Hyper Light Breaker is the highly anticipated successor to 2016's Hyper Light Drifter, Heart Machine's hit action RPG that boasted stunning pixel artwork, a renowned soundtrack, and challenging combat. This time around, Heart Machine is taking Hyper Light into the realm of 3D and introducing rogue-lite elements that encourage repeated playthroughs, with players facing various new challenges in each run.

Game Rant sat down with Joel Corelitz, one of Hyper Light Breaker's composers, and Alex Johnson, Hyper Light Breaker's audio lead, to talk about the game's music and sound effects. They went in-depth about their creative processes, the challenges they faced when creating sound for a 3D successor of a 2D game, and the experience of working within a smaller indie game studio. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

RELATED: Hyper Light Breaker Announced With 3D Graphics and Online Co-Op

Q: How do you approach making the soundtrack of a Hyper Light Drifter successor? Were you frequently making comparisons to the original’s soundtrack?

Corelitz: I think that is very much at the top of our minds because we want it to feel related, we want it to feel in the same universe, but we don't want to draw so heavily from it that it doesn't feel like it comes from an original place. So I think it's really about taking the overarching sensibilities that make it feel in the same family but creating something that feels really unique to Hyper Light Breaker.

We had a lot of conversations early on about what made something sound “Hyper Light,” which is kind of an all-encompassing term. Once we had a basic understanding of how that felt, once we had a design language and a musical vocabulary to understand what that meant, then we started to figure out “Alright, now what makes it sound like Hyper Light Breaker?”

I feel like about a year in, we've got a pretty strong musical design language so that between Troupe and myself, we’re able to speak the same language to the point where a lot of times we'll play the game and we'll be like, “Did you write this? Or did I write this?”

Johnson: Yeah, especially now that we have some stuff like dovetailing and cross-fading. We're getting the implementation to a point where it's this fairly well-blended cohesive whole. And that's where it's like, “Wait, did that thing end? Or is it still going?” and that's kind of amazing because it's going back and forth between the tracks that Joel and Troupe wrote.

How do we approach Hyper Light Breaker from a sound design standpoint as a successor to Hyper Light Drifter, and how do we make it related but make it its own thing? There was an immediate need to do that because Hyper Light Drifter is a 2d retro-looking and feeling game and had sounds that had a lot of “wear” to them, it felt more “Lo-Fi” in presentation than what really works in 3d and 3d space.

hlb_screenshot_1

Johnson: Different frequencies travel with different amounts of power, so if you are 100 feet away from somebody, their voice is not going to have the same chest depth that you get up close. The mids travel far and the lows and the highs behave in different ways. Since sound is a concussive wave, the lowest frequency that you can hear is something like 18 feet long for something like a 20-hertz wave, so you need an 18-foot wall to block it.

My point is we start by plugging in a whole bunch of sounds, and so we plugged in all these Hyper Light Drifter sounds, and it just didn't feel right. So it's been this adventure to figure out how to make something feel worn, but make it feel like it's in a world. Where do you put any kind of bit crushing and stuff on sounds without them sounding like the presentation is Lo-Fi, like your speakers are the thing that are bit crushing?

You want it to feel like it’s this enemy that's making the sound sounds that way, but it exists in a real space, and that's what you're hearing. That's a challenging thing to figure out, while it also has to sound like Hyper Light Drifter. But you can't solve these things in the same way.

Q: You used the term “design language” regarding the game’s score. What are some of the “vocabulary words” in Hyper Light Breaker’s musical design language?

Corelitz: That’s a great question. Like so many musical things, it's hard to put into words. It's easier to express, like, I could play you something that I felt is “Hyper Lighty.” It's a combination of heroic and tragic, and desolate, but also beautiful. And I think it speaks that language. There's using texture, and more drawn-out textural phrases, rather than melody and chords. The way it's constructed, I think, is very much about these broad strokes that just wash over you as a listener.

It's really conducive to the kind of game that Hyper Light Breaker is because it's a rogue-lite. It's meant to be played many times for potentially hundreds of hours. And so that style that's really drawn out, but still detail-oriented, lends itself very well to repeated listens.

RELATED: Hyper Light Drifter Devs Reveal New Solar Ash PS5 Gameplay Footage

Q: How do Hyper Light Breaker’s audio and sonic characteristics stand out from other games?

