Co-Oping on the Game Sound and Score for ‘It Takes Two’

Many thumbs make light work of Hazelight Studios co-op only game It Takes Two. The game focuses on May and Cody, who haven’t been the most cooperative married couple lately. After breaking the ‘divorce’ news to their daughter Rose, May and Cody become magically trapped inside the child’s hand-made dolls. They must work together to find a way to navigate obstacles in their shrunken state, survive encounters with ordinary household objects gone crazy, and ultimately break the spell that binds them in doll form.

Here, Philip Eriksson (lead sound designer), Anne-Sophie Mongeau (senior sound designer) and Gustaf Grefberg (composer/sound designer) at Hazelight Studios in Stockholm, Sweden, and composer Kristofer Eng (CEO/Co-founder at Elias Software) talk about designing, scoring, and mixing for this colorful, split-screen, larger-than-life world.

Eriksson and Mongeau share specific details on their Darth Vadar-esk vocal processing for the Vacuum Cleaner boss, vocal performances for the Toy Crusher, recording custom sounds (like the wasp wings recording session), and playing with the character POV through sound.

Eng and Grefberg discuss their multi-style approach, making each level sound unique, creating the big music for boss fights and varied cues for puzzle levels, and writing the moving end cue (which features Eng’s wife Sania Radjabi vocal performance!).

It Takes Two – Official Gameplay Trailer

It Takes Two is a split-screen co-op game, so fun! Before you started creating sound for It Takes Two, what were some things you needed to work out concept-wise on how audio would play in this game?

Philip Eriksson (PE): To be honest, we pretty much hit the ground running with this game. For me as lead sound designer, the preparation was a lot about finding the team who could make this game possible. I had to build the team from only myself and Gustaf to what we are today. Luckily, I found extremely talented and awesome people!

We had a lot of handy work that had to be done before we could start with the game production. We got our hands dirty pulling cables through the roof and assembling our internal mo-cap studio with all the audio equipment that was needed.

But aside from that, Anne-Sophie [Mongeau] and I had gotten a pitch of the game before we started and, speaking for us both, we saw that It Takes Two was going to be a sound designer’s dream project.

I personally love all the Pixar movies such as Toy Storyand Wall-E and I wanted our game to sound as good, playful and immersive as those movies’ sound mixes make you feel, but with a little bit more grounded, dirty flavor.

Anne-Sophie Mongeau (ASM): The split-screen definitely brought its set of challenges, and we knew from the start that we’d have to be smart about both the sound design and how we’d spatialize and mix sounds so that everything would remain not only clear and audible, but also immersive and cool.

Our goal was always to bring the soundscape of this game to the same level as a Pixar movie.

We set our standards and quality bar very high from the start; none of us wanted to compromise on the sound quality ‘just because of the split-screen’ situation. Our goal was always to bring the soundscape of this game to the same level as a Pixar movie. We didn’t quite find any other split-screen game that was achieving the standards we were aiming for (that we could take inspiration from), so we quickly realized we would have to follow our own intuitions about how it should sound, and how we would deliver the best possible audio experience.

The result is very much the fruit of a tight collaboration between the creative designers and the technical designers within our team, and that level of collaboration remained a recurring theme during the entire production of It Takes Two, not only in regards to split-screen audio, but also to all aspects of the soundscape.

Hazelight Games explain the sound design for It Takes Two | Genelec One on One

Can you talk about your audio pipeline for It Takes Two? Were you using an object-based audio approach for creating and mixing the game’s sound?

PE: Making a split-screen game in “only” channel-based 5.1 is hard; we learned this on many occasions during the production. This question has two answers, one boring and one a lot more interesting.

Let me start with the boring one. When we started working on ITT, we had basically nothing when it came to audio technical solutions. We really started from scratch with whatever Wwise and Unreal had to offer. We are a small team and were even smaller when we started. I had to be very strict with our planning, prioritization and our goals, so I quickly decided that we would not work with object-based audio.

