Belinda Coomes talks music and Malys!

MAY 14TH: KICKSTARTER DEV LOG

Note: These posts were written for the Kickstarter campaign that ran April-May. Some information may be outdated or incorrect. Always read the latest updates to be up to date on Malys!

Hi everyone! 

I'm Belinda, the composer for Malys, here to share a sneak peek of some of the music in Malys and talk a little bit about making music for games!

So, how did you become a video game composer?

I prefer to play games rather than watch TV and film. When I was young I'd rent a game every weekend and there was a Ninja game that had some incredible music. I remember I had to give the game back on Monday, so on Sunday I got a little tape recorder and recorded the games theme. I loved the music so much I wanted to listen to it again and again, whenever I wanted to. I also adored MYST. It wasn't so much the music, but it was a game where it was a world unto itself - it was so different. It was my biggest 'oh my god, games are amazing' moment. 

I didn't set out to be a composer. I was like "I want to work for NASA!" because I loved space science! I was always playing games, sure, but I didn't really twig that I could do music for games for a really long time. When I was young, I wasn't very good at communicating. I was really shy, so I used to just go and play instruments as a way to release how I felt. I didn't really know how else to describe how I was feeling. I played a bunch of different instruments over those earlier years. I played the saxophone for a long time and discovering jazz was really exciting to me. I knew composing was a thing, but I didn't know anyone that was a composer. Even though people in Hollywood were doing it, I didn't know anyone doing it here. 

So, I went to university and got a 'proper job' and worked in corporate IT for a number of years. I would be sitting in my cubicle at work trying to pretend to code and have music going around in my head. I'd run off to the bathroom with my phone feeling like a weirdo to try and record the ideas. I'd come home and I'd try and play them and mess with them and then go back to hearing them at work again. I always heard the music, but it's the skill of getting it out of your head which takes a long time to learn. 

I got to a crossroads in life - I had been at this company for almost ten years and realised I could easily be there for another ten. I'd saved up some money, we were talking about buying a house, and I just thought - what if I don't do that? What if I just give myself like a year or two It was really scary. I had to ask myself, what kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be Belinda the engineer? Or do I want to be Belinda the creative and the composer? 

I pretended to take some time off from work and said, I'm going on a holiday, but I didn't - I stayed home. You never know how it'll go when you leave all those safety nets. I wondered if I'd get depressed and watch Netflix all day, but I realised I loved it. I loved it so much I probably overworked, initially. 

My sister helps me randomly pick a date on the calendar, where I closed my eyes and jabbed at a date and it was like that's it, that's the day I resign. I found the games industry locally and just sort of knew from there. They're my kind of people - engineers and nerds and people who'd worked in software. I just felt like I fit in with that.

It feels like second nature that I'll play a game and I can understand what the music's doing here, what the goal is. Post-production is what I really enjoyed. I started a course on it as I tried to transition out but then realised that ultimately, I just needed to get out there and do things. There was a whole world of post-production out there for me. Seven years later, here we are!

What's challenging about being a composer?

I've learned so much about my work just from the internet and my peers - I hired a mixing engineer to teach me some things which was super useful, but as a composer, you have to teach yourself a lot of the time. Unlike being in an office where you can learn things by osmosis and if you don't know something you can ask someone, you don't get that as a composer. If you're stuck, sometimes you're really stuck.

Improving your skills, knowing the next step to take, figuring out what's involved in those steps is the hardest thing about developing a career in this industry. There's lots more information out there now, lots more composers doing content about it, which helps a lot, but finding the information that you specifically need can be tricky! 

Why work on Malys?

I was so excited to get the email from Liam, especially because I didn't think Summerfall would do a darker game. When I got offered the gig, I got a little nervous - you know, the last game was Stray Gods, it did really well, Summerfall had Austin Wintory on board who's amazing at what he does, and am I going to be compared to that?! I don't actually have imposter syndrome, but I was nervous about the potential expectations, and knew there might be an additional one because of the achievements of Stray Gods and especially it's music, but I wanted to try!

I don't believe in saying yes to all the projects. I want to find the right projects for me, that I want to do. I really enjoy writing dark music for dark games. Honestly, I'm not necessarily interested in writing happy music. It's just not in my heart! I'm from the 90's and it was emo, and grunge, so I don't know if that's why, but I do believe in writing the music that's in your heart and being true to what's in you. That kind of music just fascinates me for some reason.

