Composer Yann van der Cruyssen reflects upon his wide-ranging collaborations, including with Blocks That Matter developers Swing Swing Submarine, while publishing music of numerous genres under the artist name 'Morusque.'
By Jerry Jeriaska of The Ongaku
The dilapidated future environs explored by the feline protagonist of Stray have captured the imagination of an international audience.
Previously, we spoke with music composer Yann Van Der Cruyssen on the break-out success of BlueTwelve Studio's adventure game and its evocative soundtrack. This year, Yann is scoring mysterious puzzle game Looking for Fael, developed in conjunction with longtime collaborators currently based in Angoulême, France.
This discussion with the musician offers insights into the origins of that collaboration and others, stemming from humble experiments with Oujevipo projects and extending into multi-platform releases for numerous language regions. Throughout the process the focus has remained on rewarding the player with unique discoveries.
Don't miss Part 1 of this interview: "Stray Notes: Yann van der Cruyssen on Composing Soundscapes Beyond Human Trespass"
The physical edition of Stray for Nintendo Switch debuted late last year
Stray Subquests - Capturing Audio Vignettes in Asia
Launched in July of 2022, Stray imagines a distant future scenario — humankind has vanished, leaving robot creations on their own to cobble together a makeshift civilization based on the cultural practices of their predecessors.
The art design of Stray draws inspiration from assorted references. While a location within Montpellier was recreated in the game, much of the Slums is inspired by the cramped apartment buildings of Kowloon, Hong Kong.
BlueTwelve deliberately avoided specifying a geographic location, allowing composer Yann Van Der Cruyssen to use previously recorded source audio from outside of Europe. For example, Yann integrated ambient audio from a large incinerator he visited in South Korea into the soundscape of Stray's imaginary setting.
Stray Original Soundtrack on Spotify, published by Annapurna Interactive
The building was in the process of being repurposed as an art gallery, and event organizers invited a group of French artists to make use of the occasion to impart some basic programming concepts to Korean children. The idea was to decorate the building to make it look like it was haunted by ghosts. Surveillance cameras were situated in various parts of the incinerator, displaying images of apparitions wandering the halls.
"It's a very big place with pipes and machines and I could imagine that it looks like the factory in Stray," the composer recalls. "There were rooms for burning things and the reverb was very strong. I placed a microphone in the center of the room and I could record the sounds of machines echoing from far away. I probably used those recordings for the jail in Stray."
Yann carried his microphone with him to collect audio from one destination to the next, approximating the meandering journey of Stray.'s unnamed player character. "I think that some subtle details might sound different, like the transportation," he observed during his travels, noticing spots like subway stations in Tokyo lined with air conditioners on the walls.
"You could compare it to small quests, if you want," Yann says of a creative overlap between travel and game design that he has nurtured over the years. "I was trusting the game designers on Stray, but I was pushing for the game to be a bit more explorative, less linear and more sandbox. I think I already said last time that I'm happy to be embodied in the character that is the most non-linear quest-giver in Stray."
Late last year, Stray's physical edition launched in Japan, where ambient sounds appearing in the adventure game were recorded
The location where the player encounters the robot Morusque serves as a showcase for the breadth of Yann's talents. Bringing lost sheet music to Morusque prompts the robot to play a tune on his makeshift acoustic guitar.
Nearby, the cat can curl up on a rug and listen to an ambient music track while the camera pulls back to reveal a wide shot of the location. While the concept emerged on the developers' side, the composer followed up by requesting a larger number of respite spots where otherwise inaccessible music cues would be triggered.
"Sometimes in games, developers seem to assume that everything has to be over the top," he observes. "The music is supposed to be epic all the time and, even for small actions like clicking on an element in the interface, you can sometimes hear many layers of audio and heavy bass. I resisted doing this. It wouldn't convey the decaying, ambient mess of the game's setting. It's not possible to develop subtle details if too many elements are heavy and obvious."
He and sound design colleague Raphaël Monnin had placed a particular emphasis on putting down the controller during gameplay and listening closely, iterating on each location's soundscapes over time. Some players took notice and replicated this activity on their own.
"People post videos where they just put the camera somewhere in Stray and stay still for one hour," he explains. "The slums [location] has many different distant sounds in it, and it spawns the sounds here and there from time to time. I'm happy that we've done this because when people record videos, those random sounds make it unpredictable and more interesting, in comparison with constant room tones."
Stray is set in a future era, within an urban setting where humans are no longer present
While recording sounds in Tokyo that would find their way into Stray, Yann participated in an exhibition organized by the Institut Français called "Cozmo Kids," joined by Doshin the Giant designer Kazutoshi Iida.
Yann had contributed toward popularizing the concept of "Oujevipo" in France in the 2000s. His idea was to create an offshoot of "Oulipo," enforcing constrained design techniques as a means of spurring creativity in game development. Pierre Corbinais, a writer and journalist in France, reinterpreted its meaning to describe more broadly the kinds of experimental games that he covered on his blog.
