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Scramble: Battle of Britain will ship with a dynamic soundtrack that responds to the action around your airplanes in planning, simulation, and replay phases of your dogfights. We have been fortunate to work with a brilliant composer, Ash Gibson Greig, to find a set of instruments and style to serve as the musical language of the Scramble airspace.
Scramble: Battle of Britain exists exclusively in the sky and the player has full analog control over dynamic curving flight paths and, despite spending a lot of playtime paused for planning, players need to experience the Scramble airspace as alive and simulating. With these physical realities as a guide we asked Ash to compose the base layer of our songs with a fluidity and persistent sense of lift that reminds the player that even their “paused” sky of airplanes is inherently in motion.
Scramble dogfights are filled with thrilling action, but our core design themes also include the attrition and loss baked into the Battle of Britain history. Player experience oscillates between success and failure; it can flip as suddenly as a single turn or can exist simultaneously in different pockets of the same furball. Your unproven rookie pilots can team up to score their first kills on a vulnerable pack of Heinkels at 3,000 feet while your favorite ace unluckily succumbs to the Messerschmitt escorts he distracted down to sea level. Our ambition is to deliver music that dynamically mirrors the emotions you may feel as you zoom around the sky, whether paused or in live action, while also scaling a base layer of excitement and tension as friendlies and enemies escape, bail, or die.
The campaign is still a work in progress, but the video below offers a glimpse of how the dynamic soundtrack already works in our current development build.
Each Scramble song is broken into 15+ instrumental tracks, and those tracks all vary according to five mood parameters that we can set as the match progresses and as the player camera moves around the sky. We step the Excitement parameter throughout the match as enemy aircraft are shot down and as enemy bombers are rejected and turn for home. We reserve a final step in the Excitement parameter to heighten the mood as airplanes lock enemies in their gunsights – a geometric condition that varies frequently for every airplane in every turn. Our Tension parameter opens matches at zero and ratches up as friendly aircraft exit the dogfight through escape, death, or bail. Low Health and Threat parameters are both situational and aircraft-dependent, the former increasing alongside the damage of the selected aircraft and the latter increasing when the selected aircraft is in the gunsights of enemies. Our Sun parameter climbs as the in-game sun approaches the center of the camera field of view, and it modifies the whole soundtrack to mirror the loss of awareness and disorientation that pilots experience with sun in their eyes.
Our dynamic soundtrack will feature four distinct songs, each shifting through every second of Scramble dogfights, with changes in mood that reflect both the permanent momentum shifts of each match and the momentary swings in airspace dynamics. We are very excited to fill your skies with music.
We're working hard to make the campaign the best experience possible. While it's still being tested internally, we're planning to invite our Early Access players to try parts of it soon.
Stay tuned, and don't forget to wishlist Scramble: Battle of Britain!
