An Interview with Disasterpeace: the composer behind Fez, The Floor Is Jelly, and Hyper Light Drifter

Ever heard of Rich Vreeland?  Even if the name sounds unfamiliar, chances are good you've heard his music in games ranging from Fez to Shoot Many Robots.  Better known by his pseudonym Disasterpeace, Rich has written original soundtracks for several games.  His latest project, Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, released in July.

As a huge fan of Rich's work in The Floor Is Jelly, I used this interview to discuss that game in depth.  But don't worry—we also talked about his creative process, the unique musical choices in Famaze, his massive update to Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, and, of course, his plans for Hyper Light Drifter.

If you would like to listen to the interview in its entirety, check out the Youtube video below.  Otherwise, feel free to read the transcribed highlights.

You’ve worked on a wide variety of games spanning from Shoot Many Robots to Hyper Light Drifter.  How do you decide the tone of the music for these games you're involved in?

It's definitely not a one step process—there's a lot of factors that go into it, a lot of back and forth dialogue between myself and the developers.  We'll talk about the game, about the aesthetic, about the goals.  Then there's typically a process where I go into my lair and cook up some musical ideas.


On Shoot Many Robots, most of my music concepts were done on that guitar because that turned out to be a logical aesthetic to move into.  So a lot of ideas came out of acoustic guitar riffs and things like that.  More recently, I've done a lot of concept work at the piano.  That has been in parallel with purchasing a piano, which has been a nice thing to have.  I've been practicing quite a bit, and trying to get better at that.

When do you typically join a project?  Do you like to see a playable build before committing, or are you generally on board with early concepts?

Typically, I join a project after the initial early concept period.  Well, sometimes I'll join in name before actual builds are out—but I tend to get down to the nitty gritty around the time the first playable build is coming through.  There's a lot of concept work that can be done before that, such as establishing tone and aesthetic.  But that only gets me so far, and being able to play a game that is somewhat far along allows me to make more informed decisions about how the music behaves, and the relationship of the music to the game's art.



Your most recent game, Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, just had an audio update.  Is this something you plan on doing for other games, or was it just for this particular game?

That was definitely a one time situation.  Ideally, I like to finish my work before the game comes out, but in that particular case I had a lot of things going on and I fell a little bit behind schedule.  As the game released, and I was playing it and everything, I was not totally happy with the amount of material in the game. I decided to go back and spend the next month writing a bunch of music.


When the game came out, there were about fifteen minutes of music.  A month later, when this big update came out, we quadrupled the amount of music to an hour.  And that felt nice.

The original music covered the bare essentials for music in a game.  Basically, there was music in all the places there needed to be music.  But there was very little variety, so what was happening was that there was this game that took a few hours to play through and you've only got about fifteen minutes of music. That's like one song per twenty levels. It was putting a lot of demand on each of those pieces of music.



I really thought it was important to flesh out the variety of music in the game quite a bit, and that's what I did.  There are a lot of tangential levels and content in the game, and I went out and created unique music for all of those. That definitely helped a lot.  I also created alternate versions and new tracks to use for the main levels.

So overall, the amount that was expected from each track went way, way down.  I think now the game plays a lot better.  The funny thing, of course, is that in the reviews for the game I don't think anyone mentioned the music being repetitive.

Let's talk about The Floor Is Jelly.  I love how the music transitions from incredibly relaxing to highly stressful.  How did you go about designing the songs to match the stages?

Yeah.  There's a clear arc in that game where the levels are very naturalistic and then at some point things start to get pretty abstract. When you reach this world in outer space, you start to encounter glitches and from then on there is a lot of glitching in the game.  

I tried to capture that in the music as well.  I would say the approach for that was a two-fold approach.  First, there's the idea of capturing the emotional quality of the levels.  In the early stages of the game, most of [the gameplay] takes place outside on a sunny day, on a quiet night with some crickets, or in a rain storm.  And, you know, all of that music tries to capture the emotional content of what the player might feel.  Some of the early stuff is more laid back—some of it is happy.  The rain music is very melancholy.

So that's one facet of it, and the other facet is trying to mimic the physical aspect of those levels.  A great example of this is the music in the rain levels.  The music actually mimics the physical manifestation of rain.  You have rain drops hitting surfaces—which creates all this pitter-patter, all these plinks.  The music seeks to do the same thing.  All the musical notes pitter-patter in a very similar fashion.

And this carries on through the later stages where, in outer space, things are big and quiet at times, and then built up.  When you encounter glitches in the game, the music glitches as well.  And this carries through to the final level—which, if you've played The Floor Is Jelly, you know is totally insane.  It's one of the most bizarre gameplay experiences I can think of.  And the music is pretty weird too, so I think I accomplished what we set out to do with that.

