River Boy aka Narayana Johnson

River Boy has short curly dark brown hair and is wearing a puffy dark blue jumper. He sits on a wired chair in front of a light blue gradient background. He is wearing blue jeans and has one leg crossed over the other at a right angle.

Welcome to the third edition of the new VMDO Spotlight series! VMDO Spotlight is a new series that we have launched to highlight and connect homegrown and global music industry experts in the form of interview-style articles. 

This time we chat with Melbourne-based games composer and musician, Narayana Johnson. After years performing in pop duo Willow Beats and under his own moniker River Boy, Narayana has entered the gaming world and made his mark with the much-loved indie game, Cult Of The Lamb. 

In this conversation, Narayana tells Jessica Dale about the journey to composing, his lessons for those trying to break into the space, and his insights into what it takes to create a game soundtrack.

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To start things off, could you tell us a bit about your work on Cult Of The Lamb and how that came to be?

I was in an electronic pop act called Willow Beats. We were doing the touring/festival/triple j band kind of thing. I was doing that for ages and I actually met Julian Wilton [Creative Director on Cult Of The Lamb] while on tour. I remember meeting him at a show but it was very brief. He followed us on Twitter and I saw that he had kind of a gamey-looking display picture, so I messaged him saying ‘do you make games? I love games!’ kind of thing (laughs), and then he was like ‘oh yeah, I really like your music - it would be cool to make a game together one day.’

He was working on a little phone game called Unicycle Giraffe, so I made the music for that. I think it was three or four songs, just a small project. A few years down the track, he hit me up: ‘We’re making a console game now, we’d love to have you on board.’ and I say ‘that sounds incredible! Let’s go!’ At this time we’d kind of wrapped up Willow Beats so I was looking for something chunky to sink my teeth into, it was perfect timing.

Was it the love of gaming that led to music, or was it the love of music that led to gaming in this kind of sphere?

Well a lot of my early memories of loving music were in games. I remember going over to my friend’s house when I was really little, his older bro was playing Donkey Kong Country and I remember loving the music, even then. Then I had a Game Boy growing up, I had The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Pokémon Red. I just fell in love with those games, but I was always really captivated by the music. I come from a musical family, so I don’t know if I can say one came before the other, but I’ve always loved game music.

Could you touch on how the music shifts and changes in Cult Of The Lamb?

I wanted to write good songs first. Songs that would evoke a certain emotion and that were catchy; that was my sole focus. But there were certain areas that really lent themselves to dynamics as well. For example, when you’re in the base looking after your followers and general busy work. When it turns to night time, there are ambient versions of each base song. Essentially I muted all the drums, muted the bass, made everything really washy and reverberant, and then bounced those out as separate tracks. Those actually play alongside the regular tracks, and then when it’s night time there’s just a fader that fades across to it. There’s a few different ways you could have done it, but I feel like it’s a very elegant and simple solution. 

[In the game] you do these sermons and rituals in the temple of your base, and there’s this one brainwashing ritual where you feed them all these poisonous, magic mushrooms and the screen goes psychedelic. I have this filter that turns on when it happens, and the screen gets all wobbly and the music gets wobbly too with a big vibrato effect. It’s just really fun. 

There’s an area where the track will be playing and then you go into a cave, and the drums suddenly turn up, so there’s things like that. 

Whenever you kill a boss in Hades, the song somehow magically finishes. It’s like the song knew that you were about to kill the boss, and then ends in a really musical way. I stole that and wrote these ‘ending’ bars depending on where you are in the track. The game triggers that you’ve killed the boss, and then the music’s like ‘oh, play the ending bar!’ And depending on where you are, there’s a different ending bar.

Does that change how you go about writing the piece then? Because it’ll potentially finish in different ways? How do you plan for something like that?

I just wrote the best songs that I could and thought about this stuff afterwards. ‘OK, they could kill the boss at any point in the middle of this two-minute track; how can I end it from any point?’ Say you’re in the first two bars or the last two bars of a four-bar loop, it might have a different end bit that will trigger. It just took a little bit of messing around and playing with it until it worked.

How does this work differ for you from your work as a solo artist and what you’ve previously done with Willow Beats? Do you find that your approach is different when you’re creating for yourself versus when you’re creating for a game world?

