Dustborn: a Comic Book-Inspired Road Trip

Dustborn, developed by Red Thread Games and published by Quantic Dream, is an action adventure game I had the pleasure of working on for 4 years between 2020 and 2024.

The game follows a gang of misfits as they embark on a perilous road-trip across the Divided States of America, travelling undercover as a makeshift band. The game embraces many diverse gameplay modes and mechanics including combat, puzzle solving, conversations with dialogue choices which impact the player’s experience, not to mention some music minigames.

For the purposes of this blog, I’ll focus on a few of the key audio systems we used in the development of Dustborn, and touch on how we harnessed Wwise to bring our audio vision to life.

Echoes in the Stillness

One of the main story points of Dustborn is the protagonist Pax’s ability to enter a hidden realm called the Stillness. This realm, as hinted at in its name, is a dreamlike alternate dimension which co-exists with the real world. As such, when inside the Stillness, Pax is still aware of the real world beyond the veil, and can see and hear what occurs there, albeit through the filters the Stillness creates.

We achieved this effect by creating a Stillness state group, with 2 state values; OutsideStillness, and InsideStillness. When in the real world, the OutsideStillness state is set, and all sounds emanating from the real world are heard clearly, whilst all sounds emanating from the Stillness are muted. When inside the Stillness, we activate the InsideStillness state, where the opposite happens, although in this state we filter the real world sounds and process them differently, rather than muting them completely. This gives the impression that Pax is still aware of sounds emanating from the real world, though they are being affected by the Stillness dimension.

Whilst inside the Stillness dimension, Pax is able to locate and record Echoes; remnants of a cataclysmic event which occurred years previously, containing multitudes of voices, both new and from ancient civilisations. (There’s too much backstory to go into here, but play the game to find out more!)

The mechanic for recording these Echoes is that the player first needs to locate them, and then pull them inside an on-screen circle for long enough to record them. The Echo however has resistance to being pulled inside the circle, and will apply its own opposing force in order to try and stay out of the circle.

We utilized this force to drive an RTPC, which has an effect on the pitch and volume of the Echo sounds. This gives the impression that the player and the Echo are in a tug-of-war, with the audio becoming more intense the harder the resistance.

Stillness and Echoes video

“Smart” Stingers That Follow the Musical Key

During the combat sections of the game, we wanted to accent particular events with musical stingers. The music however was composed in various different key signatures, so we needed to ensure that these stingers were adaptive, and would always fit with the key signature of the currently playing music. This involved producing a lot of additional content, but in my opinion was well worth the time and effort to ensure musically natural results.

To achieve this we used Music Event Cues added to the music segments, so we could track when the music changed key. These events contained a Set State action which in turn set the Music_Set_Key state group to the correct music signature. 

All of the stingers were added to a single music segment, with different Random Step tracks for each key, with the volume of each track being controlled by the state group. The beauty of this system meant that if the currently playing track was to change key whilst a stinger was playing, the stinger would crossfade to the correct version seamlessly.

Adaptive Stingers video

Music Game

As the Dustborn story is centered around Pax and her crew on a road trip masquerading as a band, it only makes sense that the game would feature music mini-games. These take shape as Guitar Hero style button mashing rhythm games, where the player needs to press buttons in time with the songs in order to hear the “correct” version. If the player misses a button, a “wrong note” will play on that particular instrument instead. This is also the case for the vocal parts, meaning that if you miss the vocal button, Pax will mess up her performance.
I was fortunate to record these vocal parts with our lead actress, Dominique Tipper, at Abbey Road Studios in London. So after we’d finished recording enough perfect takes of each track, I then had to ask her to do a few more takes, but this time messing up as much as possible! I remember thinking how ironic this was. There we were, in one of the most legendary recording studios in the world, asking somebody to sound as bad as they possibly could! 

We implemented this in Wwise using a combination of multitrack music segments, with the tracks being routed to individual buses so we could duck the “correct” version of each instrument when the wrong notes needed to be played. Pax’s “good” and ”bad” versions of her vocal tracks were handled with a state, so we could ensure the appropriate version was heard at any given time. 

Band Song demo video

Collaboration

I was lucky enough to collaborate with some truly inspiring musicians during the development of Dustborn. As well as recording vocals with Dominique, I also collaborated with Charlotte Hatherley, formerly the guitarist of Ash. Charlotte contributed a brand new song for the game which was featured in various guises throughout, and also performed all the guitar parts on the soundtrack. I was also fortunate to take a trip to Prague to record a 30 piece string section with the City of Prague Philharmonic, which truly brought the score to life. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and if your interest has been piqued I encourage you to grab yourself a copy of Dustborn on your platform of choice, and embark on this comic book inspired road trip for yourself!

For further reading, check out this article about the sounds of Dustborn:
https://blog.quanticdream.com/how-simon-poole-shaped-the-sound-of-dustborn/

Links to the Dustborn soundtrack:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4WRZUr5yYwpyed5InymzQk?si=3o107d5aQJS7Do9ebYrsOQ
https://music.apple.com/no/album/dustborn-original-game-soundtrack/1763069973
https://tidal.com/browse/album/381478250