A Dev's Life: Matthew Florianz

In this Interview Matthew Florianz speaks about his work and the sounds of Spellborn. Enjoy the reading. Here we go.

Who are you and what are you doing for Spellborn?
My name is Matthew Florianz and before I started working on games I used to be a composer of ambient music and a graphic designer. I think this combination eventually got me the job to doing all the sound related work for Spellborn. In the past years I have spend a great many hours mangling sampled baby cries into sound effects, which my colleague's liked so much they promptly put me in a separate cage… I mean cubicle. As you can see from the picture we're knee-deep into crunch-trouble so I can't leave the room to shave or go visit the barbers. One time the level team let me help build a zone for Ringfell which was a lot of fun to do.

What makes the sound in Spellborn special and unique?
I think the fact it was done in-house during the entire course of production makes our sound fit the Spellborn universe very well. Although I wouldn't go as far as saying it's unique and special as most of the sound I really like is stuff I heard done very well in other games. I think my best work is somehow related to the experiences from playing games with really well thought out sound. Half Life (both of them actually), Halo (the breathing sound in the flood-breeding chambers is such a brilliant and elegant idea), Unreal, Quake (Trent Reznor is the mood and suspense in that game). All of those games used sound to create something beyond what is seen, adding an extra layer of depth. Whether or not you actually understand or can analyze why it works, it does.

To return to the question a little more, what we as a company, more precisely, a group of creative individuals, do very well, is avoid assumptions or at least always re-examine them. Instead of going for obvious technical solutions and paths thread, especially during the starting phase we tried to find more creative means to solve the puzzles and pitfalls of game creation. As the Dutch saying goes, he who is not strong has to be smart; Spellborn is not such a big company with a huge staff. So we have always needed to make choices, and choices mean you include certain options at the costs of others. In our case it meant that every member of the team has a relatively huge influence and responsibility towards the final game and as a result I think we took a few more risk, did things slightly different from the usual and made a game that somehow captures the imagination.

For sound this meant that I choose a system for streaming multiple ambiences based on where the player is presently located in the world. That choice meant I wouldn't get an advanced 7.1 mixer or hardware-filtering. I think that sound has to make an impression through it's quality and depth first and not the technical means of delivery. A bad sound design is still bad with all the bells and whistles of surround and filtering. So the focus was on filling the world with sound first not how the sound leaves your speakers. Of course, we still have 3D sound and positioning and that's not to say I wouldn't love to add stuff like hardware-filtering, but that can be done at a later stage if the basis is good. The other way around it’s much harder to achieve.

What makes the sound in Spellborn unique compared to the FPS games that I worked on, is the fact I could add a layer of care and attention that might not be noticed in the first instance, but is completely geared towards people who will invest a lot of time in our universe. The beauty of creating an MMO is the subtlety that it allows for. I think from that perspective you can understand why I choose the option which would facilitate that thought, instead of the one which would mostly just add a feature to the packaging.

Subtlety means that our ambiences are background sounds, helping the lighting, shadow and colour to set a certain mood. If you don't pay any particular attention to it, it doesn't jump out to much. But being subtle also means that when people do take a little time to listen to the world, there has to be something to hear. Those background ambiences will be heard as not entirely static:
“Standing in the fields that meander out into the forests of Hawks Landing (the starting area) the crickets become less noisy when the wind starts to go through the leaves of trees in the distance. A bird might fly up in distress making the entire field seem a little cooler. Slowly, as the wind dies again, the crickets come back in.” Technically what you hear is only a densely layered stereo sound file but the placing and perceived interaction with the visuals makes it sound as if the world around you is producing all these noises. Everything becomes a little livelier than it is from a purely analytical point of view, after all, that bird you hear is nowhere to be seen for instance. Or, to keep the suspension of disbelief, always seems to fly up behind you.

You could say one of the things we hope to achieve is that the traditional MMO player will leave their sound on. And for those that disagree with my work, we have a lot of options to fine tune the sound to their own liking in the sound mixer. Of course as soon as someone touches the volume settings I will get their avatar name and will come look them up with my dev-pimped overlord ;-)

What is the approach of the sound in TCoS?
Well, taking the above about ambience's and subtlety into account, the approach is to let sound be less and more important according to it's significance in the game. We don't have looping music because we think it has little added value to a game where hours upon hours are spend in the same area. Therefore we decided to use ambiences instead.
Now this will sound a bit odd for those of you who really enjoy music (as do I) as it is used in games such as World of Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls. Our initial idea was to play music only once, when you enter a new shard, but many beta testers asked us to play the music more often. Therefore I changed my earliest assumption to accommodate this wish as they had some good points to back their request up with. So we now play music slightly more often, every half hour in a zone or whenever you travel between an indoor and outdoor environment.

