Voice of Meerkats
Hello everyone! Another week means another update in Lead the Meerkats developer blog. This time we are fortunate enough to bring you an interview of the person responsible for all the music and audio in the game. It is my honor to introduce you to Jarno Sarkula, better known as Stakula!
Hello Stakula! Sorry to bug you in the middle of all the hectic work, but our readers absolutely want to hear few words from you.
When waiting for some game builds to complete and bugs to fix themselves, I’ve got plenty time for a little heart-to-heart with your readers. Shoot away!
You became somewhat famous Finnish TV person during the days of Moon TV* channel, but most of our international readers probably didn’t catch your shows, so maybe you could introduce yourself?
Yes, some years back I did a few hundred episodes for Moon TV as “Count Stakula”, one concentrating on PC Games and one for DVD’s. I hosted the shows, wrote the reviews and at some point also edited the whole thing. It was quite an underground channel, there was nobody controlling me, I could do basically whatever I wanted! It was lot of fun back in those days.
Starting from 2001 and especially after Moon TV went under I’ve been working with Finnish game industry doing music, sound design and sometimes a little bit of marketing material like trailers and stuff.
Starting from 1997 I’ve been also leading a Finnish “fictional world music” band Alamaailman Vasarat (Hammers of the Underworld), doing most of the compositions and playing wide variety of woodwinds like small and huge saxophones and clarinets. With five albums to date, the band now tours around the world, quite often performing big venues like Roskilde Festival just a few weeks ago!
In the past, you have worked on hardest of the hardcore Finnish games, such as Warhammer 40.000: Squad Command, Flatout Ultimate Carnage and also the upcoming Earth No More from Recoil Games. Lead the Meerkats, on the other hand is much more family friendly title. Do you find the project more challenging since it is quite different from your previous projects?
Well, I’ve done some casual/family gaming stuff in the past for the handhelds, like Rovio Mobile’s Boing 3D Boing Voyage and Redlynx’s Reset Generation. So, this is not completely strange genre for me, but usually I do darker stuff, that’s true.
However, I find this very refreshing, especially musically. For example, compared to fully orchestrated, cinema-like scores I did for Warhammer, mostly with samples, in this game I can use more real instruments to get that special loose feel. I also like the personal, intimate mood this game has. Those elements need to be emphasized musically and this makes the whole thing interesting.
It’s been very rewarding working on this on a social level too; the guys in the team are very pro and friendly. At the same time the team is small enough to keep the bureaucracy down to a minimum, which really speeds up the development process. Also, as a big fan of the North, I don’t mind coming to Lapland to work on the game on-site. Just now, from the window, I saw a reindeer with horns big as Hell strolling down the parking lot. You don’t see that in Helsinki!
Your band Alamaailman Vasarat plays fictional word music. I’m sure this has given you a lot of perspective for creating the African soundscape for the game?
With Alamaailman Vasarat we’ve done some African stuff, or more like blended styles from that continent with other styles. While not strictly authentic African music, those musical experiences have been a great help when it comes to this project.
Harmonically, African music is generally quite simple, so in that sense the compositions are not that demanding, but the sounds and performance, especially for live instruments like saxes and guitars, make a huge difference in the final piece. Also, rhythmic elements are usually quite dominant and need more thought and experimenting.
Luckily it’s summer – this kind of music is somehow easier to play with a lot light and warm weather! A few beers here and there also keep the creative juices flowing.
The game has broad repertoire of African animals. Can you give us an example of how you start creating sounds for each of them?
For some animals, you can find sounds quite easily from commercially available SFX libraries and my own collections, but for some SFX you just have to be creative and work with what you have – creating new sounds through vigorous editing, pitch-shifting, blending with other sounds, filtering, etc. In many cases you end up doing lot of versions and testing them out many times over. But it’s no problem; it’s all part of sound designer’s daily work and always inspiring!
Thank you for your time, Stakula!
You’re welcome! Keep them Meerkats running!
* “MoonTV was a free Finnish cable network channel. It started off as a channel for programmes about computer and video games but later grew into a channel covering several areas of youth culture.” Source: Wikipedia