Burning Planet Digital originally began as a team that made soundtracks for video games before growing into a fully-fledged game publishing company with its debut release,Molly Medusa, arriving in April. The team consists of veteran musicians from the punk, rock, and metal scenes including Max Malmquist who has toured extensively with Junkstars, and Karl Rosqvist, who plays drums for legendary heavy metal band Danzig, Joan Osborne, and other notable acts.
Game Rant sat down with the Burning Planet team andMolly Medusa’s developer Niklas Hallin (also a co-founder of Burning Planet) to talk about the team’s experience as musicians, how that relates to work in the gaming industry, and all about Hallin’s latest project.Molly Medusais a trippyindiepuzzle-solving adventure game full of surreal environments, intriguing puzzles, and Burning Planet’s expertly crafted music.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: You guys have fairly extensive backgrounds as professional musicians. What made each of you decide to come together to form a company in the gaming industry?
Rosqvist:Through music is how Max and I got into this. Niklas is a game developer with a music background as well. Basically, we started out as a music composer company, so we started making music for games because that’s what we’re into. I personally slowly got into this 15 years ago. It started with movies and film soundtracks, and then suddenly I realized thatgames were starting to sound like moviesand it went from there. Max, myself, and another guy started working together as a music production company. That’s how we met Niklas, because we made music for his game. And, you know, one thing led to another.
Q: How has your experience as musicians and band members affected your approach to operating within the gaming industry?
Rosqvist:As far as the music goes, it’s more or less the same. But as a publisher,Molly Medusais the first game that we’re putting out. So far, there are a lot of similarities when it comes to running a band. We come from a DIY kind of thing, you know, from punk and metal and stuff like that, where if you don’t do it yourself, nobody’s going to know that you exist. So we’re used to thinking about merchandise and thinking outside the box when it comes to most things in order to get people’s attention. It’s more or less the same thing.
Hallin:Yeah, there’s a huge overlap betweenindie game developersand music bands, down to the fact that a regular rock band often has the same amount of members as a small indie team, the group sizes are more or less the same, the kind of promotion and marketing that you’re doing, and the project scale and the project scope. There is a big overlap in how this level of musicians and this level of video game developers are doing day to day.
If you follow video game developers on Twitter, and you follow indie bands, punk bands, or metal bands on Twitter, their tweets are almost identical. They talk about the same things. They have the same problems, they have the same issues that they are trying to deal with, and they complain about the same things. The product itself might be very different, but the lifestyle of making them is surprisingly similar.
Q: Have you noticed a difference in approach between making music for video games versus music for general listening?
Rosqvist:Of course, when you’recomposing music for a game, you’re doing it together with someone else. In this case, it’s the developer, so it’s going to be a different approach from the get-go because you’re trying to get inside their head and reproduce whatever they want to hear. If you make music for yourself, it’s only your opinion that matters. That’s the main difference.
Hallin:I think video games are so fun because really strange and bizarre scenarios occur. For example, you get the music piece and you’re like, “Okay, so hear me out here. There’s going to be a teddy bear from space. They’re going to have a birthday party. Can you make something for that?” Like, they’re really outlandish, weird, and specific. So there are incredibly specific vibes and aesthetic goals.
Whereas if you’re making an album, the songs must be able to stand on their own. In the video game, they’re presented within a context that informs what they sound like. And, of course, as a video game developer, I frequently try to make the games and music as strange and particular as possible, trying to push the weirdness of the combination as much as we can.
Rosqvist:WithMolly Medusa, when Niklas presented the musical idea, it was like, “Okay, so it’sset in ancient Greece, and it needs to have elements of heavy metal in it, and some deserty vibes here and there.” It took a while until we found the formula on how to approach the music. The music in this game is linear, so there’s no interactive music. The music slowly evolves from whatever into metal, which was quite a challenge but a fun one.
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Q: A lot of musicians are also avid gamers. Do you have any advice for artists looking to step into this field?
Hallin:Game developers are always looking for people to make music for them because you always need music. And also, musicians are always looking for developer teams. A lot of indie game developers specifically struggle with not just music, but also sound effects and sound design, creating a holistic audio picture.
That’s a very strong personal selling point if you want to work as a freelancer with indie game developers: talk and think a lot about the holistic picture of sound. But also, you can learn to make games on your own, like programming wise and stuff like that. That’s a bit of a learning curve, but it can be done.
Sometimes you encounter a small-time indie game that looks kind of crap, and it’s not fun to play. But someone has mixed it so well. You just hear the atmosphere of the music and the sound that comes from the environment and everything, and you’re like, “Woah, someone wrote all of that! That’s impressive.”
Q: Niklas, previously you developed Yono and the Celestial Elephants, a super upbeat and adorable puzzle game. Did any lessons from that experience help you with developing Molly Medusa?