Regardless of what everyone says, the artwork speaks a thousand words, and the whole journey writing the music on Malys has been me being inspired by the artwork. Ben's distorted demons have been really cool to look at and use as inspiration, and the idea of the game and the idea of it being exorcisms was really cool to me creatively. 

Then, there's also the team! I got a sense that there would be good people to work with, and seeing Stray Gods and what had been achieved was exciting to me. The project was a yes, the team was a yes, and obviously getting paid was a yes! So it was an easy yes for me to get involved. Once I got working on the project, I got more and more comfortable and excited - everyone on the team has been so kind, and supportive, and I got to figure out how everyone worked and how I worked as part of that.

What does your creative process look like?

There's never any one answer, it just depends on the team. Initially after speaking to David and then looking at the art bible, before I'd seen anything in game, I thought I would do one thing with the music. I thought it'd be cool to go and do more prepared piano stuff and get more live recordings, but when I started seeing the artwork, my thinking changed. 

I ended up watching a lot of exorcism movies and most of them have an orchestral score. I was playing an exorcism and I was like, what's this feeling, because I felt like it needed to be a bit contemporary in some way. I'd had this idea for a sort of 'pulse' vibe, and I ended up watching a movie called Sister Death. It actually doesn't have a lot of music in the film, but at the very end there's this track that has a similar pulse energy going on - a weird feeling, but it was working. I got the pulse nailed down, then found the track through experimenting with chasing that feeling. 

I often go and do my own research, listen to music, play the game with other music behind it just to see how it feels. I'll often storyboard with notes - I like the pulse here but not there, I like this slow moving section and let that marinate. Then I improvise - going back to my jazz days - I might spend a couple of days just brainstorming and coming up with ideas and trying not to judge what I'm doing. I'll come back the next day and try and listen to it as though I've never heard it before, not from a composer point of view, but more objective about what works and what doesn't. 

Often it's less about what someone does want and more about what they don't want, which also helps define tone and sound. David didn't want a purely orchestral score, nor a purely horror music score, and not too many big drums, and not rock, etc etc. It's kind of like a piece of clay. You carve away based on what's not wanted, and then keep carving and carving. Once you've carved enough away and played with some different things, you never quite get to perfect, but you can get to an 85% level of confidence. That lets you put it in front of the creative director and they'll either go yep, giving you validation for the next one's direction, or not quite, and you can adjust.

I'm always trying to connect with the game - I'll compose by having the game up on one screen and my composition app on the other, so I'm kind of playing the game at the same time that I'm composing and looking at the visuals. I spend a lot of time jumping between programs, so I might have written a bit of music and then I'll go and play the game and rinse and repeat. The music has to be a character, not necessarily the hero of the game, so it's a lot of back and forth with myself to get the balance right for what the game demands.

It's so much easier to write the music for a game later on when lots of the decisions have been made, but the start you're deciding what instruments you want to use, what the sounds are, what's the style. The more tracks you send over that get accepted, the more you understand the creative director's ideas. 

Can we hear a sneak peek of the music?

Absolutely! Enjoy!

What's it like writing for horror games - where do you get inspiration?

I use the Evil Within 2 as a reference, I love the music for Outlast and Outlast 2. Music in horror games is so amazing and experimental. I like sitting in my room manipulating sounds and coming up with tones. That's like that's my ideal day and horror allows me to do that.

For Malys, I always really liked the idea of static. It's sort of an ache - a broken connection. So I was always trying to add a tinge of static or distorted, fuzzy strings. I wanted there to be this question of where is this world? These distinct moments between the city or the exorcism. You won't hear actual static really in the soundtrack, but that sense of connection not being right was interesting to me. 

You learn things on every game but I think that the difference is always what's the world and how are you going to describe this world. I always think about music in triangles. I've got three  dials that I blend it's like a Venn diagram. So you've got the more kind of horror-ish, the more kind of orchestral, and the more kind of contemporary static distortion. I'm always asking the question of where am I in that - not going too far to any one edge, but playing within the shape.

It depends on the story, the art, the creatives involved.  Every game is different - that's the joy of the discovery. 

Belinda