My name is Dooma Wendschuh and I used to write AAA games. Teams hundreds strong. Huge budgets. Endless days, blurring together: screenwriting software, narrative flow charts. That smell of the studio that I just can’t forget.   Even longer days with actors in the voiceover booth.  Thousands of lines, pick the best ones. Traveling - on planes… a lot. Microwave Indian food at the studio in Morocco.  Vodka at the studio in St. Petersburg. Shows. Autographs. Interviews. Conferences. Sleep?  Maybe when I retire.  

And then, finally, I did retire. On a remote island where seal hunting is kind of a big thing. They’re cute - like sea-puppies.  Bought a restaurant- best seal nachos you’ve ever had.  Walked my dog along stunning red cliffs in the snow. It was great. 

Then Abbott called. His friend Joe had made a game.  On nights and weekends, while working full time as a movie director and shooting commercials for big brands and managing the release of his most recent film, Joe taught himself Unreal – and built an open world sandbox action / survival game about starting and managing a doomsday cult.  My kind of guy. It was amazing – but there was still a lot to do to get it over the finish line.  And it needed a story. So here we are.

Bedford County is full of many mysteries.

This is unlike anything I’ve done before.  We’re 10 people on this team (+2 part time).  The whole game budget is less than the travel budget for games I’d worked on before.  The biggest difference: 20% of our team is dedicated to working on crafting the story. 

But this is not an easy story to write:

Firstly - while there are exceptions – I think it’s fair to say sandbox survival games are less known for storytelling.  It’s more about the story you create as the player (or if it’s co-op game, the story you create w/friends).  And JOIN US has that x1,000... but a traditional narrative is a tall order in this genre.

Something very bad happened at the Bedford Zoo. And the animals were not the losers.

Here’s the real challenge:  The 1st thing my first screenwriting professor taught me:  Every story needs a protagonist - the central character whose journey drives the action.  And JOIN US can’t have a protagonist.  When your character dies, they’re gone forever.  You come back as a different Follower (assuming you have Followers – but a cult of one is more of a study in poor life choices than an actual cult). 

Things are, uh, heating up during a nighttime raid.

And we stretched this permadeath concept even further:  You can switch to a different playable character whenever you like.  When you switch, you’re “teleported” to wherever that Follower is located.  If your outpost is being raided, open your roster, find a Follower at that outpost and you’re there.  Now imagine trying to write a story when the player can check out at any moment and re-appear at the other end of the map. 

There's a perfectly logical explanation for this. The apocalypse is not coming. Probably. Most likely not.

Oh, and in JOIN US, you have essentially unlimited freedom to choose your cult’s beliefs using “teachings” - & each choice has implications for your gameplay experience.  Imagine trying to write a story where you don’t know whether the cult embraces hedonism, or if they’re preppers, or worship aliens, or practice cannibalism.  And the story has to make sense no matter what the player chooses.

Can you see why these challenges got me to put down the seal nachos and un-retire?  I won’t tell you how well - or poorly - I think we addressed them.  That’s for you to decide! 

I just hope you have as much fun playing this game as we had writing it.

Here a sample of the Hero Suite score here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3b_a9jIQIs
Dear Cultists,

Ben Bostick the composer here. Greetings from Atlanta, GA, where I sit in my studio taking a brief break from scoring the magnificent, glorious end scene of Join Us. Too many great stories have disappointing endings—not this one. The end is near, and it’s oh so sweet!

Scoring Join Us is my first experience working on a video game. I have done some composing for film/TV/ads/events/etc… but most of my musical career has been centered around the popular music side of the clef; as a songwriter, producer, and performer. So years ago, when my friend Joe first started asking me if I was interested in scoring a game he was making, I didn’t let myself get too excited. I figured he would eventually come to his senses and hire someone qualified for the job.

Then a few months ago, Joe casually told me it was really happening, and the time to start composing was now. I excitedly thanked him for trusting me with the game, hung up the phone, and entered panic mode. I had no idea how to score a game.

Partying at the Waterways Cruise Corporation Annual Summer Jam Festival.

Composing for a moving picture (film/TV/commercials) is intuitive—you simply write music that is timed to work with the image on the screen. Writing for games, on the other hand, took awhile for me to wrap my head around. The player controls what is happening on the screen, and the composer has no idea how long the player will be in any area or situation.
So how the hell do you account for that as a composer?

My solution was to put myself through a semester of college in a couple weeks. I devoured a couple books textbooks (Composing Music for Games by Chance Thomas, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell) and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about game scoring.

This still has nothing to do with music. It just goes hard.

Eventually I was able to wrap my head around the concept of “adaptive music,” which is a term used to describe music that comes with a set of instructions for a programmer to implement. And after trying my hand at a couple of cues, I started to get in the groove.

My current process goes something like this…
1) What is the game state?
2) What are the creative needs of the game state?
3) What are some technically possible ways to make a cue for that game state?
4) Which of the technical possibilities best allows the creative to shine?
5) Design an implementation strategy for the cue.
6) Make music!
7) Bust out all the different files needed for the implementation.
8) Write instructions to the developers on how to implement this bunch of files that you just uploaded. 

The musical “world” of course started with the game world.
Join Us has a very specific tone.

Interrupting production on the movie shooting in Bedford County's old west tourist town. A nod to the western film influences on the game's vibe.

Early on Joe told me that the game was somewhat of a spaghetti western wrapped in a cult simulator…with the occasional eldritch god. So after some discussion, we decided to try to hit all those tones and mash them into something unique. I came up with a flexible musical theme that could live in all those worlds—the hero theme uses only a few tones and could be part of any number of ancient scales—and I composed a suite around that theme. At first there was a plainchant (aka Gregorian chant) section, then an Ennio Morricone style section, then a vintage sci-fi section, then more Morricone. It sounded awesome, but it also sounded very serious. We tried a version that was more grindhouse inspired, with 70s funk and disco sounds, but I ended up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The first version was great, but just too heavy. That’s when Joe suggested we throw in a little John Carpenter. And maybe end it all with a big grindhouse funk orchestra bang. My head was spinning at this point. A piece of music that combined plainchant, spaghetti western scores, vintage sci-fi sounds, grindhouse disco funk, and John Carpenter scores? It’s all over the map. It’s insane. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work. We recently posted that original “Hero Suite” on YouTube. Go give it a listen and hear how it all began \[[i]link above[/i]].

I have written hours of music for the game since composing that suite, but most of the basic tonalities of the score were established from the start. Can’t wait for everyone to play the game and hear more music!

Cheerio for now!
Ben