I had past experience with object-based audio for games like Star Wars: Battlefront and other titles from EA DICE and I knew it would take a lot of time for us to get it to work well.

We also did not have the hardware in terms of speakers to test it so it would have been a lot of guesswork which is never a good idea.

We had many dreams that we would have liked to realize during ITT but we had to choose the right things to create for the project. Object-based audio was actually one of the easier ones to let go, due to lessons that I will talk about in the next part.

Here comes the second answer to this question. I had many sleepless nights theorizing about panning/mixing solutions for split-screen, and we also learned a lot along the way. We basically play two instances of the game with all sounds from the same speakers/headphones.

I had some plans very early on about how to play two full mixes of sound but still maintain clarity and spatial information. The first thing that I felt strongly about was that I really wanted the “couch mix” (two players playing in the same space) to be good. I decided that we would split up the 5.1 channels into two halves since the game is mostly played with a vertical visual split — the left player would own front and rear left speakers and the right player the right speakers.

… I really wanted the “couch mix” (two players playing in the same space) to be good.

One issue with this is that it would practically mean that each player would have a mono mix but with front and rear panning abilities. So I decided that both players would share the center speaker and to bleed over to the right and the left speaker but with a lower volume, to maintain stereo possibilities.

We used the center speaker a lot for ITT! Sound effects, VO, foley and even reverb/delay were played through the center speaker. Traditional single player games mostly use the center speaker only for VO and perhaps foley.

After creating these rules for where to place sounds, we realized that we wanted to create a mix that felt very connected to the screen, inspired by film sound mixes which mainly use the LCR speakers and just add very select sound effects to play from the rear speakers. We liked this because it made the sounds feel like they were connected to the screen and to the game, and it made it easier to feel like you were in the game as the player.

Check out the footage from the recording sessions for the game

Another thing that we realized was that having too many sounds being spatial and playing through the rear speakers could easily break the illusion since it would be incorrectly panned for the other player. For example, one player is standing in a room with sounds playing from all kinds of directions whilst the other player is in a different environment where hearing these sounds become weird.

We noticed that it was less obtrusive for the player hearing the sounds from the other side of the split-screen if they were less spatial.

We noticed that it was less obtrusive for the player hearing the sounds from the other side of the split-screen if they were less spatial.

We created many tools and strategies for us to design and mix our sounds so that we would be able to create a good mix for split-screen. For instance, we panned player sounds like foley/VO/abilities (in most cases) solidly to the left and to the right with some bleed to the other side. Göran Kristiansson (Audio Programmer) also created a panning system for spatial sounds that was based on where either player was looking — if one player is looking at a sound and the other player is looking away from the sound, we still play it only through the front speakers but if both players are looking away from the sound we play it from the rear speakers. So we basically favor the front speakers in most cases.

This topic was one of the biggest we had to deal with but also one of the most interesting. In the end, we realized that “simple” worked well for our game and for split-screen. We had to make very hard choices when it came to mixing decisions as well as tech ideas. Our mix utilizes depth and screen immersion whilst other games strive to create a very detailed simulation of hearing a world that is as believable as possible. But I think we made some good decisions along the way.

The look of the game is so colorful and almost like claymation. And it’s very domestic-based (i.e., stylized household items). In terms of sound, how did this impact your choices for your sonic palette?

PE: Our goal was to sell the immersion of being tiny in a big world so everything needed to sound recognizable but also “larger than life.” Some sounds like character movement needed to be quite small so that we preserved the bigness for other things. Also, we used a lot of worldizing techniques such as in-game reverb, runtime delays, and baked reflection assets to make the world have size and feel real.

…we used a lot of worldizing techniques such as in-game reverb, runtime delays, and baked reflection assets to make the world have size and feel real.

In combination with those worldizing techniques, we designed sounds that have life to them and have a voice so that they sound magical and playful, and those two things together really contributed to the way ITT sounds in the end.