Hallin:It’s an evolution right? It goes step by step forward. So as you said,Yonois very light, friendly, and colorful, and has a kind of childish tone. I’m moving up one age category to go from child to teenager, which is why I wanted to push heavy metal music so much. I wanted to have these screaming guitars to say that this is not a children’s game. Now we have the sort of angry frustrated teenage emotions.
But also, here’s a little game design secret or lesson that I learned. I thought that designing challenging level design was going to be tough, so I put in a lot of cities and villages and towns where you just walk around and talk to people and do side quests. Turns out, I was wrong about that. Making aton of side questsis really a lot of work, and making level design with enemies and bosses and stuff was much easier.
ForMolly,I was like “Okay, we can’t have this many towns, we can’t have this many characters. Let’s turn them all to stone. Let’s make it so that soon as you talk to someone, they just freeze up, and you can’t get any side quests.” You can’t buy any upgrades, and you can’t get any story exposition because everyone is just stone. We focused on making these complicated big temple labyrinths with different doors and keys and stuff instead, so that’s an evolution from the elephant game.
Q: Speaking of the Medusa curse, how does turning everyone into stone impact the gameplay?
Hallin:As much as it can. Turns out, that was a more interesting game design idea on paper than in reality. What you want when you design a game is to put in a mechanic that opens up more interaction. You want to put in a gun with bouncing bullets because the way the bullets bounce can lead to all sorts of wacky nonsense. Freezing characters to stone closes off the interaction and makes it impossible to do anything with them after that, although you do move people around, and you can position them so that you can stand on top of them and climb to higher places.
I added a wholesystem for stealth, which is to say you can sneak up on an enemy when they aren’t aware. Once you have them frozen, they can’t hurt you, so you’re free to walk around a bit and control the enemy’s position by having them be a statue. But the thing is, once you go too far away, they’ll turn back again and start shooting at you. It becomes this crowd control situation where you move between different enemies to freeze them at certain points while also trying to solve a puzzle. So there are ways to build game scenarios around the stone thing, and I’ve really focused on putting that in as much as I possibly can.
I don’t think it would carry a game. If that was the only thing, then it probably wouldn’t carry a whole game. You have to play some more around it. If you have a bigger game around it, it works quite well.
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Q: The game also features very interesting M.C. Escher-esque architecture and strange gravity. How do you approach the design of these mind-bending spaces?
Hallin:That’s tricky. I used to have this whole technique of drawing outlevel design ideason paper, with different symbols symbolizing different things. It would almost be some sort of blueprint or schematic. That didn’t work for this game because of the 3D nature of all the rooms. It turns out I couldn’t draw them on paper, so I had to visualize them in my head.
I would instead make a list like, “Here are the steps you’re going to do first. You’re going to push this thing, and then you’re going to find this enemy, and then you’re going to light this thing on fire, and then you open the door," as a sequence of events. Once you have that sequence as bullet point list, you can start placing the elements in weird corners of the room, upside down, behind something, and stuff like that. You have to abstract the sequence of actions out of the 3D space and then put it back in afterward.
I attempt to give rooms strange silhouettes or strange shapes like this room is a cube and that room is kind of like a macaroni bend. In another room, it’s like two squares melted together, so each room has a strange geometric shape that makes you notice that you are in fact bending gravity when you walk around a curve.
Q: You guys also made the soundtrack for Molly Medusa. Does each person have their own responsibilities such as one person focusing on melodic elements while another handles drums?
Rosqvist:On this one, it was just me and Niklas, Niklas’ mind and my “skills” (laughs). We actually wrote a theme song for this. It’s heard only in the beginning, at the entrance. We went all in. We have a female vocalist on it, and it’s like a full band playing because why not? We figured we’d go all in and do a full band song for it. The rest of the stuff is just me recording everything myself.
I mean there’s a lot of MIDI stuff, like sample libraries and things, but I always attempt to put in as much organic stuff as possible, just to give it one more dimension of human touch.
Q: When it comes to music production, what kind of software tools do you prefer?
Rosqvist:I use Logic for everything on the Mac, and then just tons and tons and tons of sample libraries. I’m so deep down the rabbit hole of sample libraries. I have everything and I mix them all together in a way that I’m sure the people who actually recorded them wouldn’t appreciate very much. But you know, as long as it sounds good.
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Q:Molly Medusaand your previous games feature a decent amount of puzzle-solving. What are the challenges involved in designing puzzles for games?
Hallin:I think about it a lot, to begin with. I don’t like it when you repeat the same solution more than once, so I have this thing where every puzzle is completely unique. There are no repeated challenges. That does not work in a AAA environment, where the game has to be80 hours or 120 hours long, and they have to repeat content a lot. But when you’re working in an industry where it’s like, “Nah, it’s fine, we don’t have to make a huge massive game, we can make one where every single challenge is only a one-time thing.” And then we move on.
