Mathilde Hoffmann: Sound designer and composer on ODDADA

Music is an integral part of video games. Whether through its presence or absence, the sound design of epic battles or the nostalgic melodies of a walking simulator. Mathilde Hoffmann, freelance sound designer and composer, has worked on a number of projects, including the exciting ODDADA, where you create your own melodies, and Ken Follett’s: The Pillars of the Earth, the visual novel adaptation of Ken Follett’s work. She agreed to talk to us about her job, and to explain how music and sound are created.

Point’n Think: Could you briefly introduce yourself and your work?

Mathilde Hoffmann: Hello, I’m Mathilde Hoffmann! I’m a sound designer and composer for indie games such as Unrailed!, ODDADA or Closer the Distance. Depending on the size of the project I’m sometimes only designing the sounds on a project, sometimes only composing – but I love when the two disciplines music & sound become intertwined, just like in the music making game ODDADA!

PnT: How did you become a sound designer and composer for video games? What is your background?

Mathilde Hoffmann: I studied „music design“ in 2014-2018 – it was a broad field of studies where I learned a lot of things related to creating sounds and music inside a computer. I knew early-on that I wanted to specialise in games so I tried to twist all the exercises our professors gave us to put them into a game context – for example when we were tasked with creating an arrangement for Cello and Piano, I chose a video game music track to base my arrangement on.
In 2017 I was able to do an internship at Deadalic Entertainment in Hamburg, a games company that was known for their beautifully drawn and witty point & click adventure games at that time. I worked on „Ken Follett’s: The Pillars of The Earth“ during my time there. It was super fun – creating sounds that would actually end up in a released title! And I still have many great friends in the game industry from my time at Daedalic. 
After the internship I decided to get a part-time job and start a Freelance career on the side, slowly building up my website and portfolio. I got very lucky: in 2018 Daedalic decided to publish Unrailed! – who were still looking for somebody to help them out with sound and music. Even more lucky: when Unrailed! was released in 2019, it turned out to be a success, my „credibility“ as a competent sound designer rose and thanks to that I was able to find more projects to work on and transition to a full time freelance career.

PnT: How does that work? When do you get involved? At the beginning of development, in the middle or at the end?

Mathilde Hoffmann: Good question! It can vary a lot depending on the client and project.
There is some contract work for bigger clients, where the game is already released but they hire a sound designer for occasional content updates.
In indie development with small teams, I’m usually involved in the process really early, starting with scoping out the sound needs for the project and defining the budget, but also talking to the team about sound and music references and getting inspired by the early concept art of the game so that the team and I are on the same page. If I’m composing music on a project I can get started right from the beginning of development. For sound design there is usually a bit of downtime in the early stages: sound usually comes last in the asset development chain, after the animations are finished and sound ist ready to be implemented.
Because of that downtime I usually juggle multiple projects at the same time.
With ODDADA it was a bit special – because I had the honour of being involved in the game design, too – so I joined pretty early and helped to shape the game into a full-fledged music game.

PnT: How did you come to work on Oddada?

Mathilde Hoffmann: A friend who knew both me and Sven connected us after Sven showed the prototype to him and mentioned he would like to work together with somebody who is knowledgeable about music and games.
Sven showed me that beautiful prototype he had made, where you could place little houses onto a landscape to create tones. It already showed the potential of the game becoming a musical exploration and I was hooked!

PnT: Which tools do you use to create your music and soundscapes? How is your working time structured?

Mathilde Hoffmann: I use an audio software called „REAPER“ for both sound design and composition. It allows me to record and edit sounds or instruments, but I can also play virtual instruments, use synthesisers or layer together sounds from sound libraries. I love recording the sound material I use for my projects myself but sometimes there are crazy sounds such as explosions or wildlife animals that are not easy to record yourself, or instruments that I can’t play at all so I’m thankful for the modern tools and wide variety of sound libraries to add to my arsenal! 
As a Freelancer it’s hard to maintain a very clear structure of the day because there’s always some business tasks to take care of, meetings with multiple clients, taxes, maintaining the website, posting stuff on social media, writing asset lists, testing the game, writing feedback to the programmers etc – I’d say I only spend about 60% of my time in the audio software itself – the rest is managing the work + clients. I try to focus most of the paperwork on one single day in the week to be able to keep my head free + allow for creativity during the rest of the week.

PnT: ODDADA is a game in which the players construct the music themselves. How do you work on this kind of project? A project where you don’t have the last word on what the players are going to hear?