ASM: Since the world of It Takes Two is grounded in reality, even though it is transformed into something different (even magical), we wanted to ground our sound design in reality and then go from there. So for instance, ambiences were designed to be quite realistic to provide a sense that ‘this is a real place,’ and some elements of exaggeration may have been added where relevant.

On top of that, objects and characters are also designed to fit their original form or purpose, and then molded into their new unique shape by adding some creative elements to them. For example, in the Vacuum level, the Vacuum Boss and its tentacles are made from various vacuum sounds (and so are the hoses). To those noises, vibrations, and mechanical layers, we added squeaks and squiggles that give it a bit more personality, as does its Darth Vader-inspired breathing and voice. We really didn’t want to fall into a cartoony-style or anything that was too far removed from the original object, so we always started from organic sources and recordings made from real objects and then built something unique from that start-point.

What custom sounds did you record to build your library for this game? Were there any commercial sound libraries that were helpful as well?

PE: We used both commercial libraries as well as did our own recordings.

A few very important sound effect providers that we can’t thank enough are: Pole, Boom, The Recordist, Mattia Cellotto, Tonsturm and Collected Transients.

We had a lot of fun recording sounds for the game. One of my favorite memories is capturing underwater recordings in February in Sweden. We rented a scuba suit and I performed sounds in the ice cold water for the Water level in the game, whilst Anne-Sophie and Joakim Enigk Sjöberg (Technical Sound Designer) had two jobs: making sure I stayed alive, and recording the sounds.

ASM: Commercial sound libraries are always very useful, but we also recorded many sounds for It Takes Two. We wanted to give the game as unique a soundscape as possible, and an excellent way to get there was to use our own sounds, recorded for their own specific purposes.

…we had a full-day recording session for all things wasp related in the Tree level.

For example, we had a full-day recording session for all things wasp related in the Tree level. We built our own bullroarer with two planks of wood and a bit of paper, and we flapped anything flappable in front of a microphone for the wasps’ movement and wing flaps (papers of various thickness, cardboard, sticks of all sorts, sticks with stuff taped on it, etc). We also made some kazoos from popsicle sticks, and used a massage gun against any surface we could find to create the wasp buzz sounds.

Can’t wait to show what we are working on! Here is a teaser! pic.twitter.com/1tvvt54nq4

— Josef Fares (@josef_fares) December 3, 2019

Another set of sounds we have recorded ourselves was various whip cracks to create impulse responses to use with convolution reverb in the game. Philip even went as far as making his very own whip from scratch! Those recordings were very useful to create unique environments that sound like no other game.

Despite the WFH circumstances, the show must go on! #yihaaa💥👊🏻#hazelightstudios pic.twitter.com/uU17IJva0o

— Hazelight Studios (@HazelightGames) May 12, 2020

The character’s perspective of being tiny in a big world is another fun opportunity for sound! How were you able to have fun with that sound-wise? What were some of your favorite moments to play with that perspective, sound-wise?

PE: I think one of the best examples of this is the “ball-fall” in one of the levels. Anne-Sophie and I happened to pass the largest waterfall in Sweden so we recorded it, of course. Anne-Sophie used those sounds mixed with a hundred pitched down ping pong balls. The mix feels believable because it has the right playful ball components as well as the biggest waterfall that we could find to make it have size. That’s pretty simple but works like a charm!

ASM: One fun anecdote about this topic is that at a fairly early stage, when we were just starting to populate the game with sounds and shaping our creative vision, one piece of feedback we would often hear circulating among the audio team was, ‘I think it needs more bigness.’

one piece of feedback we would often hear circulating among the audio team was, ‘I think it needs more bigness.’

We quickly realized that, indeed, in order for this contrast of being tiny in a big world to come through objects that were meant to be large in comparison to the player needed to sound even larger. For instance, the squirrel planes (in real life made from small sticks and scraps), needed to sound like actual WWI fighter planes in the context of the high pace airborne chase the players are put through.