Having said that, I do have a system where puzzles are divided into elements, and you only encounter elements one at a time so you can see how it works. Then in the next room, it’s combined with some other elements. You get this matrix where all the elements are written out, and then you find the overlaps where this thing can interact with that thing. You put them in an order where there is a sort of progression.
For example, in the elephant gameYono,there’s a lever or a switch and you press it down and a thing happens. The first time you encounter this, a treasure chest appears and then the treasure chest blocks your path. So you have to press the lever again, you open the chest, take the thing, and then you press the switch again, disappear the chest and now your path is open. So now you have learned that the switch goes up and down and you can switch between two states.
Later, you see one of these levers, and when you walk near it, a fire beam like a flame thrower comes out and shoots the lever, and now it becomes glowing, red hot and if you touch it you get burned. You’re like, “Cool, I’ve seen fiery things before. I know that the elephant can fill the tank with water, spray it on the hot thing, and cool it down.” So there is this systematic connectivity between all the puzzle elements. They have a logical order in which you have to present them because that’s the order in which you learn how they work.
I have developed an intuition for which order the elements are going to be in because I’ve just done it so much. For years now I’ve been like, “First you learn this, then you learn this, then take those two things together and you learn the third thing and then you start to learn a fourth thing.” Which is why you can only play this game in sequence. You have to do the first temple, then the second temple, and then the third temple. ThenBreath of the Wildcame outand you could play the temples in any order. I was like, “Oh no, I don’t like that!”
It’s incredibly important that you played it in this one specific order because the puzzles naturally evolve from each other. My challenge as a developer now, for the future after this game, is thinking “What if you’re able to sequence break it a little bit? What if you can do it out of order a little bit? How can I take my design philosophy to the next stage by making it possible to find a little bit of a path?” But forMolly, the temples have specific orders and puzzles go forward almost like sentences in a text.
It sounds like linear level design is actually an advantage in a complex puzzle game since players may need to be taught a specific order.
Hallin:The big problem is if you may play the temples in any order, then every single temple has to be the first one. Every temple has to be level one. You can’t do a level two temple because what if they find that temple first? The thing is, once you get to level five, inMolly, that’s some advanced stuff. The process gets really bizarre in level five, but that’s fine because you played all the levels up to that point so you know what to do. If you go into level five and haven’t played the game before, you’re screwed. There’s no way.
Q: Turning everyone into stone must be an incredibly lonely existence. Is that isolation a central theme of the game?
Hallin:Absolutely. And we’ll see how well that theme hits.Yono and the Celestial Elephantslooks like a children’s game, but It is written like an old-school RPG. It hastext likeBaldur’s Gate,Neverwinter Nights, orFallout. There’s this kind of plot twist when you think you’re playing a cute puzzle game, but you’re actually playingFallout. Turns out, that was really hard. Writing that much text was really a lot of work.
So forMolly, I was like, “Okay, let’s see how well we can bring this across with just images and with just music and facial expression and animation and camera angles. Can I write as little as possible and still get a story across?”
I think this very strong and simple theme of loneliness is going to work pretty well. A big moment in the game is when you walk through the village, without the curse, and talk to all these people and befriend everyone, and they seem like they’re going to be your friends. It seems like you’re going to do stuff with them for the rest of the game, buy stuff and upgrade stuff, have side quests, and stuff.
Then you return to the village a minute later, and it’s just “No, you get nothing like this." You’re just out. I hope that that’s going to resonate with people. That feeling of being rejected by society more or less, and it’s 100% gameplay. No one tells you that. No one says that in dialogue. It’s a gameplay moment.
Q: Along with a new game, you’ve also got a debut novel coming out this month. Would you like to talk a bit about the novel?
Hallin:Well I’m from Sweden, we are all from Sweden, and my novel is written in Swedish which means promoting it is strange coming alongside a game that is in English. It’s quite hilarious that I managed to plan my life out in such a way that my novel and my game were finished within months of each other. They are kind of sister projects, inescapably. Theloneliness themeand Greek mythology cross-pollinate between the novel and the game. It’s really fascinating to work on two projects like that because writing a novel is very different from writing a game. As I said, in this game, I’m trying to write as little as possible and focus on animations and visuals, whereas of course with a book all you have is words.
The game is very basic. The player is running around pressing buttons all the time and has goals and objectives, and is focused on moving forward in the game, whereas a book is much slower in its pace. With a book, you can linger on things much longer. I do have a significant amount of theme inMollycompared to a lot of other video games, but it is still a very cartoony funny video game. If you’re writing a novel you can be like “Alright, now we’re talking about a heavy theme. Now it’s serious business.”
Q: Any last thoughts you’d like to share with readers?
Malmquist:We have a release party on the 27th of April at a bar called N3rds Bar. That’s a bar where you can play games and have a good time. If you’re not there, you can follow the party live on Instagram and Facebook. If you know someone that wants to have a publisher that is punky and cool, just let us know and we can set up a meeting.
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Molly Medusareleases on April 20 on Nintendo Switch.
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