Some of the levels in The Floor Is Jelly require the player to go underwater.  Doing so muffles the music in an interesting way.  How did you create this effect?

That effect is all baked into the music files we're using in the game.  When you're above ground, there are no added effects.  When you go underwater, there are some additional musical effects added, but there is also reverb, delay, filtering, and sonic shaping to create a different environment.


Those two tracks exist in parallel so that you can crossfade between them seamlessly.  Of course, the actual crossfade happens when you hit the water and start to go under.  That crossfade is masked by the sound of your character splashing into the water. Together, that hopefully creates a cohesive experience.





I have a few questions about Famaze.  Although I enjoyed the music, I noticed long pauses between songs.  Why did you decide to include gaps between each song?



Yeah, that was a choice I made consciously.  I wanted to do something different with this project.  Overall, the project didn't really turn out the way we wanted it to.  It took a long time to finish, there were a lot of personnel changes, political problems...the list goes on and on.  That said, the game we ended up with is still pretty good.

Musically, there's—well, I should point out that the experience of the game really breaks down into these two distinct sections.  The first half of any level is you as the character moving through the maze, interacting with objects and enemies.  What you're trying to do is find a key which will allow you to open a door and progress to the next level.  So that's the first half, and the second half is once you get the key and now you have to find a way out.



I really wanted to tap into that idea with music.  And the way I did that was that each level has its own theme song. [The theme song] usually lasts about a minute, a minute and fifteen seconds or so, and then it withers away slowly.  In some cases the player will already have found the key and in other cases they'll still be looking and they won't hear music for a bit—maybe five to ten minutes. 

But once they find the key, the music picks up again and you hear character music.  You could play as three different characters in Famaze.  You could play as a warrior, a rogue, or a wizard.  Each of those characters has a theme song, and those were generally a bit longer.  Each of those was about three minutes long. That piece is supposed to represent the journey you've just been on as well as some kind of dopamine receptor, some kind of reward for finding the key and being able to progress to the next level.

I wanted to explore this totally different way—well, not totally different.  Just something that would be more interesting than having a loop. Especially when you're dealing with a procedural level, and the amount of time it takes to play through that level can vary greatly.  Looping music can get repetitive very quickly.

All in all, I think the system works as intended and it works well.  The one area where I think it would be more effective would be if we added environmental sounds into the game.  That way, when the music dies away, you're not left with no environmental sounds at all. Because that can feel a little strange at times, and I think [environmental sounds] would have been a nice glue to really marry everything together. 

And finally, onto Hyper Light Drifter! A couple of days ago I saw a Twitter update from you that read: "Figured out the theme for Hyper Light Drifter on the piano today.  It's some Gilgamesh level stuff. Feels good man." What kind of music can we expect to find in this game?

There's some of it floating around already—there's a combat video on Youtube that has some very atmospheric, synthesizer music.  There will certainly be a lot of synthesizers on this score.  There will be some overlap with Fez, but it's going to have a different character to it.  It's definitely going to be a darker, more rounded sound.  More analog, in a way.  I'm also exploring using thematic material more heavily than I did in previous projects like Fez.  Fez has a couple of themes, but they only get used sparingly and I'd like to try and focus more on that.  I think it's an interesting challenge and I think it has a lot of benefits.






Hyper Light Drifter is going to have some different modes that will play out very differently, and I am going to approach the music very differently for some areas.  Some areas will be more like side content, and those will have more energetic music.  The music for the campaign is very cinematic, and I've been spending a lot of energy trying to get into the right headspace to create music for this game.  A lot of the music is turning out to be very impressionistic, in a way.  Very much inspired by composers like Ravel, Satie, Debussy—so yeah!  You can expect some cool stuff!




One last question: what advice would you give someone trying to get into the production of video game music?

I would say that you've got to be yourself. You've got to lean into the things that compel you, the things that drive you.  But you've also got to try stuff and make mistakes—it's all part of the experience and the journey of getting to where you might want to go.  That journey doesn't have to end anytime soon because there's always turnover, things are always changing...it's a back and forth process of listening with yourself.

Outside of that, as far as more business-related advice, definitely be visible and go to public facing events. Go to conferences, go to meet-ups in your area (if you're fortunate enough to have those).  If not, there are "game jams" which are a great way to meet developers and to work on games with little to no overhead.  And if you live out in the sticks, well, the Internet happens to be there and there are a lot of Internet centric game jams.  Ludum Dare is a good one.

So yeah.  The world is your oyster.

If you are interested in listening to more of Rich's music, you can visit his website here.  He's also big on Twitter, Facebook, and Soundcloud.  

For more interviews:

Follow @LiteraryGaming