I was really lucky in this project in that the development team already liked the music I was making. They were like, ‘just do you, but like you’re fighting cult leaders’ or “just do you but you’re about to sacrifice a follower”. They definitely gave me directions like ‘this bit should feel more energetic’, but they were also like, ‘we want it to sound like you as well’. I was really lucky in that I could get quite experimental. I felt like I got to express my musicality through it.

It is different in that each piece of music sits in a particular space and should add emotion and feeling to that space. In the base I know the player will be doing a bunch of busy work, cleaning up after followers, building, farming etc. So the music is quite chilled out, it doesn’t need to be in your face and should just add a vibe of getting things done, making progress, the bustling of followers going about their business. It should make the space feel fun and productive and have a sense of movement.

Do you think there’s a particular skill-set that musicians need to have to make the transition into composing? Is there something going from, let’s say, pop or rock music, do you think there’s something in particular that they need to develop, or if you’ve got the skills in this area, then it’s easily transferable to composing?

I think it is transferable. Like I said, I was lucky that the music that they wanted in this game was the sound that I’m good at. I was really lucky in that sense. One of the developers did want more of an orchestral feel, more timpani and more strings, so I was learning how to compose with those instruments as well. But I feel like if you make good music, there’s a game for your style out there.

Were there particular challenges you faced moving into this world? Was it pretty smooth because it was close to what you were already doing?

When I was first starting, all my beats were a little bit too laid-back. The feedback I kept getting was that ‘it needs more energy!’ because these would be for sections where you’re fighting cult leaders and monsters- and my beats are pretty chill. (laughs) They were dark but the energy wasn’t there. So for me there was a bit of a process of learning how to add energy to something, and there’s multiple ways you can go about that. I think as well, you need to be really open to feedback. If someone gives you specific feedback, you need to be able to … like, I’ve almost never gotten feedback, went and changed something and had the song get worse, if that makes sense?

I guess the game’s moving into a new stage with Relics Of The Old Faith. Were things different the second time around? Were they part of the original recordings that you did, or was that an entirely new project? How did that work?

There’s these four new biome tracks; there’s basically these remixed biomes that you can play once you’ve finished the game. I remixed the original biome tracks for the new ones, which goes along thematically because it’ll be the same forest but everything’s twisted around a little different. It was more of a remixing process. There’s also a new track for the Chemach (NPC) room.

Originally we had Joonas Turner on board, he was doing all the sound effects for Cult Of The Lamb, but he had since moved onto other projects. Massive Monsters were like ‘we need a bunch of sound effects for the update!’ and I just kind of … I think I did a few and they were like, ‘oh yeah, you can do these’, and by the end I was getting lists of sound effects to make! So it was a bit of a transition into being more of a general audio person, as opposed to just a composer.

Did you enjoy that? Was that a fun challenge to have?

For sure. It is challenging. At the start, I’d get a video for some sound effect I’d need to make, and I’d open up Ableton and just have no idea what to do! But you record a few weird sounds, download a few sounds and chuck a few things together, and then it starts to shape up, and then it gets fun. It’s rewarding but it’s challenging. The software we use to implement the music is called FMOD, it’s a middleware.

Can you expand on FMOD and how you use it?

So I make all the music in Ableton, that’s my ‘DAW’. And then they make the game in Unity. With FMOD, you load in all your audio files and then tell it how to react to the game. It plugs into Unity. All my audio is in different timelines in there, and then the game just triggers stuff from in FMOD. It allows you to do those transitions that I was talking about before like the night transition, all that stuff is really easy in there. It’s an Australian made software as well, which is cool!

In terms of technology, are you finding there are things – and this is probably for people who are at the very start of doing this work, whereas you have more experience – are you seeing more technology that’s coming around that’s making it easier for people to break into this type of work?

It’s not necessarily an emerging technology, but the fact you can make a whole song in your bedroom with one person, that got rid of a lot of barriers. If you imagine before this kind of software, if you wanted to have violins in your song, you’d have to write it all out, go and find violin players, record all that. It’s still ideal to have live players, but if I’m on a budget and need a few strings in a track, I can put them in myself. And I can make the whole product from start to finish; I also did all the mixing and mastering. 

One technology I actually do use quite a lot is iZotope Ozone. That’s a mastering software but it does an auto-master, which is a great starting point. It does an auto-master, and then I tweak that and get it to the level that I want it. I find it really useful that I can do every step of the process from home.

