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Airborne Kingdom Composers On Scoring a Sky City Builder
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Paul Aubry and Simon Desrochers
Accomplishing this, we soon discovered, meant incorporating the game’s central theme of balance into our music-making. In Airborne Kingdom, as players build their city from a small platform into a bustling kingdom, making sure the city stays centered becomes one of the game’s main objectives. Otherwise, the kingdom will begin to tilt, creating all kinds of issues for its adventure-seeking inhabitants. Similarly, we wanted to pinpoint a feeling of scarcity and openness in our score, never leaving tracks crowded while still conveying a sensation of sound floating in mid-air. Flutes and other wind instruments helped us achieve this initial mood, and a swirl of strings offered smooth long notes to add some dimension to that sonic levity.
Time passes slowly but surely in Airborne Kingdom, with day and night cycling in perfect harmony as players explore the vast expanses of the game’s world. To differentiate between these halves, we made piano and carefully placed bells the foundation of night-time music, with more conspicuous guitar and strings defining the sounds of each new day. It is our hope that players will feel emotionally well-rested at the beginning of every new day, and our score aims to rejuvenate players each morning with warmer, more energetic arrangements – though percussion in both halves remains a rhythmic motor to keep the game moving around the clock.
Airborne Kingdom’s narrative gradually encourages players to discover far-flung civilizations on the ground, ultimately reuniting a world that was long ago scattered to the winds. Staying emotionally grounded in the story meant crafting music that mirrored such a sense of unification. In places, disembodied human voices quietly gather into a chorus, and unique instruments (such as classical guitar over the desert landscapes) join together over the course of the game as more of Airborne Kingdom’s expansive world comes into focus. That cumulative effect was important to us, capturing a certain upward trajectory that fit the game’s vision quite elegantly.
Equally essential was discovering tones from disparate cultures to swirl together into a truly hypnotic, globalized sound. The bansuri flute, native to India, became a foundational instrument in our score, with its delicately lilting melodies complementing our more traditional orchestral flute. Elsewhere, an Arabic percussion instrument called a Riq merged together with touches of India tabla drum to create a sense of forward rhythmic motion. “World music” is sometimes a term applied too broadly, overly generalizing sounds that possess an important cultural specificity, but our mission with Airborne Kingdom was to emulate a full-fledged global exchange, with arrangements inspired equally by sounds from many different regions, from Latin America to the Middle East. Our most unlikely instrument, however, came from truly all over: a looped sample of quietly rushing wind, a subtle addition that brings unmistakable realism to the player’s experience of charting a course through the clouds.
Even outside of Airborne Kingdom, crafting video game scores is all about achieving balance, sonically transporting players to a far-away world without exuding so much energy that it overwhelms and distracts from the gameplay. The pace at which a game unfolds is very important to consider in matching it to music, and Airborne Kingdom offered us a unique hint by framing the city itself as a primary character. Its movement through the wide-open landscapes of Airborne Kingdom became the focal point for our music, and we aimed to create soothing, slowly unfurling compositions that could complement the city’s graceful progression across the sky.
Airborne Kingdom is now available for pre-order on Epic Games Store for PC and Mac. Those who pre-order the game ahead of its launch on December 17 will also receive a free copy of the soundtrack!
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