With regard to significance of sound; an area where you will spend a lot of time (a forest) has a natural sounding ambience. This means most of what you hear is sound that such an environment could produce. Rare area's, where you won't spend quite as much time (say a high house, or an instance) feature sound that might not be coming from the surroundings at all, but is more about setting a certain mood or atmosphere.

The loudest noises in the game are combat sounds, spells and effects. I tried to keep the ambient approach for background sound in mind and went for distinctive yet not so much it would become annoying sounds. The different (arch)-types of magic for instance have their own base colouring so you probably will start to recognize the types after a while.

Jesper Kyd made the Soundtrack, right? How did he help you?
Well, the short answer would be that he helped me by being himself.

I think a lot of movie and game producers make the mistake of hiring a composer and only then begin to think about the music. In essence, they'll have a composer re-creating what is called a temp track, which is existing music that is used to give an idea to everyone what kind of sound they are going for. I have been an avid collector of film music for a long time. And over the past ten years, the creativity usually associated with writing for film has become scarce. Nowadays every fantasy score you hear sounds somewhat like what Howard Shore did for Lord of The Rings, even though his approach was to a degree very original when he wrote the music for the series and everyone else was still copying Trevor Jones (The Dark Crystal), Danny Elfman (Edward Scissorhands) or even John Williams (Indiana Jones).

We weren't going for that type of relationship with our future composer as we didn't want to create a world and use one of the most powerful emotional tools in storytelling (music) to lip-sync to another game or even setting.

When we started looking we did so by going over what we knew and how the style of these people would fit our world. I had always wanted to have an electronic score for Spellborn but I suppose there's only so far innovation and being original will take you. It's never been an intention to use innovation in an elitist way and scare people from the game. “Hear our 80's German Electro band; Nagelbett do Spellborn...you don't understand what Fahr, Fahr, Fahr, on the Autobahn and the Oracle have in common??? Tough luck kid, you obviously didn't get it!”, well there's ideas and than there's the reality of their execution, I had to take both into account. Still looking at movies, Vangelis was a name that popped up as did Tangerine Dream.

When I played the game Freedom Fighters (one of those lucky accidents that I would play it during this time) I heard Jesper's score and it immediately clicked. That was the kind of music that would probably work very well for our setting. Our combat designer Coen Neesen also has a big hand in the final choice for Jesper. Hearing more of his work it was clear that Jesper's bridged the gap between full electronics and fully orchestral music. His combining of electronic and acoustic instruments would be the mix for Spellborn.
My reasoning was that a world as colorful and lush as ours would not have been helped with a big orchestra and choir. Using the obvious would have stated the obvious and would have made everything too sweet and in my opinion, very two dimensional. That's not to say those moment's don't exist in the final score but everything is always some sort of mix between small and grand, electronic and acoustic sounding.

Once we found our man, all I really had to do was talk about where we thought we needed music. Then we talked about where exactly the music would play in the world, giving Jesper a bit of background story.
Jesper would come back several days later with something that would be spot on and very well fitting to the world. It's not until you have heard one of his tracks a few times that you begin to hear the many layers hidden within, he really took that whole what lies hidden thing to heart and understands very well how music in an MMO is perceived, as opposed to say an action title. That whole subtlety thing again.

Jesper's an immensely creative guy with a big imagination and he knows exactly how to bring an emotion in such a way it doesn't overstate itself. He's also a fan of video games and that's not unimportant for a composer of one of these things. I really have been very lucky that he agreed to work on Spellborn as it has, by the quality of his work, made my job so much easier.

How do you work? How is the sound/music created? Do you have an example? Do you simply use sound library or human voices?
Most of the sounds in the game are created from sample libraries that we purchased. So basically we are using the exact same “basic” sounds that most other games and movies have used also. Next to samples there are also synthesizers used to create effects. For those that understand terms like Korg and Roland, I used a Korg x5 and Wavestation and a Roland 1010 for the musical effects and ambience's.

For the creatures we did indeed use human voices. A lot of the staff have been lending a hand with these and I have done a few monsters and critters myself also. For those critters (the non lethal cutesy animals) I had originally wanted to use human voices only. The idea was that it would make them sound different from the dangerous wildlife which have all been done using treated animal sounds.
When I tried to do the cows, cats, dogs and sheep in a similar way it didn't work, we all know exactly what a dog sounds like and saying “woef” into a microphone was just too big a leap, for the imagination to follow.