Mathilde Hoffmann: I was very scared for a long time that people would not like the kind of music they can make in ODDADA. We had an early, very experimental prototype for the game that we playtested with a handful of people and we found out quickly, that – although the toy-like playfulness of the game was fun and immersive – people were struggling with creating something musically satisfying.
In the old prototype, everything took place on one single map, all the tools and mechanics of the game were at your disposal right away, overwhelming the player with choices and things to learn, so that it felt like having to learn an instrument from scratch and having to put in a lot of practice to master it.
That was when we went back to the drawing board and tried to understand better – how can you make the music creation process simple and intuitive? What does a music track have to do so that it sounds balanced and satisfying?
The first big step we took was splitting the game up into multiple levels – instead of one single map.
Each level would focus on a different musical mechanic, such as creating beats in one specific level, creating a bass line in a different one, so that you could focus on *one* aspect of music making at a time.
Another big step in the right direction was creating an underlying 4/4 beat that all the levels shared so that one loop would always sound in sync to the next. Especially introducing a drum / beat based level early during a run helped for the people to find their rhythmic footing and a common ground to build the rest of the song on.
And then, after successfully simplifying the music creation process – the second round of playtesting went way better than the first one! – we decided to gradually introduce more tools to the players to be able to control and vary the tracks more. You can gradually unlock tools, that can change the tempo, change melodic sounds to percussive sounds, change the musical scale of the song and much more.
I think in the end we took a very typical process for game development: we simplified as much as possible and then started adding more complexity again.
Thanks to the opportunity of showing the game at Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show we also had gathered plenty of experience of how people usually react to the game so we didn’t have to be so afraid of the release anymore! 

PnT: Is it more difficult than one of your other projects?

Mathilde Hoffmann: ODDADA was the most difficult project for me out of all my projects! In my other game projects I only carry responsibility for the game sounding good or not, but not for it being fun or not 😀
For ODDADA that was different: if you don’t like the music you can make with the game, why bother playing it? And me being both the designer of the sounds that the players are going to choose from, but also not knowing what kinds of crazy things people will try in the game and how many sounds they’re going to trigger at the same time I was very scared 😀
Thankfully in our last year of development, Sven and I received help from a competent audio programmer: Bastian Clausdorff. He helped testing and implementing audio systems that would prevent the game from crashing or the audio from distorting. We have some people on our Discord server who have created crazy compositions where tons of notes play at the same time but they turned out super interesting instead of horrible, that was a big relief and all thanks to Bastian! Also a big shoutout to Annika, who also joined our team in the last year of development to help us out with marketing. Since most of the time we were just a team of two, we were both in charge of cutting trailers, talking to publishers, writing business-emails, doing marketing analysis, writing announcement texts etc – those usually don’t fall under sound design responsibilities! But thanks to Annika we were able to focus on creating the last sounds and features for the game before release.

PnT: You’ve worked on many projects, from fantasy with Les Pilliers de la Terre to science fiction with State of Mind. Does the universe of the game influence the way you create music?

Mathilde Hoffmann: Definitely!
It’s not just the ‘age’ in which a game takes place that has a big influence on the choice of instruments and sounds. For a game set in the Middle Ages you would probably prefer to choose realistic instruments that probably existed at the time – Science Fiction games open up the space for synthesiser sounds of all kinds.
Indie games in particular, where the graphics are often stylised or the game world is not entirely realistic, allow for a lot of freedom to reinvent the sound world, too.
Does the game look very blocky, or focusses on shapes with sharp edges? Then you could work more with short, choppy sounds that cut off quickly – or with percussion that sets the beat.
Is the game world soft and picturesque? Perhaps stringed instruments with a smooth fade-in or soundscapes that float above the composition would be suitable.
But it’s not just the graphic design that influences the music. Timing, tempo and the tone of the music are strongly influenced by the mood that the players should feel – and the particular moments in which they should feel something.

PnT: In video games, music is also a way of communicating with the player. How do you go about it?

Mathilde Hoffmann: Music has the wonderful task of translating the intentions of the game designers and writers into emotions that the players can feel. In addition to what we can perceive visually in the game or read via dialogue and lore, the music, which is usually only a background element, subconsciously conveys a lot of information: where are we situated? Can we expect danger? Is an adventure awaiting us? Even information such as temperature or weather can be translated into musical motifs. When composing music for games, I personally try to take inspiration from other game soundtracks, but also from classical music, where music alone, without any visual accompaniment, has successfully transported audiences throughout the ages into different worlds and told them stories

PnT: The music often follows the players’ actions, and sometimes those are strange, not logical, creating moments of non-linearity with the story (backtracking, multiple-choice play, etc.). How is not-linearized music composed?

Mathilde Hoffmann: There are many great concepts for interactive music – especially two main approaches have established themselves as the most commonly used: Vertical compositions, so-called ‘layering’ – where certain instruments are added to or taken away from a piece of music depending on the intensity of the gameplay (for example in combat), or where the same piece alternates between different instrumentations, for example between day and night.
The other typical one is an horizontal approach, where the music is divided into parts of different lengths. Only when the player makes certain decisions, it jumps from one looping part to the next. Like a song where the player decides when the verse is over and moves on to the chorus. Sometimes musical sound effects, so-called ‘stingers’ – for example a swelling cymbal sound or a sudden beat of a drum – can also help to bridge from one part of the music to the next.
‚Audio middleware‘ such as FMOD or Wwise are tools with lots of audio functionality, that are commonly used for interactive music.
With their help the transitions from one part of the music to another can be started exactly on the beat, so that ideally –  if carried out elegantly in the right key and tempo – the player is immersed completely by the music and doesn’t get distracted by a sudden musical interruption!
In the end a good thought-through plan for the composition is one thing – but it always requires a lot of playtesting to see whether the music transition really fits and feels right in every situation!

Thank you so much, Mathilde, for answering our questions!

And check out all the games Mathilde Hoffmann has taken part in on her website!