Corelitz: I think that's one of the things that we've been finding along the way. I feel like our soundtrack has come together in a way that it really feels like it's coalescing into something that's much more than the sum of its parts.

Johnson: I actually do feel like this is more unusual, the way that things are being constructed, melodically and texturally. Something that we are doing from an implementation and timing perspective – which I think is really interesting – is there's a challenge to this kind of game where you have a lot of randomness and variety.

You don't know what path the player is going to take, you don't know what they're going to do, because it's a game where you can really take any direction you want. There's so much freedom, and there's variety, the world is always different. We don't know how long somebody will be somewhere, we don't know in what order they will do things, and so if music and sound is something that happens linearly, and you have it completely follow everything, then all you're doing is reacting. So it's like, “Oh, this thing happened, and so this started, now you're hearing this. Then this happened, and so now you're hearing this.”

We're trying to, whenever possible, be predictive and move where we're doing that to say, “We know that this thing is going to happen, so 20 seconds before we're going to do this, we're going to do this.” We’re looking at any game data that we can to determine the status of the game, like how many enemies are around me or if my teammates died.

Basically, by asking questions about game states, I can give us an idea of what may have happened, or maybe what is going to happen, and create anticipation. And so I think that, because we're putting a lot of thought and a lot of caring into that, I hope that that ends up being something that feels special because people will be able to play a game that is unpredictable each time, but the music isn't just reacting to that unpredictability. It's part of the thread of it.

hlb-screenshot-2

It sounds like you guys put a lot of focus on making the music responsive and reactive to what’s going on in-game.

Corelitz: That is very much where we are right now in the development process. Because I think, from a compositional standpoint, a lot of what I'm doing now, a lot of what Troupe’s doing, too, is very much based on the system that's in place. There's so much going on in Hyper Light Breaker. One of the things that we figured out was that too much activity in the music often doesn't feel right. There are certain times for that, there are certain times for intentionality. A lot of the time though, it feels right to have the music be ambient and expansive.

The problem with ambient music – and I don't mean to make a gross generalization here – a lot of ambient music is designed to blend into the background and doesn't have as much perspective for that reason, because it's not meant to. It's ambient.

But I think our score, even though it's ambient, is the most intentional ambient music I've ever made because it knows exactly what it is. It abides by this design language that we've cultivated. So it knows that it's Hyper Light Breaker, and it is constructed in a way to work with this musical system so that it is designed to feel totally intentional, without being too reactive, because I think you can go too far that way.

I'm really, really excited about those two systems, the creative side and the technical side which we are both here to represent. And of course, there's plenty of crossover too. I'm really excited about the way it's coming together.

RELATED: Hitman 3's Roguelite Freelancer Mode Pushed Back

Johnson: Something that I'm starting to think about a lot as I'm finalizing this part of the system is thinking in terms of “hard reactivity” and “soft reactivity.” Soft reactivity is something that you could back out of if there's proximity to something like a special location or specific enemy or something. So you'd say, “When there's this enemy, we want to play certain music,” but we don't know if the player is going to move toward them and then move away. We don't want to start it and then have to think, “Okay, well, now how do you stop it?”

Maybe you think in terms of an intermediary, or maybe the thing that you're already playing has the capability to become more tense or something by just changing some mix values. Then when you get to the point where you are certain, then you can trigger a more definite change. This way, you can sort of fake the intentionality. Five seconds before this thing happened, we started playing this music, but that's because at that point, we really know, but it sounds like we’ve known for 20 or 30 seconds as you were approaching. We're looking for every opportunity to do that kind of stuff now.

hlb-screenshot-3

Q: You’ve both worked on an impressive array of titles like Halo Infinite and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. How has working on Hyper Light Breaker differed from your past projects?

Johnson: It's an interesting thing to work on a “big small” game. Heart Machine likes to do ambitious games. We tend to look at it like, “We can do this, but then also, what if this? And also, what if this?”

If you look at Solar Ash, it’s a full open world with 3d gravity that can wrap you around everywhere, and there are no upgrades through it, so you start with your full kit, and also, the bosses are a mile long. So you start with something simple, like, “Oh, let's skate on clouds, or fly through space” and then you end up there.

