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Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew represents the culmination of a decade-long evolution of the stealth tactics’ genre. This journey spans three titles, all developed in collaboration with Munich-based Mimimi Games.
Text: Filippo Beck Peccoz – Fotos: Archiv
Pivotal Encounter: Mimimi and Me
I met the founders as well as most of the core team of Mimimi in 2010 during a Global Game Jam: I just got out of college and had zero contacts in the industry, and they were still students! Fortunately, we connected on a human and creative level as if we had known each other for a long time. Those crucial 48 hours resulted in a fun little game that I still have on a hard drive somewhere … Since back then, I’ve had the privilege of scoring and overseeing every project from this wildly creative and harmonious team as a freelance audio director.
Last year, Mimimi announced the closing of the studio. I consider Shadow Gambit to be not only the best project Mimimi and I worked on, but also a swan song for our daredevil gamble to resurrect a genre from the late 90s. On can safely say that we succeeded in introducing stealth tactics into the present. Like the gameplay, visuals, UX, and UI aspects, the audio was also ready for a big leap into a new territory. In this article, I focus on the musical direction and technical implementation of the soundtrack. However, I would like to point out the amazing work that has been done on the sound design side by my longtime partner Philipp Sellier, who created all SFX and has always been hands-on implementing the assets and finding creative solutions to our audio challenges in the game. Similarly, the VO studios and their actors and personnel contributed tremendously to making this a great sounding title. Finally, let’s not forget the many hours of audio programming that are essential for making assets work.
Aesthetics: of Hurdies and Shamisens
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew has been released in August 2023, and it features a soundtrack that is about 2 hours and 45 minutes long in its linear form. It is always fascinating to me that the OST is just a “screenshot” of a music system that contains much more variety than the crystallized linear version. I hold the edited OST, which serves the purpose of listening outside the game. However, the only way to hear the music in its most definitive form is by playing the game, which will be explored in the rather technical section of this article.
The “Red Marley”, a sentient ghost ship that has the power of manipulating time and reverting the world to a memory of its choosing, is not only a deeply fleshed out and important character throughout the game, but also serves as the main hub for the player. The characters reunite on deck after Shadow Gambit’s many missions. In terms of shear scope, these Mimimi collaborations represent my biggest projects to date: admittedly there has always been a bit of anxiety involved in starting such an endeavour. In my experience, it is great to get involved early in the process, ideally during pre-production or even before. But still, there’s this moment when a blank page (or blank DAW template) stares at you, and that’s where the journey for a consistent voice in the score begins.
The game presents a colorful cast of 9 ghost pirates fighting against Ignacia, head of the “Inquisition”, the protagonist’s and thus the player’s opponent throughout the story. Getting through it the first time takes approximately 37 hours, with many more added once the player decides to dive deeper into each crew member’s back story, which is told via special “character missions” that unravel each pirate’s past.
The “Creative Month”
A great help in finding this voice has traditionally been the creative month, a wildly experimental 4 weeks that grant me absolute – and, at first, terrifying! – freedom in terms of outcome. This creative push is geared towards laying the musical groundwork for the rest of the production: even if every single song produced during that time will not make it into the game, it is OK as long as a vision has been established.
Freed from technical considerations, I spent this time diving into a chaotic-creative process of unconventional instrument combinations, late-night insights, and shanty writing. It is also important to note how sharing these early works with the whole team, even if they were just sketches, helped us define the stylistic direction together and spawned important discussions that shaped in an important way what would afterwards become the soundtrack.
Instrumentation: Hurdy Gurdys, Marxophones and Singing
Just like Edo Japan in Shadow Tactics or the Wild West in Desperados 3, Shadow Gambit’s “Strange Caribbean” begged for the inclusion of the classic pirate score instrumentation and stylistic tropes: the concertinas, the swooping strings, a hearty dose of raggedy yet vigorous percussion … courtesy of the great films of the past. Yet, I longed for a sonic identity of my own, and that is where I started looking for instruments that could convey the Shadow Gambit’s peculiarities. A big help came in the form of the story itself: the inquisition’s military aesthetic, their disdain for anything magical, and their stern architecture and attire are at odds with the ghost pirates’ lively, jumbled style.
