Jared Bohlken & Brad Leyden on eighties music and their video game: Interference: Dead Air (Part II)

You can read part I here.

You don't understand how excited I am to see this game released. When it's all said and done, it's a pretty huge accomplishment for you [all].

Jared: I’ve played this a million times just by nature of creating it. I know every line; I know every beat; I know every little secret in the booth; nothing is surprising. One element that really does make it feel the closest it can be to new is whenever we get music [masters] to pop into the game; it highlights all the things that we take for granted as we make it. Sure, Valerie’s sad here, but having the music underneath that section renews it for us mentally as if we're playing it for the first time. I don't mean this to sound corny, but that’s actually true.

Brad: I will literally tune out the dialogue sometimes when I'm not testing or I'm not focusing on anything, specifically; I’ll have the turn running in the background and then, “Oh, I need to test the power reroute in this sequence.” And I don't listen to a word they're saying, it’s just background noise. As Jared said, as soon as you put that music in there, it makes you focus on it again. And you’re like, “Oh, wow!” this is actually a cohesive thing. It's easy to forget how much work went into this story that we built, and it's nice to have a reminder of that.

If I recall correctly, when Jared sent me the first demo of Catching Wind in the Polaroid intro sequence, I’m pretty sure I cried.

Jared: I did [cry]. I'm not ashamed. There are moments of catharsis in the development process when everything is working as it needs to and has finally come together. And then obviously two weeks later we hate it and we rip it apart and change it again anyway. But this thing that I've poured my entire life and savings into is actually something that feels good.

Brad: It’s that Polaroid, especially; that’s the first image of the game that with the music, it all comes together. This is what players are going to see the very first time they load this up.

We started this journey a few years back. I wrote the Interference Theme, but I didn’t know what was to come of that. Did you imagine that we'd be here now: constructing these character motifs and a deeper soundtrack while using more orchestral components? You've received a grant, you have a publisher now, and maybe there's a soundtrack release for streaming and purchase…I’ve definitely started taking myself more seriously as a professional musician. Did you ever anticipate this massive change in scope?

Jared: Who knows? I mean, if you asked me when we started this, “how long will the game take [to develop],” I would point to the “coming 2020" text in our original trailer that you can still find on our YouTube page.

Brad: I think we made that trailer in 2019, too. So that was after working on it for over a year that we still thought, okay, only one more year after this; we thought we were halfway done.

Jared: I would say originally we thought this would take two years, but Brad and I have been working at [developing video games] since the summer after we graduated college in 2015. I remember going over [to Brad’s apartment] with my crappy old laptop and booting up a really old version of Unreal Engine 4 (trying and failing and trying and failing). Then finally (I don't know why we did it a fourth time, but) it stuck. Here we are. When we realized maybe this was a little bit bigger than we anticipated is when we went to [DreamHack Anaheim] at the beginning of 2020 before all this COVID stuff happened.

We saw people play the game for the first time, and we got our first real feedback which led us to larger discussions. That's where Perry came from; we inflated the scope of the game related to how people played. We signed with [V Publishing] and we received the [Epic MegaGrant], which was very helpful; I mean that’s what allowed us to bring you and Pat onboard. Because of how much we enlarged the scope, there’s now tons more music than we would've been able to afford had we not received that grant. I never anticipated this. It's been a weird four plus years.

Brad: I never would've imagined that we'd have an entire custom soundtrack. Right before we signed with the publisher I thought maybe we could get someone pro bono to put together a couple tracks, as [Joe] did at one point. Then we'll flesh out whatever else we can with royalty free stuff we find online. It'll do the job, but it’s not going to be this exciting, identifiable thing in our game.

