Hey everyone!

This week, we wanted to give you all a bit of a deeper dive into our development process, specifically, our audio and music development.

Music is one of the most important aspects of video games; it grounds the player into this fantasy world, and makes them feel a part of the adventure and story as it unravels. The triumphant highs, painful struggles, and cataclysmic events that transpire in a video game all need a fantastic score to go along with it. 

Luckily for us here at Azure Ravens, we have an amazing composer in Josie Palmer, who has been hard at work composing, orchestrating, mixing, and mastering our music.

Over the last few weeks, we have been working with her on developing the identity and theme for Ravenwood, as well as the initial main track for the game, which we hope to share with you all very soon.

As we design this identity, we discuss what kind of mood we want to invoke in the player. This is a game of choice after all, a game of adventure and possibility. Therefore, this must be at the forefront of our thoughts when designing the audio identity for a game. Working with Josie, we sat down with the rest of the team and developed a mood board. While different tracks will invoke different emotions and feelings, the identity and theme of the game must remain true to what we want the players to feel at all times; freedom, adventure, excitement, just to name a few.

After finding out the mood and emotions we want the music to emanate, Josie begins creating melodies using her piano that invoke those same feelings. Often, she will use both text and lyrics as rhythmic devices for the instrumental track. These melodies then are reviewed with the entire team, and from there we agree on the direction of the main theme for the track. Then, Josie expands upon the theme with colorful orchestration, often times experimenting with different instruments and audio samples, which will make up the sounds of Ravenwood.

Once she finishes developing the track, it is once again reviewed by the team. From there, the track enters the mixing and mastering phase of development, where Josie will adjust levels of the mix, so that all the right musical lines are heard at all the right times throughout the track. As of right now, this is the stage Ravenwood’s main theme is in, and we are so excited to be able to share it with you all soon.

Finally, when the track has finished being mastered, it is approved one final time by the team before considering it completed and both “Game Ready” to be added into the game engine, and ready for all of you to enjoy!

We hope you enjoyed getting a bit of deeper insight into the design and development process for our music and audio. We cannot wait for you all to hear the outstanding music being created here at Azure Ravens, and look forward to sharing more about our development process with you soon.

Want to keep up to date? Follow us at https://wefunder.com/azureravens/