Musically, the inquisition is represented by military snares, an orchestral brass section and most predominantly a “choir” which distantly resembles medieval chants. There is both a sense of elevation and hollowness in this sound, a representation of the “holier-than-thou”-attitude of an organization hellbent on eliminating the pulsating, essential magic that fuels the game. The choir sound was made entirely by me singing the lines and layering them dozens of times. It was my first foray into using my voice for a soundtrack and a direct result of the “creative month”, where shanty singing ran rampant, and I developed the courage to actually perform vocals for Shadow Gambit.
Ignacia, the main villain, has been given the voice as her instrument, but this time, it’s the renowned game vocalist Julie Elven taking the stage: her performance in the game’s Main Theme reflects the crystalline yet unsettling vibe of the inquisition.
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Apart from guitars, mandolins, and bouzoukis (playing guitar and its siblings is a sort of fil-rouge that connects all the soundtracks I worked on); hurdy gurdies kept fascinating me since the days of Desperados 3.
To give the ghost ship “Red Marley” a strong identity, we chose a bass hurdy gurdy made by German instrument builder Karl Riedel. It is part-hurdy, part-cello, with three thick strings that vibrate rather eerily when played together. There is that ghostly quality that we had been looking for! In most of the “hub themes” of the game, while the player enjoys walking around Marley’s decks, the bass hurdy sings its often wistful tunes.
Character Instruments
Each character in the game is so varied that unique instrumental colors had been asked for. During the development of Shadow Tactics, I bought a Shamisen, a Japanese string instrument. Who would have thought that I would use it in a Pirate game … but it happened, as the cast includes Toya, a Japanese pirate hailing from the province of Iga. One of my further highlights was sampling an old zither, playing it in a way that resembled a marxophone. This vintage instrument has a similar design but produces a peculiar sound, as its strings are struck with mallets that keep bouncing off them until the sound fades.
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We did not have mallets but achieved the “bounciness” effect through various experimentation with objects, other strings, etc … and the resulting Kontakt instrument has been used extensively. As so often happens, stretching the samples into a very low register sounded even more appropriate for ghost pirates: this instrument is heard right at the beginning of Quentin Aalber’s theme. He is the treasure hunter of the pirate crew, and the scintillating sound of the “faux-marxophone” felt right at home with him … almost like gold coins falling into his treasure chest.
Apart from live recording instruments, I recall also stacking up to eight slightly detuned piano libraries and panning them in the stereo field. Each plugin was tweaked to sound almost distant but always ghostly using exaggerated reverb settings. The “piano from the depths” was another mainstay of the many songs in the game.
The Sound of Stone
Shadow Gambit introduced an important Italian collaboration for me. In the summer of 2022 (and thus right in the middle of production), a personal trip to Sardinia led to the discovery of Italian artist Pinuccio Sciola’s monumental work. Sciola has dedicated many years to a project called “Sounding Stones”. The artist created sculptures out of gigantic rocks recovered from the seaside of the island and had them cut in such a way that they would create sound when struck by hand or with another rock. Some can even be played with a violin bow. Sonically, there is a similarity to the glass harmonica, but the stones have an even more ethereal, deeply layered quality. The samples of the sounding stones are being heard whenever the player visits Red Marley’s hold, which in itself is an ever-expanding, timeless place in which Marley’s memories reside. There could be no better match. The inclusion of these sound sculptures – previously heard in movies, documentaries and live concerts – into a video game is unprecedented. I am proud to have brought the sounds of such works of art into the world through the Shadow Gambit project.
Technique: Shadow Gambit’s Music System
The development of Shadow Tactics began in 2015. It would be Mimimi’s first stealth-tactics game, a genre that had been neglected since the late 1990s and the early 2000s. During this time period, the genre was flourishing with titles like the Commandos, Desperados, and Robin Hood series. This type of game involves a small group of specialists fighting against a large number of opponents, often-times infiltrating enemy territory without being detected, relying on their unique abilities to solve almost origami-like puzzles that require both thinking and reflexes to execute the correct moves in order to gain ground. I remember Dominik Abe, Creative Director of Mimimi, showing me an early prototype of a sprawling Japanese city, seen from the classic RTS “isometric” visual angle. We brainstormed possible musical approaches for a genre featuring long play sessions on the same map. This was not trivial as the level structure in stealth tactics games is often very non-linear, and it is very hard to predict how long a player will take to reach certain “anchor points” during his session.