"I think I showed some games from France, or some obscure game jam games," he says. "The idea was that I had prepared a few hundred games, and then if Iida was showing a game about birds, I would pick a game about birds, as well. For each game, we would pick somebody from the audience, and that person would play the game for five minutes or so."
Through that research into disparate prototypes, the talk session at "Cozmo Kids" became a multiplayer game of its own.
Nostalgic Source Files - Making Chiptunes on Stage and in Soundtracks
NES Music from 2008 by Morusque
It was at the age of six that Yann came up with the portmanteau word "morusque." It was a combination of the French words "Morue" or cod, and "Mollusque" or mollusk. If you could leap into a doorframe before the door closed, that would earn you morusques. However, if the door closed, no morusques would be awarded.
"I had been using this as a kind of point system," he explains. "It was a measurement unit for a fictional game where you were supposed to do certain actions to win points. And I later chose to reuse this as a nickname when there were internet forums and I had to choose a nickname."
Around the same age, he was playing NES music by ear on the piano. "I had this game, Faxanadu. The soundtrack was made by Jun Chikuma. And there is one level that a lot of people remember— a level with mist, where the music has a melody that feels detached from the background chords. The game is interesting in many ways."
Later, Yann revisited Faxanadu and hacked the ROM to learn how the data operated. He found that by altering the bytes he could manipulate the audio files themselves. "I remember that I found a way to merge several pieces of music. I was doing it randomly, so I didn't know exactly what to do and what to achieve, but I had new music that didn't exist just because I altered the music data."
The audio of the 8-bit game console presented a form of puzzle, wherein each tune invited Yann to imagine what kind of musical instrument the NES sound card was attempting to mimic. He found this exercise applied to Western games, as well. He discovered Tim Follin's music while playing Solstice, and searched out the soundtrack from Equinox, despite not having access to a Super Nintendo.
He says of Follin's game scores, "I get the feeling he likes to push the boundaries of what a console is capable of."
Sylvain Buffet, aka Bitcrusher, and Morusque - filmed by Mehdi Lévêque
Around the age of 21, Yann began composing chip music and performing at public venues in the small city of Angoulême, located near Bordeaux. He took to the stage with his friend Sylvain Buffet, aka Bitcrusher, utilizing the LSDj sequencing app for Game Boy.
"If you're organized enough, you can keep them in sync with the Linker," Yann says of the portable game console. "We were composing music on each other's Game Boy and we tried to make the tunes match. We were also playing with bent toys and synths."
Yann and Sylvian hung assorted cables on a tall dentist's tray — the tree of strewn instruments lending the performance a haphazard, risky ambiance. The intentionally messy vibe served as a comic misdirect, camouflaging the performers' adept skill at adapting to any inevitable hardware malfunction or technical snafu. A friend who attended said it felt as if the show could "crumble" to pieces at any moment.
"Sylvain was wearing a suit with a [CRT] screen on his head," Yann recalls, "so it's exactly like the characters in Stray."
Yann's chip music is hosted on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, carving out personalized genres composed of Game Boy and NES sounds. His collaboration with Sylvian made him specially qualified for scoring sprite-based indie games. However, a typical problem that arose was negotiating a balance between the nostalgia of classic console soundfonts and requests for enhancements to make them sound more contemporary.
"Limited number of channels and waveforms, I like," Yann says. "I think I find it harder to mix those limitations with a broader set of limitations.
"Some people sometimes tell me, 'Okay, I'm doing this game. It looks like a Game Boy game, but with more colors and stuff.' They want the soundtrack to sound like Game Boy, but not too much like Game Boy. For me, the in-between is very hard to do.'"
The Cheat Code Live au Buzz, Paris, le 15 décembre 2010, via BitcrusherTV
One such request attended the soundtrack conversion of Cave Story for WiiWare, where the developers were unable to utilize designer Daisuke Amaya's PxTone Collage files.
"I chose instruments that would fit among the GM [General MIDI] specifications, without knowing what they would sound like in the end," Yann recalls. "When I discovered that it was going to be a very generic Roland canvas, I requested that we create our own soundfont instead."
As it turned out, the developer determined that the MIDI soundtrack was incongruous when paired with the higher resolution graphics of the WiiWare port. Yann sought out some assistance from Swedish game designer Nifflas in developing a custom soundfont. When it was discovered that the soundfont player was unable to handle more than eight notes at once, this necessitated another pass.
"We had to revise the sounds used, and probably some of the music as well, to make [the data files] smaller in size. All that was kind of vain. In the end, we had to convert all the MIDIs to MP3 and compress the MP3s heavily."
Ten years later, Yann was contacted by a fan project seeking to release the album in a format more closely approximating his original intensions. The compilation is streaming on SoundCloud, posted by user SoloMael. Listening to the soundtrack, Yann observed, "Overall, it was not so bad as I remembered."
A thorough equalization of Cave Story's WiiWare soundtrack, via SoloMael
Co-developing - Angoulême, Montpellier, and Co.