We are making a big complex game with a small team. That's not an impossible thing to do, but you have to apply a lot of thought to how things happen, what should be made, and where you should focus your energy. In big complex games, there are a lot of options, so you have to make smart decisions, and then get through it with a small team. But that means that you get to think big picture and solve big problems that are usually handled by large teams where you bite off a small piece. I get to work on these really interesting things by myself, and that's fun to put together.

hlb-screenshot-4

Q: Were there any particular tools or synthesizers you favored when working on Hyper Light Breaker’s score and sound effects?

Corelitz: Each of us has our favorites in terms of the tools themselves, and I think a big part of every score is defining the building blocks and the palette of what creates the score: the best way to express all the sensibilities that we talked about. Early on, we were looking for unique ways to express those things.

One instrument that we've relied heavily on is this piano called the Una Corda. We have a sampled version of it, but it's a piano that has no cabinet. It's got exposed strings, it's only about four and a half octaves, and every note has only one string as opposed to a traditional piano which, for the middle notes and higher registers, has a few strings.

So it has a piano-like quality, which made a lot of sense for the themes that we wanted to express and the instrumentation we wanted because it has an organic, natural feel. It almost feels like a higher-tech version of a piano in some ways, but it also feels like you can really hear the medium. It has a delicate, kind of exposed, vulnerable quality to it too. So that's an instrument that is in a lot of pieces of music that we've composed, between Troupe and me.

I think in general, we like using tools that work the sound in interesting ways. So tape emulation, tape saturation, and tape wow and flutter. That's an effect we've used a lot because it makes things sound kind of old. You can take a synth sound and apply tape to it, and it makes it sound kind of like an undiscovered remnant of this lost society, which is this really cool combination. Of course, tape emulation is nothing new, but I think the way that we're using it, and having it be a really big part of the sensibility of the score is a significant component.

RELATED: Indie Roguelike Astebros' Three Heroes Offer Playstyles for Everyone, Say Devs

Corelitz: And then for me – and I think this goes for all of us including Alex's sound design work – we create all of our sounds from scratch. I have nothing against presets personally, but because Hyper Light Breaker’s score is rooted in ambiance, I felt like all those sounds deserve to be created from scratch, just to really dial in and express those in the language that we've talked about. I'm a big synth nerd. I've condensed my collection a little bit, but modular stuff has been great for this.

I actually build a lot of poly synths with modular sounds where I'll build an interesting sound, and then we'll auto-sample it. I'll sample each note five times over the course of 30 seconds, so I can create pads and things I can play polyphonically. Because as you may know, Monosynth, all modular stuff is typically modified so it's fun to geek out with that stuff.

The theme in the first reveal trailer was played with an instrument like that, it was a modular sound that was resampled polyphonically and it’s like a balance between strings and brass almost. It's a Karplus algorithm.

hlb-screenshot-5

Johnson: On the sound design side, I tend to stick with all software because you'll work on something, and then you want to change it like six months later, so you want to be able to just open up the session and have all of the sources of creation there.

Much like Joel, there's a lot that we get out of synthesis for the sound design, so I have been using Kilohearts Phase Plant a lot, which functions somewhat like a modular synth, but it's like a blank slate with modules, and you snap them in, and then you can link stuff together and put effects on the output. You can drive any of the knobs with audio followers and modulators, there's a bunch of different LFOs, or envelopes that you can apply to things, and macro knobs.

You can design a sound that is really interesting because these parameters change in the core of how it's made, and then map that to a couple of sliders and hit a button, and slide them around. You can get these really interesting shapes, like non-musical stuff for making sword whooshes or something.

The tools are high quality enough nowadays that you can get to the point where you’re making something that actually feels very resonant and real and completely actualized even though it's 100% synthetic, so trying to find a blend of organic sounds is something that has been a fun challenge.

hlb-screenshot-6

Q: How do you approach creating situational and ambient music for certain environments? Do you play through the level and think about what would be musically appropriate?

Corelitz: From an overall perspective, it takes a lot of time. And it takes a lot of just living with ideas that we've already created and iterating on them. We play every week, at least. I mean, we all play on our own, but the whole audio team gets together every Monday and we play the game, and we talk about it. And we're like “This feels good. This doesn't feel good.” That’s basically the takeaway from our discussion.