Early on, it was clear to us that we wanted to feature strong, linear tracks that would loop rather traditionally to conserve what we felt was a strong suit of the original stealth tactics games: songs that keep stuck in your head, attached to certain situations or certain maps, loops crafted in a way that even after many times wouldn’t bore the players but rather give them a sense of “homecoming” as soon as they would play again in another moment. This, however, was not enough to satisfy our intent to refresh a 20-year-old genre, so we set out to create a musical system that involved the layering of instrument groups as well as smooth transitions between tracks. We created what would internally be known as “stealth tracks”, 2 to 3 minute-long musical canvases that are populated by combinations of instrument layers depending on the intensity of the situation or at times in a “controlled random” fashion. There could be up to 40 recombinable layers containing percussive, melodic or harmonic content in different rhythmic variations. When activated, the “random mode” would shuffle the instruments at an established time in a musically gratifying way (e. g. changes would occur on a beat or at the start of a new bar), generating new variations in the stealth track.
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In Shadow Tactics, stealth tracks were intentionally rather minimal in terms of musical content, leaving space for the more “important” linear tracks to shine at the beginning of the map. This approach, as we will see, has been reworked throughout Desperados (the second title in Mimimi’s stealth portfolio) until Shadow Gambit, where the dynamic tracks benefit from the same musical weight as their linear counterparts.
The decision to implement stealth tracks alongside more traditional songs gave us both the flexibility of a dynamic music system and a way to hark back to the effectiveness of “old school looping”, which might be considered too static these days, but in my mind, it can still be used very effectively if the music “hits” every time without being annoying – a very fine line. Instead of relying on Middleware, a custom Unity audio system was developed to suit the peculiar needs of the genre, this “Mimimi Audio” component grew throughout all three projects, gaining new features and QoL enhancements as the audio became more complex.
Camera-based Dynamic Music
Shadow Gambit contains several maps, all of which are islands. These maps are often re-visited depending on the story, sometimes feeling like a different location altogether due to the time of day or enemy setups: you can get lost in the sheer amount of detail in each of the maps! What worked well in previous titles (a mixture of linear tracks that characterize a location and sets of dynamic stealth tracks) appeared to fall apart here, where locations are often reused, and the mood inside the map changes dramatically depending on where you focus your attention. For example, on every island there are enemy camps and churches built by the inquisition. High walls and lots of guards … but next to these structures, you might find an old cemetery untamed in its display of soul energy (the world’s magical force). Yet farther away, the shore crashes upon the skeleton of a stranded giant sea creature … but somehow there’s a feeling of adventure and safety. The question arose quickly: how can we deal with these contrasts when the player can move around the map at will?
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After many experiments, we came up with what we called “cam music zones”: a song plays throughout but is divided into several stems, with only the bass and a bit of percussion as the backbone. Everything else was divided into layers that could freely fade in and out depending on the direction the player camera was pointing. So, one could infiltrate the inquisition’s camp and hear the choir, the brass, the snare drums … but as soon as the action turns to another crew member, who might be stuck in the cemetery, the whole musical landscape changes by crossfading layers. Each layer has different ranges and fade times (there’s a fade curve which ensures smooth changes even when jumping directly to another character); thus, it might happen that at the shore, you can already faintly hear the military drums announcing the enemy camp farther away.
As far as composition goes, I wrote the songs in at least 4 different arrangements every time, in order to accommodate all the points of interest (POI) in the maps. It was an exercise in balancing and also exporting from the DAW, since everything had to line up in the engine in order to work, of course. Then, once the assets had been integrated, I spent quite some time tweaking the zones to make each potential camera move feel good. Overall, I think we gained a lot by using the cam zones, as I was free to consistently use a melody in the songs and have them juggled around by the dominant instruments in each layer. That was a lot of fun.