Similarly, with the voice acting and the way the writing team has expanded—if you were to go back to 2018 when we first started this—I never would've imagined any of it. I would've thought, “okay, if we even release a game at all, we’ll just be met with the reality of the situation. We’ll have to cut almost everything to put together something really quick and sloppy, and it'll probably fail; we’ll learn the lessons from that.” I have to say, it's been unexpected, but nice to see that people have responded well. The scope of the game was able to expand and we were able to support the expanded scope, even if by some metrics, it’s a relatively small game. The fact that we spent so much time on it shows how much work goes into something like this.

Jared: What started as a fun little side project we can bang out in six months became something very different than that. It’s fun, and it’s stressful. It’s just very different. Because we’ve been able to expand the scope, there is more pressure on us to make sure that it's the best it can be. That's where the custom soundtrack comes in.

We really do tie our identities to these huge [projects], but to others, sometimes they just don't know the amount of effort, no? The ability to get people enthused about it or to get your team performing at a certain level. There are so many aspects that go into game development, music, writing, into any creative endeavor. Going from knocking it out in half a year, to a couple years later; wanting to [expand], and seeing people's reactions and interest. Pushing yourself to reach a higher goal. It’s inspiring.

Jared: You touched on a good point there: this is not something that I think would be attainable if it was just us two. Yes we’ve poured countless hours into this game, but we did bring on these collaborators, including you and Pat. You all flesh out the vision and bring your voice to the table. Knowing how those relationships work and how those creative voices can add to the project is key in making sure that it's going to be the best it can be. I can write music, but I can't write the type of music that you and Pat are [writing]. I can't do all the sound design stuff that our Sound Designers are doing. I'm sure Brad and I could get by, but if we weren't lucky enough to have dedicated people on board for these things, it would be garbage. That's what it would be.

You wanted to go along with our ridiculous ideas of making a dynamic music system and really explored the depth of these characters in a sonic, musical way that we had no way of conceptualizing ourselves. We give Rosefinch an inch and we get back a mile. It's fantastic. Period.

You've developed the [music] engine based on wanting to deepen the character development. Can you explain the looping mechanics?

Jared: Early on in the game development process, it became pretty clear to us that simply dropping a track in was not going to cut it. One person's play through is not going to be the same length as someone else's play through due to how long you take to respond [to Valerie and others over the radio]; some [players] might not respond at all. All of the music is adaptive to how the player is playing. The music is divided into chunks that our engine can then queue up at certain points in the narrative flow. If you are in this narrative branch here, we could queue up this [chunk] of the track; we’re in this narrative branch over here, maybe we’ll skip this [chunk] and move forward.

It's much more complicated than how it all ends up sounding. I don’t want to toot my own horn here (because ultimately the programming wasn't that difficult), but doing something like this is just magical in a way. Responding to Valerie over the radio leading to a shift in the music is a nice way to allow the music to support the narrative arc organically. Like I said earlier, the music is its own voice; it truly is responsive to how the player is playing the game. Without that, I think it'd be a completely different experience.

To speak to working with you in that process: we couldn't fully anticipate what our needs were in making this dynamic music system. We added that secondary clip queuing [functionality] later on in the music writing process, because we determined one single loop during any player response was starting to get repetitive. There are other [implementations] that we've talked about trying with the music system that we ended up abandoning, but it's something that in the future, if I was to make another game, we’d expand on, because it’s so cool.

What did you enjoy the most about working with Rosefinch?

Jared: Your attention to detail that you bring to the table. You wanted to go along with our ridiculous ideas of making a dynamic music system and really explored the depth of these characters in a sonic, musical way that we had no way of conceptualizing ourselves. We give Rosefinch an inch and we get back a mile. It's fantastic. Period.

Brad: My favorite thing has been never knowing quite what we're gonna get, but in the best way possible. Feeling that level of trust of us all being on the same page without being prescriptive saying, “we want this beat here.” We took a much higher-level approach knowing that what we’d get back is going to be super cool (and something I didn't expect), but something I'm super, super excited about hearing in the game.

Watch the trailer and wishlist the game on Steam or visit Fear of Corn's website for more about Interference: Dead Air.