Then we go in and we fine-tune stuff. We fine-tune implementation, we’ll re-compose things, we’ll compose new things, and we’ll throw things out. At this point, I think we've gone through enough iterations that we have no issue.

I think composers, in general, are resistant to killing their darlings, but at this point, I think we're ready to just get rid of stuff that isn't working in favor of stuff that is. We've been really active the last couple of days. Alex has been recording game capture and showing it to us and we'll be like, “That feels good.” You know, and just sort of going from there. I think it has to because it is so tied to the intention and the function of the game. There is no way to evaluate it other than playing the game and just living with it.

Johnson: I'd talked earlier about how the game has variety. Game audio is something that happens over time, a WAV file is completely linear, it’s one thing that gets drawn over time. So when you’re playing the game, you think “Man, the music feels really good at this moment.” Then you think, “Okay, well, what is it that's really lining up? What is it in the game experience? What is it in the music that matches right here?”

And then you have to rewind like 30 seconds and see how it felt at that point, and what can you do to identify these moments and identify how to land as many of those as possible. It feels really good for that one second, you really have to think about 20 seconds around it so that it doesn't suddenly bring you in and then suddenly take you out. As we play, as we think about it, one of the most valuable things that we do is identify “Where does this work? Where does it not? Is that something that we have control over?”

hlb-screenshot-7

Q: Most musicians are familiar with the concept of “happy accidents.” Were there any instances where you unexpectedly discovered an interesting idea?

Corelitz: What comes to mind for me is because of this design language we've been talking about. There is a real impressionist sensibility to the Hyper Light universe, in terms of the chords and the musical sensibilities that are used.

And that lends itself to a lot of polymodal harmonies. What's really fun about that is I can sit down at the keyboard, and I can be like, “I want to play a D minor, seven sharp” or whatever, but what's great about working sort of in a polymodal universe is I can also just put my hands on the keyboard in a way that feels interesting, and then play a bunch of chords, and see what happens and not think about them. They might be in four different keys and might not technically work together, but they feel good together.

To me that's really exciting, being able to hit record and have an improvisational quality to the music. And I think that's something that I touched on earlier. There is really an improvisational quality to the musical sensibilities in Hyper Light Breaker because I think a lot of it is because of the spontaneity combined with the intentionality of the musical system.

We want it to feel like it's being composed on the fly. In order to do that, there has to be some spontaneity. There's a passage in a previous game, Solar Ash, where I just played a bunch of chords for a bridge. I have no idea what chords they are to this day. But I was like, “That is a really weird chord progression, and I'm totally keeping it.”

RELATED: Cel Shaded Roguelike Ravenswatch Gets Early Access Trailer

Corelitz: I think for me, they're not exactly accidents, but they are uncontrolled experiments. It may sound absolutely terrible, in which case, it's really easy to just hit the delete button. Or, you know, I think I think a lot of times the happy accident that comes about as a result of this process is when I don't hit the delete button. When I'm like “Hey, that actually sounds kind of cool. Even though I have no idea what it is.” I could analyze it and use my musical theory knowledge, but I like to turn that off whenever I can. So I turned it off.

In some ways, It's kind of like slow, ambient – I don't want to say jazz, because it's such a genre – but feels in a lot of ways related to that space. If Debussy was a synth geek and played ambient music, it might sound something like our score.

Johnson: We've been solving for big moments and things that happen, and then trying to solve what happens in between. So we've settled on this music system that we've built and brought online a couple of days ago, internally, where we have these “buckets” of an instrument, with like six or 10 phrases played on that instrument that are like seven seconds long and then play those randomly, and there's like six of these buckets. Then we can control the volume of them independently.

We're working toward making this randomized yet intentional-sounding ambient bed to fill the space in between where we know we can play bigger, longer, more intentional tracks. So that's the music system. That's all happy accidents.

hlb-screenshot-8

Q: Do you have any particular sound effects or tracks in the score that are favorites of yours or that stuck out to you?

Corelitz: We developed a theme in the first trailer that I'm still really excited about. It's rare that that happens when you write a theme for the first thing that ever gets unveiled. A lot of times themes take a long time to develop, but I think because we had the lineage of Hyper Light Drifter, and Solar Ash, which shares a lot of sensibilities, we were able to come up with something that felt like Hyper Light Breaker pretty early. We had something that felt adaptable that we can use to express different aspects of the universe.