Call and Response: The Twins of Nerechtemeresch
One of my favorite uses of cam zones happens on the rather small island of the twins of Nerechtemeresch: two child-like ghost souls that reside on the same map and trick their invaders and visitors. The music contains a call-and-response type melody. The call comes from the eerie piano, outlining a simple lydian scale. The response comes in the form of strings. Together, they form the melody of the twins. The island itself is roughly shaped like lungs, and the starting point of the missions is at the extremities of each. The player needs to reach the middle of the island, where the twins’ soul magic is at its peak, to succeed in the missions. The setup of the music is such that at the extremities, you hear only the piano or the strings. Moving further towards the center, the melodies finally join, aided by additional layers that heighten the intensity of the song. Only then you are really hearing the complete melody of the island.
Smooth State Transitions with Musically Timed Events
For its modularity and openness in gameplay, there are a few distinct states in Shadow Gambit that helped us in our search for musical anchor points. One of them is the so-called “alarm”: as the player is always outnumbered, it is wise to stick to the shadows and remain unseen. When a character is detected by an enemy or when the body of an eliminated foe has been found, the first alarm stage is being triggered. The first “low” alarm occurs quite frequently during gameplay. If the player fails to hide or eliminate a certain number of opponents, the second, “high” alarm is being rung, and at this point, all hell breaks loose. This corresponds to the alarm states in our earlier games, and it required a very abrupt break in the level music, followed by a couple of seconds of silence, almost like a shock. Then, the high-intensity alarm tracks start. In this case, such a hard cut complemented the action well. For the new alarm state, we first tried to stick to the formula of the previous title without any changes: the low alarm entered with the same vigor as the high alarm. This quickly became unbearable, as the time it took the music system to transition back into the regular music state was too long, the cut was too violent, and the number of occasions far too many. Therefore, a beat-synced transition system was created that enabled the music to stop or smoothly fade instrument groups on a given bar or beat and concurrently trigger percussive fills that would dovetail elegantly into the alarm track. The only limitation was that for the system to work in the most satisfying way, the alarm and level music had to have matching BPMs. Being able to not break the flow of the score as a low alarm triggered was a new and important challenge to solve during development. The result is, in my opinion, a subtle shift in mood that gets more intense as the alarm state continues (this has been achieved by how the tracks are composed), without any jarring pauses to the flow.
A Surge of Soul Energy
At the end of (almost) each mission, the player walks back to a magical gate created by the Red Marley in order to get to the ship safely. Here, we noticed a need for a triumphant but also tongue-in-cheek musical moment: a signal that the mission had been accomplished, and the walk back could be enjoyed more than dreaded. A special stealth track set featuring an upbeat character was the last addition to the dynamic music netlist. I’m glad we still included it even though it was rather late in development, as this stealth set gave the missions a feeling of ending on a high note, irrespective of the circumstances that the crew might have sustained before.
A Couple of Numbers
The music’s overall linear length is just shy of 3 hours and 30 minutes. Most cam zone songs are split into 5 to 15 layers. Stealth tracks can obtain up to 40 layers that are reshuffled depending on the situation or in a controlled-random manner. Each location has approximately 30 event triggers that change the music depending on a goal reached or a story event. There are approximately 170 individual song sets, including cutscenes, linear tracks, stealth sets, and cam zone songs.
Conclusion and some Melancholy
As I look back at our efforts, the experience gained and the successes made I cannot help but feel grateful for the many years of collaboration with a team like Mimimi. It is also clear that the studio’s end imprinted a bittersweet taste on Shadow Gambit’s memories, as it unexpectedly became their swansong. Nevertheless, having been able to revive a genre and bring it into the present, including modernizing its audio aspects and truly unchaining my creativity through its soundtracks has been both a pleasure and an honor. The final words to this retrospective might also come from shipwright John Mercury, potentially the game’s most unhinged and quirky character, who recites a shanty throughout the game:
“That's what we do, that's why we live We're a mighty crew, until we run aground the ship.”
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Filippo Beck Peccoz is an award-winning game audio designer living in Munich, Germany. He combined his two greatest passions – music and video games – and made them his profession. He began to work in the video game industry in 2010 after studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA. In the following years, Filippo has been involved in the creation of audio for projects such as Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3, and Shadow Gambit by Mimimi Games, as well as a series of independent works such as Itorah, FOX n FORESTS, and Tavern Talk by Gentle Troll.