It was also super fun to design enormous clocks and gears for the Cuckoo Clock level, for various ambience and platforming elements. In reality, clocks make small ticks and tocks, but in It Takes Two, those clocks and gears turned into giant wooden and metallic mechanisms resonating through the entire world.

The game’s bosses are ‘adorable’ (and dangerous, of course!), like the Vacuum Cleaner, Giant Octopus, Metal Bird, and Joy. Can you talk about your favorite sounds (or vocal processing) you created for some of the bosses?

PE: We had a lot of fun with the bosses and especially the voice processing. Greg Stankevich (VO Designer) and I worked very closely together on these. I could talk about all of them, it’s hard to choose! The Vacuum Cleaner was our attempt to make an homage to Darth Vader. The combination of the grumpy acting from Stephen Greif together with a vacuum hose impulse response reverb, a short delay and light distortion turned out so well in my ears. We of course could not resist the temptation of adding our own vacuumified version of the iconic Darth Vader breathing.

Joy was another fun challenge. She needed three different voices. The first one needed to be demonic and poisonous. We used the classic trick of reversed reverb before the dry signal and some dissonant pitching. This took a bit of time to create for each voice line but turned out worth it. The second version is when Cody becomes part of Joy during the fight. We used the same kind of trick but we also morphed their voices together to make it sound like they were part of the same body. Third version was Joy as an angel; she needed to sound super healthy and sparkling. We used the same technique as for the demon voice — reversed reverb — but we added it after each word instead of before, together with quite a bit of reverb and chorus it made her sound bloomy and full of life.

ASM: One of my favourite bosses to design sounds for was the one we called the ‘Bull Boss’ in the Cuckoo Clock level. This giant angry bull, like the rest of its environment, is made out of cogs and clock gears, so I morphed real bull vocalizations with moaning and groaning metal sounds to give it a metallic quality. On top of that, it needed to sound very heavy so the footsteps are made of various metal impacts and anvil sounds.

Another example is the Moles in the Garden level. Moles are relatively tiny creatures in real life, but in this level (in comparison with the characters) they are huge and life-threatening and they needed to sound like it. Their vocalizations and breathing are made from various large animals like pigs and walruses. It was quite fun to make them sound a bit nasty and gross.

And finally, I have to admit I had a fun time recording vocalizations with my own voice for the Toy Crusher in the dungeon crawler section! Especially the first laugh – what does a giant mad baking doll sound like?

What were the director Josef Fares’s ideas in terms of music? How did he want this score to make the audience feel, overall? Can you talk about your process of finding the tone (instrumentation, musical style) of this game?

Kristofer Eng (KE): This is a very special game in many ways due to the differences in every level — not only is gameplay new in every level, but everything is. Our workflow for this game involved Gustaf [Grefberg] and I pitching music ideas, instrumentation, and sounds both to Philip [Eriksson] and Josef [Fares] for every level. It was almost like starting a score for a new game every month or so. Josef was very involved and I don’t think many tracks made it to the game without passing through Josef.

It was almost like starting a score for a new game every month or so.

Gustaf and I set up strict rules about the instrumentation, like the Tree could only have wooden instruments and the Shed could only have brass and metal. The glue to the game became the “real world” music and the talking book character, Dr. Hakim, that was a constant throughout the game, together with the symphonic orchestra.

For me personally, I really like the differences Gustaf and I have in our composing style and how we complemented each other. I got to use all styles I really love which kept the project fun and interesting all the time. Sometimes I focused completely on a main theme, sometimes I found myself playing blues guitar and another day I was deep down in orchestral arrangements. It never got boring :-)

The main tone of the game is a crazy and playful adventure, at the same time a romantic comedy.

Gustaf Grefberg (GG): The main tone of the game is a crazy and playful adventure, at the same time a romantic comedy. This game has an insane amount of variety, and we decided to take the same route with the music, yet to keep a certain “red thread” through it, with themes, and a more common sound through many of the cinematics, that ties the parts of the game together.

