Sentry is an upcoming action-defense first-person shooter developed by Fireblade Software. The player(s) can use turrets, environmental destruction or traps to defend their starship from waves of ruthless aliens through a dynamic single player or co-op campaign.
Barry Topping (aka Epoch), Sentry’s composer, is based in Scotland and has been in the music industry for twenty years. He studied music at university and toured with several bands through different countries. We met him and talked about his journey into full-time video game composing and musically what to expect from Sentry.
Why did you want to move from producing your music and touring in bands to producing full-time for video games?
Barry topping: It’s weird; I can’t remember when I realized, “Hey, video games have music and it’s different from other music.” I remember the first game soundtrack I bought on a CD from eBay. It was the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VII.
This was before YouTube, so at that time the only place you could hear video game music was in video games. Suddenly I had some video game music that I could put on a CD player and listen to. That happened when I was already playing guitar and in bands, and something clicked in my head that if I wrote music for bands, I could also write music for video games.
Besides being a game composer, do you still produce your music?
BT: Yes I do. So before I got my “break” from working on games full time, I was producing for a game called Paradise Killer, which made such a big splash that I could get my foot in the door and do it full time.
Before that and in parallel I always wrote music for myself, be it in bands or solo electronic stuff. I made a synthwave album in 2019 called Encounters, a semi-concept album inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam. I also still do singles next door. I made a single this month called ‘Adria’, a sort of Parisian house tune.
I got excellent advice from a friend of mine, who is also a composer, and she told me to “just keep writing music, even if it’s not for my job.” There is so much value in just writing what you want to write.
What is your process for creating music for a video game?
BT: Well, if we take Sentry as an example, you got a letter from people who made the game saying this is what we’re looking for, and this is how it should sound.
Your job as a composer is to interpret that based on what the game looks like, how it feels, what it’s like to play mechanically, and how you can apply a style or set of styles to create one cohesive soundtrack that will enhance the overall experience. improve while playing the game.
I put a lot of myself into my music. I’m not one to go into a project that just wants some low-key background stuff. I like that my music is part of the project, because especially in indie games there is room for that, which I don’t think is present at higher levels. We have the scope to take greater risks.
While watching the trailer for Sentry, I noticed that most of the music was timed precisely for the on-screen action, right down to guitar riffs as assault rifles burst. What is it like to compose under that precise time pressure?
BT: If you’re a film composer, you always have to write to image, and the way this trailer was put together was storyboard. The developers knew what they wanted the trailer to look like and asked me if I could write for it.
So yes, there were moments that I wanted to touch. It was rigid timing and it’s almost like a puzzle trying to pick the dynamic markers or hit everything you want. To see when it’s in line, like when you pick a tempo and 16 bars later, something extraordinary happens, that’s a good feeling.
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Unbelievable that the Sentry trailer looks scripted, but it isn’t; they are game captured images. We had a rough storyboard of it, but Gary (who runs Fireblade Software) had to sit there and take one after the other until it was perfect. So we had a rough draft of it, but it took 10 seconds longer for Gary to capture the actual footage.
So then it’s the second pass of this puzzle-like process of changing tempo at 0.5 BPM and changing or cutting things to make it fit.
When composing for a game, there are so many different things a player can do while music is playing. How do you ensure that the music you produce is appropriate for what the player is currently doing or focusing on?
BT: You have to take dynamics into account, and by that I don’t just mean “music goes loud, the music goes quiet”.
For example, a game I’ve worked on, Paradise Killer, has a music playlist system.
So your music should be a wide variety of styles and dynamics, but should essentially fit everything the player could do. So suppose there are 16 tracks in the game, and they can go around and pick them up in any order; I just had to tie those together so that each number made sense for every possible situation.
The slightly different approach to Sentry is that we have a dynamic music system. So, for example, if you take on a battle level, you’ll have a startup stage music track that will step up to a higher intensity version of the same combat stage track.
Then that can decrease if the enemies aren’t near you, or you haven’t seen them in a while. Then you have your last wave where it will go high. So for Sentry, I wrote four pieces of music that all share a tempo and key, along with others rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic of each, so you can dynamically move between these pieces of music based on the on-screen action.
After the announcement trailer was released and it went viral on Reddit, what do you and the developers think of people’s reaction to the game as you aim for an early access release sometime next year?
BT: That viral Reddit post was a big shot in the arm.
I can’t speak for the other developers on the team, but I know that when I’m in the development process, in isolation, you can lose sight of some of the qualities that make the game great, but the response on Reddit reminded me remind you that we are making a great game.
As the game progresses further in the development process, we will have more to show. Especially musically. Sentry is an exciting game to work on as it is an opportunity to explore Sci-Fi music and Sci-Fi music themes and push it in a direction they don’t often get.
At first glance, Sentry is a Sci-Fi game, but we have a lot of plans where the game will go beyond just the industrial spaceship you see in the trailer. It will be exciting to see how we can push the music in other directions.
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