Into the Depths: The Music of Mutazione — Part 1
We are delighted to announce Into the Depths: The Music of Mutazione, a four-episode podcast in which Douglas Wilson talk to Alessandro Coronas (Music and Audio Design) and Nils Deneken (Creative Direction) about the music of Mutazione. Here's more from Doug:
The series is being released in partnership with Eggplant, a podcast about making games. Episode 1 is live, and we’ll be releasing each subsequent episode every two weeks.
I happen to be one of the four co-hosts behind Eggplant, but we didn’t originally plan to co-publish the podcast. These recordings were initially motivated by the three of us wanting to “debrief” on our work together on the project. After all, we had worked on the game’s music systems for ten years! (Off and on). We figured it might be fun to share those conversations with the public, as a kind of historical document, while also teasing some unreleased music drafts. A podcast felt like the perfect format, since we could intersperse our conversation with fragments of music.
Originally we were going to title the podcast The Radio Tower, a reference to the various radio towers in Mutazione (as you might remember a couple of them from one of Kai’s dreams!) Here’s a logo Nils drafted for it:
As we got close to publishing the episodes, my Eggplant co-host Nick Suttner suggested that the show would perfectly fit our “Into the Depths” show format — an alternative stream of the main Eggplant podcast in which we spend four episodes focusing on one particular game.
There’s no way we could capture the full story of the development in just four episodes. After all, an entire team beyond just the three of us had worked on the game, for years! But I was personally interested in diving deep into the craft of one specific aspect of the game. I’m not sure how many directly actionable lessons we have to offer, especially given that we had the luxury of iterating on the music for so many years. But I do hope the episodes give a usefully specific look at the art and craft of making a videogame — or at least an important piece of one.
In Episode 1, we discuss the early history of the project, and play some music drafts that didn’t make it into the final game. To accompany the episode, both Alessandro and Nils have released Spotify playlists of music that inspired their work on the game. There are some really excellent recommendations on those playlists, don’t miss them!
Over the next three episodes, we’ll cover the garden music, the evolution of the town music, and all the other moments of story music throughout the game.
Big thanks to Alessandro for painstakingly producing these episodes, as well as to Nick Suttner for editing them for and publishing them via Eggplant. We’ll post when the next episode is live, but you can also follow us on Twitter at @gutefabrik, or Eggplant at @eggplantshow.
