How The Stray Gods Team Wrote A Musical With Millions Of Endings

Stray Gods was born from a rejected proposal for composer Austin Wintory.

Wintory’s idea for a game was so exciting that five years earlier, he had been invited to the pre-GDC to share it with an unknown friend. It was a musical game – not just a game with musical numbers distributed throughout, but where the player has control over the music itself. Wintory’s best friend wasn’t very enthusiastic.

Wintory remembers that “he said in no uncertain words, I hated that idea and wanted nothing to do it.” The story is told with a smile, and he finds humor in how this pitch was eventually turned into the game that I am currently interviewing Wintory about.

His unnamed buddy wasn’t particularly interested in the idea, but he pointed Wintory to Liam Esler. Esler is a game developer who has similar goals of creating narrative-based games that allow players to make choices. Wintory ‘literally sprints’ across town before the flight to Australia to meet Esler. The two began talking about how much they love musicals. Buffy The Vampire SlayerThe partnership was formed between Wintory’s Summerfall Studios and Esler.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical was the final game they produced. The story follows Grace, played by Laura Bailey (a veteran performer in video games), who is a woman trying to prove her innocence as a suspect in a murder trial. She uses the powers she has gained from a “muse” which makes people around her sing. It is set in a world that’s a modern interpretation of Greek mythology, featuring many gods, now known as idols, such as Apollo, Persephone and Athena. In this twist of the role-playing game genre, the player can not only choose dialogue during the conversations but also lyrics in musical numbers. By doing so, the players are able to change both the plot and the soundtrack.

Grace decides to take a stand in the middle of a song.

There is no doubt that managing a branching narrative requires considerable effort, but adding music to the mix also takes a lot of planning and coordination. Wintory does not reveal what exactly turned off this friend from working on this game. However, every Stray Gods member that I spoke to could not help but mention the mind-boggling scale of this project. The scope of the game is staggering, even for an indie developer’s debut title.

How did the writers come up with a way to create a song that had millions of possible endings.

Music Beyond Measure

Wintory was appointed Stray Gods music director and composer. He worked closely with a team of writers and members of the Stray Gods narrative to assemble songs and scores. But while Wintory has written music for huge games, such as Journey and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, there’s never been a game with a scale quite like Stray Gods.

Wintory says, “A song which only has three options can end up with literally thousands permutations.” In the final of the game there are literally millions of permutations.

It’s hard to choose between the red, blue or green option. Your choices earlier in a song, or even earlier in a plot can have repercussions on the current situation. The difference between being kind to the character two times in a line and then becoming mean is that you are not repeating your kindness. The lyrics for each section are different, and in some cases the backing track is also altered.

You can also look at numbers in a different way: Grace decides how to move forward. The song allows Grace to choose whether she wants to side with Freddie or the naughty idol Pan. The song has only three verses and three choruses. There are also two pre-choruses and a middle section. But the 38 different sections that need to be recorded and written result from the choices made. If you do not include the planning required to align each route, that’s four times as much work. And this is just for an early song – as the story proceeds, the number of variables in each encounter only increases.

Wintory intends to release the music as four separate albums in order to cover as many aspects of this storyline as possible. They will all roughly describe a different play style but, at best, [give]He says that the game has six hours of music. This is a lot more than any other soundtrack I’ve seen. Wintory told me that there are six hours worth of music, which dwarfs any other soundtrack I could find. However, it is unclear whether every single minute will be included on the soundtracks.

Wintory emphasizes the need for each songwriter to be well-versed in video games, including dialogue trees. Tripod was a natural choice due to the previous work they had done with Wintory on This Gaming Life, Syndicate, and other projects. Tripod was initially only going to help with the lyrics. But its contribution quickly spread into other areas of music.

In the end, there was too much work for not enough writers, and so Summerfall began to look into hiring another writer. Montaigne was at the top of the list, but Montaigne took the initiative before Summerfall reached out to see if they were interested in composing music for the video game. tweeting, “seriously though. “Let me write the music for your computer game.” The music team went from four members to five in a flash.

