Making a Horror Adventure Game: The Soundtrack
The guys asked me to write a post on how the Alpha Polaris soundtrack came to be. The events of Alpha Polaris revolve around a massive ion storm and an ancient evil presence. Trying to express this through music was going to be a challenge, so I wanted to create a soundtrack that would mesh well with ambient sounds like howling wind or radio static. This called for a very low-key approach to composing the tracks. Also, you can often spend a lot of time in one area, and the music can end up looping quite a few times, so I didn’t want the music to stand out so much it would become annoying. I’ve heard comments about the music along the lines of ”you barely notice the music, but when you stop to listen it’s actually pretty cool”, which makes me really happy.
We wanted to convey a feeling of a beautiful arctic environment, but with a melancholic undertone. It was thus hard to find a better reference than Vangelis’ Antarctica which can be heard in the instrument choices of the more cheerful tracks. Alpha Polaris is also heavily influenced by The Thing, so it felt natural to include some atonal elements in the more intense parts of the soundtrack.
There are four basic types of tracks in Alpha Polaris, let’s call them cheerful, melancholic, mystery, and tension. Cheerful tracks are played early in the game when everything is still relatively fine and the horrific events are yet to unfold. I used bright synth pads, bells and clean guitar to establish an airy feeling to the sound. As the game progresses, and characters start experiencing stress from the events, the music also becomes more melancholic with string sections and piano replacing the bright synthesizer sounds.
Mystery consists of a specific set of tracks playing during events or puzzles involving the core storyline. The idea was to link important events and make the player pay attention when the music changes. Tension tracks are more ominous in character, foreshadow major dramatic events, and establish a sense of urgency during moments of danger. Dissonant elements, noise, and distorted sounds were used to make the point that the current situation is clearly out of the ordinary.
Getting the music to play properly also turned out to be a hurdle. The tracks were composed with seamless looping in mind. To get perfect loops I copied a section from the loop point and crossfaded it with a similar part in the end. This was fine in theory, but the loops kept breaking when converting to .ogg format. After much hair pulling the culprit was found to be a 3rd party codec that added couple samples of silence to the end of every encoded track. Lesson learned.
As a bonus for the musicians/gearheads reading this, I managed to find a photo of the setup I used back in 2009. The soundtrack was composed on a laptop running Sonar 8.5. For sound sources I mainly used Roland V-Synth and Fantom S synthesizers, and the fantastic Spectrasonic Omnisphere software synthesizer.
All in all, composing music for Alpha Polaris was a very interesting project. I was initially only supposed to do music and sound design, but also ended up doing art and programming which allowed me the luxury of iterating the music over the months. I feel this had a huge positive impact on the end result, and I hope you guys like the soundtrack. You can listen to some of my favorites using the Soundcloud player below.
Mikko Heikkilä (Raudanjoki)