The sound for each area specifically was largely a matter of experimentation, because we could of course have gone with a more common, contemporary style. But due to the quirkiness of the game, we wanted to give some different ideas a try, so it was often a process of testing out several ideas between me, Kristofer and Josef, until we landed on something that felt right.

[tweet_box]Co-Oping the Sound and Score for ‘It Takes Two'[/tweet_box]

What were your challenges in scoring the boss battles? With so much going on visually, with the action, and with sound effects, how did you approach the music for these battles so that it supported the gameplay but didn’t overwhelm the players?

PE: This was a significant conversation that we had regularly and with everyone involved. We did spotting sessions with the whole audio team present to try to make choices about where to play music, sound effects, and VO. We wanted to make those decisions early so that we would not have to throw away hours on things that had to be removed later in the mixing stage.

We also wanted to find ways of orchestrating the mix between sound effects, music, and VO, so that we could get the most interesting element, one after the other. We had to make really hard choices to avoid it being too messy.

The main question was, ‘what is important for the player?’ What I mean by important is not informational as in other types of games (FPS shooters, for example), but what is most interesting and makes it the coolest, most impactful and most emotional experience for the player. In the end, I think that we have a few moments where the mix gets quite loud and noisy but I am eager to develop this further in the future.

I think we pushed the boundaries a little bit of how bold and experimental the music was allowed to be.

KE: Having guys like Philip and Gustaf — with all their game experience to rely on — helped me a lot to not use percussion in places because it will collide with the sound effects or not using certain instrumentation, etc. However I think we pushed the boundaries a little bit of how bold and experimental the music was allowed to be. I can imagine that it demanded a lot of mixing skills to accomplish this :-)

GG: The majority of the boss battles were composed by Kristofer, just as most of the ambient and puzzle elements were composed by me. This was a deliberate move to add some consistency in style throughout the game. Kristofer found a very nice “open” sound for the boss fights to leave space for dialogue, sound effects and pacing of the scene.

What boss battle was your favorite to score? Why?

KE: It’s very hard to choose. I loved them all. If I have to choose one I’d say the Wasp Queen — actually, the whole wasp nest since the battle is just the climax of the whole wasp nest. I got very determined to make the orchestra sound real.

This was also one music style that Josef wasn’t used to, so I had to be really strong in my opinion. This was early in the project and I think this piece really opened up what was possible, style-wise, in the game.

GG: I didn´t compose many of them, but out of the ones I did, the crazy mangling doll in the Castle Dungeon was fun — to go all out with a really aggressive track to a big crazy track with a gigantic baking tool of death.

What about music for the puzzle sequences, where the players spend some time trying to figure things out? What was your approach for these? Is there a puzzle ‘level’ that you liked best, music-wise?

GG: It was important to make music that had some playfulness in it, but also fit the story. Most puzzle areas don’t have one track but several tracks, as you progress. We wanted to avoid any sense of repetitiveness as much as possible.

My personal favourite puzzle track is actually the first one that made it into the game — the first half of the Hopscotch level.

The ending music was so lovely! Can you talk about how you developed that cue?

KE: The ending music where May sings was actually my first assignment for this game. I was going to write the main theme for the game. At first, I did really complex orchestra themes and it was completely not what Josef had in mind. When I realized this melody was going to be sung by May, combined with the story about this sad little girl Rose, I finally came up with this very simple theme. I remember when I first got that scene in a rough first version and I asked my wife to demo the singing. That’s a very precious memory for me. I’m so glad we decided that my wife Sania Radjabi should be the singing voice of May.

I asked my wife to demo the singing. That’s a very precious memory for me.

This cue is also a great example of the collaboration with me and Gustaf since the music after the kiss is actually Gustaf’s arrangement of this theme.

