NintendObs Asks: Deniz Akbulut on the music of CrossCode and Project Terra.
"I am super thankful to Felix for trusting me to make the entire soundtrack." A NintendObs Dailies exclusive interview.
Luther from NintendObs Dailies:
How did you come to learn music, and how did you and the CrossCode development team first meet and decide to begin working on what eventually became CrossCode? From my understanding, this is your first original soundtrack, a long one at that especially for an indie game, all on your own no less, yet it feels like you've been producing 16-bit soundscapes your entire life. How did your first production turn out to be so professional, varied, and quite frankly so epic?
Deniz Akbulut:
When I started making music, I only had piano lessons. So, most of what I knew about composition and harmony theory etc. was acquired without a teacher. I would try to dissect music and analyze those, play them on the keys, try to reconstruct them on the DAW, which still is a great way to expand music production knowledge for me. I did enter a music college very recently and it's great to finally have teachers and access to so many books and facilities to properly get trained into a musician. My musical intuition is unchanged, but the training and knowledge I have now makes it easier for me to express myself the way I intend to.
When I started making music around 2005 (I was 12 years old at the time), I was also very interested in RPG Maker games and would try to make my own games. I was part of a couple of German RPG Maker communities back then, in one of which I met Felix Klein. Back then, he was known as the creator of two of the most popular German RPG Maker games, "Tara's Adventure" and "Velsarbor." I remember I would just add him on MSN and tell him how much I liked his games and how I would be very happy to collaborate with him one day. That kind of approach wouldn't work today, but we did actually become good friends. There weren't many people in those communities who would also make their own music for their games. At some point Felix asked me if I wanted to make music for a game he was planning on submitting for a "Game Boy style" competition. I agreed, and that was so much fun! The game itself I thought was ahead of what people thought was technically possible. Felix is a computer scientist and he can just bend the limited RPG Maker to his will just like that. The game is called "Peuteris Grey" and we did actually get the first place in that competition. At some point, Felix showed me a DS homebrew he was working on the side while getting his computer science degree at university. That game would later become CrossCode. And it did actually look very similar to what you see in the first cargo ship levels. I didn't think back then that CrossCode would become this big of a game, and I am super thankful to Felix for trusting me to make the entire soundtrack.
While there were multiple things I worked on that never saw the light of day, CrossCode could be considered my professional debut. A lot of the first music I wrote, I ended up scrapping. It was very hard finding a good style for the game at first. I had just entered university and barely had any money, but whatever I had I spent on music software and hardware. The music of CrossCode became better over time; I would reiterate on multiple tracks until I was satisfied with them, but then redo them again after I felt like I had made significant progress on my writing style. It was a slow process, and it was hard keeping up with building up the soundtrack while also having to work on my degree. With CrossCode being a retro-inspired game, I felt it was necessary to get the retro feel in the music as well. I grew up with Playstation 1 & 2 games, so that's retro for me. I started researching how the music of my favorite games during that time were made, and I eventually purchased a sound module and started hunting sample CDs that were popular during the 90s. I tried making music using those old sounds; I wanted to make it sound authentic. I love varied soundtracks, and I wanted to write something that isn't inspired by other JRPGs, so I drew inspirations from genres outside of that. One of the biggest being Klonoa: Door to Phantomile.