There's a lot of stuff coming together. I hesitate to say too much about it because I guess time will tell if it ends up in the final product. I think we've gotten really good at feeling it out, but I have a certain amount of I don't want to say detachment – because I'm very attached to the ideas that we've created – but only if they really serve what the game is going to end up being. So hopefully it'll stay in and if it doesn't, we'll have something that works better.

Johnson: For sound design, something that I did recently that I've really liked is I approached all of the deaths and teleports from one place to another and responding and all of these things as one family of sounds. I hit a whole bunch of these big momentous shifts in game state, and I really felt like that was the moment where everything that I've been doing came together. I'm pretty sure that those are gonna show up in their current form, and I really love them. You'll hear them all the time.

RELATED: New RPG Has Sword That Punishes You for Having a Powerful GPU

Q: On the subject of detachment, you mention that sometimes things end up getting cut. How often do you have to abandon a song that doesn’t fit? How do you reach the decision to cut something?

Corelitz: That's the real job of being a composer. Everyone that hears our work hears the final product. Our real job, our secret job – I teach music for games classes and this is one of the things we talk about – I feel like my real job is to communicate and turn a bunch of conversations about the game into something that sounds like the game and belongs in the game. What that means is generally at the beginning of a process, the front end of a development process, we're still very much finding what the game is. And that happens on every project I work on, even if we find it quickly, even if it's a spiritual successor like this, we have to find it.

In the beginning, you're just generating a lot of material that only exists to get you to where you're going to end up. A bunch of stuff ends up on the cutting room floor. For me, the more I work and the more experience I gain as a composer, the less attached to that material I am. That was just a means to an end, it got us to where we need to be. I might like it as a piece of music, but really, the only thing that matters when you're composing for a project is whether it fits the project.

If it doesn't fit the project – it might subjectively be the best piece of music ever, doesn't matter – if it doesn't feel like the game, it's getting cut. So I think generally you produce more of that on the front end. Then hopefully, as you progress, you know what you need to write, and you can just draw the straightest line from point A to point B. Every time you sit down, that doesn't always happen. I think the other thing about being a composer that's challenging is you have to edit and evaluate as you're creating. For me, that's the hardest part of my job. And it's the part that's taking the most practice.

Johnson: It's a little bit different on the sound design side as far as feeling like you're killing your darlings, because, at the beginning of a project, you're fighting this uphill battle to figure out how to make sounds that work in this space, and you end up creating a lot of things and filling the whole world with things that don't belong together, because you haven't found that voice yet.

And then, toward the end of the project, it all starts to make sense. It took me two weeks to do sounds for this character, and now I can do characters in two days. But you're also running out of time to actually go back and address all that stuff. So there are things that end up shipping out where every time I hear it, I cringe because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know where I was headed.

You get to a point eventually, where it's got its own voice and it starts to tell you what it needs to be. And we're at that point, we've been at that point with Hyper Light Breaker for a while now, where it really feels like when you're playing this game, it has an identity. There's a greater whole to support. I love when a game speaks to you, and I just want to give it everything that it deserves and help it have a stronger voice.

hlb-screenshot-9

Q: What does a typical workday look like for you as a sound designer? When you need to make a sound, how do you get started and what’s your process for sculpting a sound?

Johnson: Different people approach it in different ways. The smart thing to do is to look for the biggest moments and support those first, and then you have your anchors and then you can build some sound around it and figure out how to lead into it. A lot of times I will have things going on in the back of my mind and so I'll work on the more subtle aspects of the sound first, and start to explore. I like to do that because there's a lot of creative room in this project. We have to do things that don't just sound realistic, but sound interesting, and that means a lot of the sound design process is really heavy processing and heavy effects usage, more so than I would do on almost any other project.

What I'll do is in Reaper, I'll have my library open and then when you're demoing sounds from the library they’ll pipe through any tracks that you choose. So I will set up a track and I'll be working on “What effects can I have?” I start looking for heavy rock impacts and put them through distortion, then a compressor, then a resonator, then reverb, another compressor, and then a delay, and now I’ve got this huge thing that happens when I play that. I'm gonna go through my rock impacts and find one that fits with that.