GG: Since themes keep the whole thing together, it´s often what takes the most time and trying to get right. Sometimes, you get lucky and land it right away, but more often than not, the most essential things in the music take a few rounds with the director before he feels it is right.

What were some of your challenges in creating the mix for It Takes Two?

PE: One of the challenges — but also most fun things with mixing ITT — was that we needed to be two players/mixers since we could only make the game behave the way it was supposed to by playing together.

Anne-Sophie and I did most of the mixing towards the end so we had to play the game many, many times in all kinds of setups. We had to play as both characters in the couch coop setting as well as in network. Luckily, both of us were able to do the mixing in our studios at the office during Covid-19, whilst everyone else was working from home.

…at Hazelight we strongly believe that the game mix needs to be maintained at all times during the entire production.

The only good thing to come out of Covid-19 for us was that our colleagues were forced to test the game a lot over network and to play in headphones, which was very valuable. I want to add that at Hazelight we strongly believe that the game mix needs to be maintained at all times during the entire production. Every person in the audio team has a lot of ownership over the mix, and we playtest often, which means it remains in a good state throughout the whole process, something that I think is crucial. How else will you be able to make any mixing decisions until you reach the very end?

ASM: As we mentioned earlier, the split-screen most certainly made mixing It Takes Two more challenging than mixing a more conventional single player game. We had to make compromises for the sake of clarity. Hearing two worlds at all times instead of one means some of the elements within each world need to go, to leave room for the most important ones and make sure those come through clearly.

We had to make compromises for the sake of clarity.

But that was also a very fun challenge for us sound designers, since it meant that the element that we did choose to include had to ‘feel’ like they used all their space. That meant dialing up the ‘bigness’ and ‘coolness’ at every possible opportunity, and this game sure did provide many fantastic sound design opportunities! A few of my favorite sound moments that illustrate this include: the Evil Bird Boss and the Giant Clock Statue in the Clockworks chapter, the Bobsled sequence in the Winter Village, the Mountain Collapse in ‘Slippery Slopes’, and so many more.

What are you most proud of in terms of your sound work (or score) for It Takes Two?

PE: I am proud of the audio team at Hazelight and all the external people who helped us in any way with the sound. We are a new audio team and we were under constant time pressure. We set a goal of making the best-sounding split-screen game ever made and other very high goals for ourselves. We started from pretty much nothing and managed not only to release a very cool game but also to have a lot of fun during the process, make lots of new tools, systems, and sounds. But I think the biggest thing is that we created a great culture and a spirit within the audio team and the studio as a whole. That is my biggest achievement and take-away from this production. #Sisu

ASM: I am really proud of our audio team and what we have accomplished with the game overall. The odds were not in our favor — we started late in production, we built an entire team from scratch, we also built 100% of our systems from scratch, and the game is one of the most varied in terms of content I have ever played.

…we started late in production, we built an entire team from scratch, we also built 100% of our systems from scratch

But despite all this, by relying on each others’ talents and skill sets and putting a lot of trust in each other, we pushed through and managed to stay true to the standards we aimed to achieve.

In terms of sound design that I am personally proud of, I have to mention the Kaleidoscope world — I had so much fun making weird sounds that were meant to sound like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Those trippy tunnels and environments asked for a truly unique soundscape, and we decided to be quite bold with it, for instance by deliberately leaving digital silence as ambience and instead filling the space with really funky reverb and delay.

KE: For me personally, it’s the fact that neither me or Gustaf took the easy way anywhere in the game. For me, that meant struggling with a theme for days or playing live instruments every time it was possible to arrange the orchestra in the most believable way. I think me and Gustaf triggered each other to always do better.

GG: I am proud of the end-result of the quality of audio in the game overall, including the music. Also, I’m proud that we were able to pull off such a massive amount of content and variety and still be able to mold it into a synchronized story.

A big thanks to Philip Eriksson, Anne-Sophie Mongeau, Gustaf Grefberg and Kristofer Eng for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound and score of It Takes Two and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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