But a hoppy on the other hand, would you know what they sounds like?
I think that we have found the answer so you know whom to blame if they annoy you.

Another such a critter is the Tanuk. I absolutely adore how our content writer Vincent Leeuw voiced it. The creature, by merit of the sound, has a dopey character. I actually get a little upset over it's death cry as he sounds so confused and sad when it happens. I don't think real sounds would have given the critters as much personality as the voices have, though, and this goes back to the beginning of the interview, sometimes you have to choose what's better for the imagination over what would technically be more precise.

What was the hardest and easiest sound to create?
Honestly, I wouldn't know anymore. The hardest part in any creative process is when you start to understand why things work and others don't. That's the moment where the work is no longer a series of intuitive decisions. It's the moment where pesky side-effects like “wanting to be better” or “quality is important also” come mess up the flow of production. That phase started a good year into production and moving beyond it, to a combination of working intuitively and knowing why things work was the hardest part of the process. You have to constantly balance between what's good for the game, and what is simply just “showing off” and that gets hard when you have been looking inwards for such a long time.

The last two years have been very smooth for me and in that time most things I tried or did came rather easy, especially the ambience's which are very close in approach to the music I was making before asked to do so for Spellborn. I'd say ambiences are definitely the easier part.

One very tough thing to do that does spring to mind is the sounds for when your statistics change (buff, debuff). It was almost impossible to create a layer of sound that had to inform yet was at the same time competing with the sound effects of combat itself. In the end, we decided that the layer of sound signifying status changes only added confusion, so, we left it out.

Another sound that was really hard to create was the sound you hear when trying to execute a skill that cannot be executed. An example of such a skill would be a ranged attack on an object close by, or when your chosen skill is still cooling down.
That sound had to be like a “no” said in the way the owner of a dog that has a dog which listens to their owner, would say. Yet, saying “no” in such a way wasn't a pretty “no” to listen to, in fact, it was an annoying “no”. So I choose to have a sound which is annoying to be in the game and that bugs me a bit. Even though it does work perfectly well in saying “stop trying to spam, it doesn't work”.

What part of the game are you proud on the most (besides sound)?
The mood of the world, how it feels and grows after a while of playing, is something I haven't seen or played before. There is a feeling of familiarity, at the same time though, not one where you begin to anticipate what's coming next, because you have done it all before.
I love the pacing which is, uncommon in our attention span free society, rather slow. There's not a whole lot of combat in the first few levels, and the path you thread is rather linear at first. It's a dangerous choice that our game design team took, as the risk of loosing people because it doesn't smack you in the face right away is there. But it is precisely because the game takes it's time to set up pieces that a few hours into the game you begin to feel the rewards of playing all the more.

The pep system is also absolutely brilliant and I really liked my experience with it. It's a system where kills will give you pep (player experience points) and if you have enough of that, you rise a level which will permanently add to your base states. One of those base states is your physique (morale and concentration are the other two), which means at pep level one you raise your physique and can run faster, among other things.

Although we do not reward players for grinding with regular fame (the name for xp in spellborn) you can use it to build up your pep. There's a catch though, although we don't punish you for dying (no loss of items, degradation etc.) you do loose some of your pep and that could mean running slower again. It makes combat a bit more risky as pep is something you don't want to loose. Although it's accumulation does not cost you anything since it is a sort of by-product when doing combat related quests. It's an elegant system that is fair and rewarding to all classes of players. For those wondering, rising in levels in Spellborn (ding!) is done through completing quests, the story is after all an integral part of the game.


What part of the game are you proud on the most (besides sound)?
It has to be the combat. The fact that the team chose, right at the beginning, to make the core-gameplay less about the interaction between statistics and strategy and much more about actions/choices/strategy puts you a little closer in the action with your avatar. You're not telling the avatar to do something, you are the one doing the work, dodging enemy attacks, choosing the right combination of skills.

The skills, especially in the beginning, aren't hugely important in deciding defeat or success for you, but after a while when movement in battles has become second nature, they can bring yet another layer of depth, planning and strategy to the fight. It's hugely rewarding to be able to think up a different strategy, perhaps even changing your skill deck accordingly and find combinations that suddenly give you more of an edge.

That the entire team has managed to do this in a way that does not require years of FPS experience is something I am very proud off. Though, it is a different way of playing an MMO, and people will be given time to ease into that. Of course all the other elements, the fantastic storytelling, the gorgeous setting, the music and the lore are all part of that combat experience. Without a reason to fight, there is no reason to win.