PS4/PS5 · DLC Released December 12th, 2023

From early 2023 to December 2023, I collaborated with Santa Monica Studio on this title as a Music Designer at PlayStation Studios. 

On this project, I had the opportunity to take charge of the technical music design process to adapt God of War Ragnarök’s music systems into the Valhalla DLC's roguelite framework, introducing over 10 new features to enhance players' musical experiences in a remixed gameplay style. It was a blast, and I learned so much! 

There were a few elements on this project that feature technical design work that I am especially fond of, the first of which was our refreshed take on the music intensity system to cover the nine roguelite-inspired playable realms from the base game. I also loved collaborating on our music system for the Greece Timer challenge area, as well as the overall narrative and combat clarity improvements that we made.

Roguelite Music Intensity System

• Similar to the base game, this system must be autonomous; Intensity values are defined per enemy type and adapt without manual setup from music designers. However, we must be able to override it situationally. 

  • An example of an override: For Arena Type C (the hardest arena type), we set the music up in a way where the highest difficulty of music would be forced for the full duration of combat, regardless of enemy intensity values. 

• We took steps to prevent intensity ping-ponging between encounter waves by introducing cooldowns into intensity drops, with an exception on "encounter complete" to make sure our musical end-tags were snappy. 

• Additionally, we implemented a buffer system to make sure substantial drops in intensity values were treated differently than minor ones, preventing noticeable musical "over-reactions" to small intensity changes. 

• Moves up in intensity remain snappy always - so in other words: music intensity has a short attack and a long release (with the exception of encounter complete, where the release is very short).

Greece Timer Music System

• Features 5 distinct levels of increasing intensity.

• Plays 10 second warnings in anticipation of leveling up intensity. 

  • The system had to be able to cancel an active 10 second warning if bonus time was added to the timer, or if the player enters a designated safe zone. 

  • We also needed to space events out under the hood during the 10 second warning to ensure smooth Wwise transitions; in other words, we didn't want all necessary events to fire at once to account for things like music segment pre-entries, processing time needed on the Wwise side for all operations, etc. 

• While exploring the area (outside of elite encounters), a tension percussion layer enters/exits based on if the timer is running or not, giving players a sense of urgency. 

  • Entering or exiting a designated safe zone will control the state of this tension layer.

• Fighting elites will trigger a special music system with heightened intensity beyond the timer system. 

  • The exception to this is when the player is at the maximum timer difficulty level; at this point the line is blurred between elite encounters and the timer system - it is now all equally difficult.

Narrative & Combat Clarity Improvements

• Force combat music upon entering a combat “arena” or room to key the player in right away that this is a combat space, with no opportunity to explore until this is taken care of.

• Do not continue to play explore music once combat has ended in a combat room, which communicates to player that they should keep moving. This was also meant to give players a moment to breathe from continuous music.

• Play custom stingers upon entering oasis areas, but do not play explore music after that. 

  • Unlike the base game, we didn’t want wall-to-wall explore music, mostly due to the much shorter amount of time you would be spending in these non-combat rooms. This approach both encourages players to keep moving while also creating a recognizable “jingle” to immediately communicate to players that they are in a safe zone.

Hoping to put all of the above elements into a video soon, stay tuned!