamscape/ 

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