From Gameboy to FMOD
It's Sunday evening, and 11-year-old Frederik Keglberg is staring with empty eyes at the checkered paper on the desk before him. Homework. Math. Ink bill. His father quietly enters the room, walks up to Frederik's desk, and places his Gameboy on the table's edge. It's playing Gameboy music!
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"He knew I loved the music from a certain game on it," explains Frederik Keglberg.
Frederik Keglberg is the Sound Designer at Bolverk Games.
Frederik's happy memory is about how his father, a math teacher, helped motivate him to get his ink bill done.
Later, when Frederik Keglberg was about 15 years old, he began making 8-bit music on the handheld console.
"Until my thumbs bled," says Frederik Keglberg with a smile.
Naive or complex
"Probably, it was the nostalgia from the early years that made me start making music on them. There is so much music from my childhood that comes from the Gameboy," Frederik Keglberg says.
"The limitation is interesting," he says, explaining how the Gameboy music maker limits the user to build on just four tracks. The challenge was to see how much depth you could give the boops and the bleeps.
"I love tinkering with electronics - if it ends up making a sound," says Frederik Keglberg.
Frederik Keglberg believes you can place most music on a sliding scale of naïveté and complexity.
"Gameboy music is so naive it almost becomes complex," Frederik Keglberg says. Another scale he likes to place music on is from linear to non-linear. Non-linear music is often used in computer games, where the player's choices help dictate the story, and the sound image needs to follow suit.
Frederik Keglberg wrote his BA project focused on the VR wave shooter Dick Wilde from Bolverk Games, one of the company's first virtual reality games. That project led to a job at the company.
Sounds like sci-fi
Recently they released a new VR title for the Quest 2,3 and pro headsets. The game is called "Genotype" and is a science fiction adventure.
"Science fiction is fantastic because, as a sound designer, you get to use your imagination," says Frederik Keglberg of his current work.
"You have to create new sounds for things that never existed before. It's totally free."
It also comes with another advantage:
"Single-player games often have the best sound because the music supports a clear narrative," says Frederik Keglberg, who mutes the music in most games he plays - except Green Hell.
Genotype is a single-player game in an Antarctic setting, which leaves Frederik Keglberg with a great setup: Tech+music+inventing sounds. It's work and a hobby; if you put it together, it all adds to the perfect job.
FMOD over Gameboy
A couple of years ago, Frederik Keglberg created the sound design and music for Bolverk Games's open-world platform game, Glyph.
"Since there are so many ways you can complete a level in Glyph, we needed a way for the music to progress and evolve. The music will try to fit your play style. With the non-linear level design in Glyph, we can't have the level control the music. Instead, we wanted how you move Glyph through the level to control the music," says Frederik Keglberg, who uses the program FMOD to implement and control sound design and music in the game engine.
It also means that the compositions are fractured and not complete songs in the traditional sense.
"For the Glyph OST, I took the pieces I liked the most and made them into complete song structures with different arrangements and some new instrumentation. I chose to make them more orchestral and epic," says Frederik Keglberg.
If there’ll ever be a Genotype OST, we’ll have to wait and see. If so, perhaps Frederik Keglberg can be persuaded to make an 8-bit version, for old times' sake.
The game
In Genotype, you explore an Antarctic research base overrun by monstrous beasts, wielding high-tech gloves that print living organisms you can use as weapons and survival tools.
- Print creatures and use them as weapons to fight off aggressive beasts.
- Transform into other beings to move through vents and use them as tools to clear environmental obstructions.
- Upgrade your creatures' DNA to enhance their capabilities, and customize your GRAID gloves to increase your survival chances.
- Enjoy high-fidelity graphics that take full advantage of the Meta Quest platforms' graphical potential.
- Immerse yourself in an emotional narrative with fully voice-acted characters.
- Dive into a world with truly alien sound design and atmospheric synth-scapes.
You play as Evely, an intern at an Antarctic weather station. During a routine expedition, Evely falls through the ice into the mysterious Snowdrop Initiative laboratories. Luckily, the facility's last human survivor, William, can guide her to save herself - and the entire planet.
The Studio
Bolverk Games is an award-winning indie studio in Denmark focused on VR games and software. We were among the first to realize how VR gaming could be more than a novelty, and we are still at the forefront of a growing market, always exploring VR's potential.
www.playgenotype.com
www.bolverkgames.com
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