Pantheons of performers

Wintory (voice director Troy Baker) from The Last of Us and David Gaider as creative director joined the recording sessions with the singers when they were ready. The process was just as non-linear. Wintory said that even though the song lyrics had been completed, the singers sang over the “bare minimum of backing tracks” — which could be as simple as basic piano chords, or even an iPhone recording.

Grace (Laura Bailey), Apollo’s (Troy Baker), advice to Grace.

Baker, who sat in during Wintory’s interview, told me that simplicity was deliberate. He does not only speak as Stray Gods voice director, but also as Apollo, the love interest. Austin said that it was important for all of us to have you as the author of the performance. This will reflect in the orchestration and arrangement of the song. “I want you to be drawn to the song, and not the other way around.” Wintory confirmed this later, adding that songs could shift genres depending on the performance of the singer.

It is an incredible amount of faith in the cast. They are all stars. Baker explains, “They weren’t auditioned.” This group was selected specifically for the purpose of making recording as quick and efficient as possible. Baker explains, “We had no margin for error like many Triple-A titles and even big indie titles.” We had to do this correctly. The budget was down to each session’s hour with the actors.”

Rahul Kohli and Erika ishii are two actors that were reluctant to sing. Baker says it’s a hard sell, saying that some people are eager to join a musical production while others may not have considered themselves as singers. Wintory & Baker say that’s exactly why they need them. Baker adds, “It grounds our world just a bit more.” Grace’s new abilities are what she uses to do this. This is not because we brought all of these people together; Grace brings this out in others.

The Stray Gods Myth and Music concert featured Anjali Bhimani at the piano, Troy Baker (on the right), Felicia Day and Rahul Kohli on the stage.

The responses are scattered. Yon says Sondheim’s influence is unavoidable, Baker remembers seeing a song by the composer. Yon believes Sondheim has a strong influence on his work, Baker remembers a performance. Hadestown Montaigne is on Broadway, and worried that Stray Gods will feel like an exploitation (a quick phone call with Esler altered his opinion), so he takes the chance to mention a childhood fave: 1994’s Swan Princess. The one musical episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer that is cited by everyone as an influence, “Once More, With Feeling,” has been a huge hit.

Wintory says that the Buffy musical “narrativizes” that characters are in a play and that they know it. The song styles and qualities are based on the situation the characters face. Stray Gods’ team is very fond of how the variety in the music plays a major role. The music also shapes the storyline. This is not only true between songs but also within them, as the music genres can change based on what the player chooses. 

Even experienced singers could find it difficult to record due to the changing genres and player choices. The songs, the dialog and other elements of the show were all interwoven and everyone needed to be aware where they stood in relation to each option. Baker says that their first recording was an confrontational song featuring Grace (played Anjali Bhimiani) and Medusa. This is when they first figured out how the recording process worked. Wintory’s and Baker’s answers to my question about why this song was the first are different. Wintory says it was the song that had the most completion at the time and that the branching out of the sequence is relatively easy because the songs are pretty contained. Baker laughs as he says they simply had to get started.

He laughs, “Nothing on purpose.”

This quote has stayed with me weeks after the interview for a number of reasons. When I began to research the songwriting, I found it to be an incredibly large process. I also heard stories about people scrambling for ideas and trying to improvise. Stray Gods, a video game, was created from an unfinished pitch during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Singers recorded vocals onto the tracks, which had not been completed. Some of these singers were musicians who joined the project because they saw a tweet.

“Nothing was on purpose” is clearly a joke – it’s evident that a lot of effort was put into every part of this game, and there’s no implication that the project was completed by accident. Even though it is a joke, the story shows how chaotic and frustrating the creation process can be, especially when some of the best professionals from the video game industry are in the same room. Stray Gods has been completed for years, and the release date of its game is fast approaching. Although it remains to see how well the game is received, and whether or not the risks paid off, I have an answer to the biggest question.

How could they have known how to create a musical that had millions of possible endings? Answer: they did not at first. It’s the fact that they did write it.

Adrift is the first Stray Gods song revealed exclusively.