Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars Preview

Arranging the music

The actual arrangements of the music took roughly four months. We had literally spent eight months in pre production. Once we had Les Claypool's music in hand, a few gigs worth of studio source, student instruments, and a near fully playable game we began the true composing and arranging. It wasn't the optimal way to go but we got to actually see the context in which we were creating for, which sped up the process significantly. Oh and Bob wrote an Epic final boss track a week before we were done!!

For the voices we knew from the beginning that we didn't want English dialogue. We felt it would take the player out of our surreal world and make it too "Saturday morning". We originally contemplated going with an Animal Crossing approach (tiny voice bits played back in Engine based on text display) but after Okami (a GREAT sounding game, just never liked the voices) we chose to get voice actors to mimic a fake language. My friend Chris Sabat got the actors together. Chris has been a voice director for a long time and is an incredible voice actor himself. Chris helped direct the actors based on early dialogue that Eric Brach had written and we pieced together phrases to make up the language.

Extra effects

The sound design for Mushroom Men was a very organic process. I said earlier that our original approach simply didn't work. We ended up approaching the traditional elements by attempting to create iconic sounds. Our final result ended up being much more representative than realistic. Pax's heal sound was originally a temp sound for a mini game. It's a short nod to the 8-bit days and the more I heard it the more I liked it. The same is true of the resurrection and death sounds for Pax (which Kidko/Bob did) the death sound isn't too punishing and the resurrect sound is very refreshing. The damage sounds were actually incredibly easy to make but to come to the final conclusion took forever. In a game the damage sounds are often some of the most frequently heard sounds within a game. I tried the traditional damage technique but it simply got annoying. We ended up recording a drummer friend of mine (McKinzie Smith of Midlake) and running his drums through a series of dub FX. Once that source was there it was the perfect element to mix with the more traditional damage sounds.

The creatures in Mushroom Men were a good mix of recorded voice actors mimicking the creatures and a Kyma patch which triggers samples based on volume and pitch. Kyma is a dedicated sound computer made famous by Ben Burt of Star Wars fame. This technique has been done before (I've done it on a game that I won't mention but it rhymes with Petroid Mime Free) but it was definitely the route to go. We were extremely limited on memory and I really wish that the creatures felt more alive but the most important aspect is there (player feedback). In the end the creature sounds did their job and the player can definitely distinguish between a pain sound and an attack.

I mentioned earlier about the world sounds or environmental sounds before we moved to Austin we had made a few trips out in to nature (one was at a camping bachelor party,,, woot) we armed ourselves with Fostex FR2's and captured a great amount of source. Again we sat on the source until we had the context of the game in mind and once the pieces fell together we began creating. Our process for the world sounds is unique to this game. We took our source recordings and placed them in Ableton Live. Using the warp markers we created rhythms out of all of the individual sounds and placed them within the world. Jeff Lake (programmer at Red Fly) created a way in which we could place an emitter (an object that emits light, sound, or FX) and put it on beat starting on whatever measure we wanted. This allowed us to make techno beats out of crickets and place them amongst the grass near where Pax travels. We later extended this to working with the particle effects designers (Dustin Dobson, Damon Waldrip) by giving them source sounds to create fx to.

We fought a lot of battles during the production cycle, thankfully it was mainly with technology. The Wii is a great and unique platform but it does have limitations. In the end you can never create a perfect experience because you'll always face so many difficulties; time, tech, communication, etc, etc. All in all though, Mushroom Men has been one of my favourite experiences working on a game. It's fun, the people involved were great and the audio got attention from the programmers and designers which is pretty rare in this industry. I'm gonna go make pancakes now.

Mushroom Men - Rise of the Fungi for the DS will be available across North America & Europe from November, 2008. Mushroom Men - The Spore Wars for Wii will be available across North America & Europe from November 2008.