One of the questions I had was more around game culture, and the traditional gamer world is starting to blend further and further into regular pop culture. For example, Zelda is everywhere at the moment. There’s a book by this author Gabrielle Zevin called Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, it came out last year and it tells this story of a developing video game company - it’s a fiction book but it’s tied in with this love story at the same time. It became this real pop culture thing that lots of people were reading, and people that weren’t necessarily into gaming were picking up this book. So I was wondering if you were seeing this change in the demographic of what the traditional ‘gamer’ is?

For sure it does feel like more people are playing games than ever before. You notice it everywhere. I saw a Zelda tram yesterday! I still feel like indie games haven’t broken in in the same way. Generally when I meet someone and games come up they’ve played the triple-A stuff like Call of Duty, Zelda, Mario etc etc but no indie titles. I know it’s a small data set (laughs) but that’s just been my experience.

I agree with that. I feel like the branch is getting wider with it. I feel like the Nintendo Switch really helped with that as well, going back to that portable player has made a difference with the accessibility of it for people.

Totally, totally. It was the perfect console for indie games as well, because a lot of them aren’t as graphically intensive as a triple-A game. The Switch hardware was perfect for them. It was really cool to see this huge library of indie games move over to the Switch and for me it became this little indie game machine.

You were recently at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience there and what your takeaways were?

We had a little game setup in the Australia House where people could come play the new Cult of the Lamb update. It was cool getting peoples live reactions to Relics of the Old Faith. I took my favorite Cult Of The Lamb music and worked it into a live set. I had guitar parts, flute parts, a little singing and I was live remixing with a midi controller. messing around with knobs and stuff. It was really cool. It was really nice hanging out with other Aus artists too. I feel like we banded together in foreign territory.

We went to GDC after and I had the best time. I met a lot of composers of which I’m a big fan. I met the composer from Inscryption, I met the Outer Wilds composer. Being a composer can often be a pretty isolating job ya know, so I feel like it was quite beneficial to meet other people in my industry/position. Just lots of lovely hangs and chats.

Having recently returned from overseas and seen what’s on offer there, do you think that Melbourne has the same opportunities? Because I feel like there is a real movement happening at the moment for Australian-based games and development. Do you think we have the opportunities here to sustain careers in this field?

Yeah, particularly out of Melbourne, there just seems to be amazing games popping up all over the place. I feel like it is really getting nurtured and there is a strong community here. I feel like, for our population, we’re punching way above our weight.

What do you think has been your biggest lesson that you’ve learnt across this composer journey so far. Has there been something in particular that’s stood out to you?

It still… it kind of blows my mind the way that I got into this industry. The way that it was just that small conversation that I had with someone on Twitter that planted the seed that years down the track would grow into this career. I wouldn’t have imagined that. 

When I messaged Julian at first, I wouldn’t have imagined that it would change the trajectory of my career. I feel like it’s a lot of luck, but I’ve been making music for a long time and I’ve been putting myself out there and made that connection. So it’s like a mixture of luck and work, but you’ve got to look for the luck, I think. You’ve got to be actively searching for it.

In the same sort of vein then, do you have any advice that you would give the people wanting to start out in this field, or where they can get a start or what they need to do?

Landing your first game can be tough and honestly I got super lucky. Everyone's entry is different too. I think that you’ve got to be active in the community. In most Aus cities, if not all of them, there are game meetups where people come and show off early builds of their games. I think being amongst it is really important, and be chill and friendly (laughs). Be a nice person.

Are you able tell us a little bit more about what the rights side looks like for game composers? Are you generally able to hold onto a royalties share or does the work fall under the ownership of the development company?

It’s different across the board! There isn’t really a standard way to do things. Sometimes composers will maintain the rights and income from the OST, other times the devs will buy those rights outright. There are cases were the devs will theoretically own the music but they’ll pass all revenue royalties through to the composer. 

I was wondering if you had an all-time favourite game soundtrack, and what makes that special? Do you find that informing your work now?

Yeah, my favourite, not even just game music but some of my favourite music of all-time is from Donkey Kong Country. David Wise (the Composer) had access to the very limited sound chip of the Super Nintendo, but he pushed the limits of what it could do. My favourite parts are ambient introspective songs like Aquatic Ambience, and I just find it fascinating, it’s such deep and intricate music for what is essentially a game about monkey bro’s jumping across platforms and collecting bananas. It adds this depth to it that I really love. Gives it emotional weight somehow like the characters are contemplating the meaning of monkey existence and their place in the universe. The pixelated 3D art is gritty and the whole package is super nostalgic for me.

Find out more about Narayana and his work here.