When I'm looking at either a bigger moment or a smaller moment I’m designing my effects and then trying things through them. I think the hardest part of sound design and probably composition, too, is ear fatigue. You dial in the compression for a drum, and then the next day, you're like, “I can't hear it.” Because you took it way too far. So when you're working on a sound that's like two seconds long, or even 10 seconds long, like weapon impacts or UI sounds or something, it’ll drive you crazy, because you listen to it over and over and over.

You have to take breaks and go stand outside and do a breathing exercise or something, and then come back and try to have fresh ears. Like if you know what the target is, if you can hold in your mind exactly what you're trying to make, once you have the toolkit in mind, making stuff is easy. It's the thinking about what should it be that is hard, hard to think of, and hard to hold on to.

hlb-screenshot-10

Q: As musicians, are there any skills or techniques you’ve developed through working on game audio that you might not have picked up if you had only been working on more typical records?

Corelitz: That's a really good question. For me, it's the overarching skill of being critical, and keeping something on the rails. But not letting that hamper the creative process is such a delicate balance, because like I said before, the only thing that matters is “Does this fit the game?” And specifically, does it fit the specific moment for which it's being composed?

If I'm sitting there and picking every single thing I write apart and evaluating it, I'm never going to write anything. It can really get in the way, so some of it is just ingraining that mentality and having it in the back of my mind. That skill is not even a musical skill, It's just a critical, creative thinking skill, but then it applies to everything that comes out of me compositionally. So for me, that's, that's what it is. It’s reconciling everything, but then doing it in a way that still feels inspired and creative.

Johnson: That’s a really good answer because mine is “You can EQ and saturate anything.”

RELATED: Acclaimed Roguelike Inscryption Gets PlayStation Release Date

Q: Do you have any advice for musicians who are interested in working in game audio? What should they know before diving into this field?

Corelitz: To me, I think the only thing is just to keep showing up. You have to love it enough to keep showing up. I wanted to do this for a long time and it took a lot of time and patience and I think the only thing that you can do is just be persistent.

Johnson: The main thing to give advice on is to remember that games are a collaboration, and you have to find fulfillment in that collaboration. The whole point of making the game is that you're working together with a bunch of people to make something that has its own identity and lives on and there's a way to approach this that is healthy and a way that's unhealthy.

I think it’s really important to remember that. You have to be interested in doing all that. You have to be interested enough to continue showing up, but you should not do that in such a way that is detrimental.

Having dedication to games doesn't mean working until 2AM every night, because it's a job. Having dedication to games means that the things that are really interesting about making games are not necessarily what somebody thinks from the outside at first glance. What's really interesting is how you collaborate with people, so enjoying that process is something you have to be on board with.

hlb-screenshot-11

Q: People learn something new every time they create. Is there anything you guys have taken away from your time working on Hyper Light Breaker?

Johnson: I've gotten a lot better with synthesizers. Not being a composer and coming from a sound design background, there's a lot you can do with editing and doing some synth design when you need to.

With this project, I'm hitting up synthesizers and building things from scratch. When I feel like I need to stretch and do something new, I’ll pick up a new one and very quickly become acclimated to it, and make creative, unique things out of it. It's been an honest-to-God level-up for me and I'm really thankful for that.

Q: How do you hope players will react to Hyper Light Breaker’s auditory experience?

Corelitz: From a musical perspective, I hope that it stays fresh with every run. That's what we're really thinking about. We hope that players notice new sounds, new combinations, and new pieces, and get excited when they hear their favorite piece come back in an interesting way. We hope the system that we're working on and the music that's used in that system stays fresh and exciting for their whole time with Hyper Light Breaker.

Johnson: The player experience is different from watching a movie, it's not a passive thing, it's an active thing, and much like a movie or book, your goal is to have the person empathize and feel like they are the character, that they are feeling the same thing at the same time as the character and feeling the strife, the desolation and heroism, and all those things in the soundtrack that are being knocked out of the park.

The sound design on this project is somewhat easy because the music does so much heavy lifting for the vibe and the vibe is so important in this game. I really hope that we land those moments and those things connect and people actually get emotional and feel reactions to the game.

[END]

Hyper Light Breaker is set to release in Fall 2023 on PC.

MORE: Have a Nice Death Interview: Devs Talk Story, Character Development, Lore Creation, and More