Saira, developed by Nifflas (Nicklas Nygren)
Amidst the challenges of porting Cave Story, Yann collaborated with Nifflas in Umeå, Sweden on the puzzle-platformer Saira. There, they recorded the natural environment, ran those sounds through trackers and sequencers, and utilized the materials in constructing the soundtrack.
One technique Nifflas employed, evident while playing the platformer Knytt, involved triggering music tracks in a manner that was unpredictable.
"Sometimes you would enter a room and a very short stinger of music would play," Yann observed. "Typically a ten-second piece of music would play—probably if no music had been played for a certain amount of time. I thought that it was working really well."
When this strategy was playtested during development on Stray, Yann noticed a positive response among the players trying out new builds.
Shortly after Saira launched in December of 2009, Swing Swing Submarine cofounders William and Guillame secured funding for their studio in Montpellier. What was needed then was some software. What they already had in their possession was a swiftly-developed prototype, not unlike the genre of experimental short-form games that has come to be described as "Oujevipo."
Irreverently titled "Tuper Tario Tros," the prototype mashed together music, graphics and gameplay elements of Super Mario Bros. and Tetris. While something of a viral phenomenon online, several websites were pressured to remove the game from their servers due to the conspicuous reuse of fiercely guarded intellectual property.
Blocks That Matter - Soundtrack Preview via Swing Swing Submarine
Reimagining their prior prototype from the ground up as an original concept, Blocks That Matter marked Yann's first collaboration with Swing Swing Submarine. The puzzler paid homage to block-themed games, from Boulder Dash to Bomberman. Even Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and Minecraft designer Markus Persson made guest appearances as pixel art character portraits.
Swing Swing Submarine's followup Tetrobot and Co. benefitted from a more accommodating dev cycle, lasting almost a full year. "It's still pretty quick compared to other games," Yann recalls. "It's a game where you're a very tiny character, and you're inside a box, so there is a confined aspect. I wanted the music to be somehow like a submarine scene or something, but not in an oppressive way — more in a comfortable way."
"There are a few levels, boss levels, that are more fast-paced," he observed. "And since I spent a lot of time playing the game, I was quite good at it. The boss levels, I could beat them in about five minutes. So I made short music, and it was looping two or three times, but it was okay. But later, I discovered that people would take more than one hour to beat those levels.
"That's a very typical mistake—to play not as an actual player but as a developer."
Tetrobot & Co. by Morusque
In Montpellier, a variety of other game design studios currently operate in close proximity to each other, from small scale independent projects to Triple A studios.
Yann mentions, regarding the local development culture: "When I arrived, Swing Swing Submarine was working in the same building as Game Bakers, and Pixel Reef, the company [founded by] Eric Chahi. At that time, Eric was doing Volcano Simulator. Then he started to work on Paper Beast, so we used to see each other from time to time."
As luck would have it, a cat wandering through Eric Chahi's garden turned out to be uniquely qualified as a voice actor. "He calls the cat ‘the cat from the garden’ because I think he doesn't know the name of the cat," Yann says of the curious animal who unwittingly auditioned for the role. "I was looking for cat sounds, and he said, 'Oh, I have a cat who goes and meows every day at the same time, so it would be easy to record.'
"I had asked a lot of friends who owned cats to record their cat, but it's very complex to record a cat. Sometimes when you record a cat, the cat is meowing because he wants to eat. Most of the time, a cat meows because of a specific cause that is very easy to tell. I got a lot of recordings, but very few of them were as useful. It might feel off in the context of the game, where the cat meows for other reasons."
The Swing Swing Submarine development team
Approximately six hours of Yann's music were recorded for Stray. Enthusiasts have gone to the extremes of hacking the game data to discover all the hard-to-access music assets, which far exceed the runtime of the original soundtrack album.
"I know that people are data mining," the composer says. "We were a bit more surprised that almost from day one, there were people taking screenshots of the game from angles that you were normally not supposed to be allowed to put the camera in, or replacing the cat with something else. There has been a lot of hacking, and I'm okay with it. I like the game to be modified by anybody. It's good, if you ask me."
A number of gameplay videos uploaded online have unearthed hidden aspects of the audio design of Stray. And yet, some secrets remain, even to this day. Yann mentions, "I think that there is one Wilhelm scream hidden somewhere, but it's so modified that it's unnoticeable."
Swing Swing Submarine is currently developing Looking for Fael. Involving puzzle gameplay inspired by classics like Myst, the mystery-driven puzzle game invites the player to uncover new rooms within a labyrinth of nested apartments, find clues, and delve into the unknown. Figuring into the story is an enigmatic GameLeaf retro console, used to collect hidden items and unlock new areas to explore.
Featuring music by Yann, >Looking for Fael is planned for release this year for Windows through Steam.
Yann van der Cruyssen is a composer and multidisciplinary creator – www.nurykabe.com | Spotify Artist Page | x.com/Morusque