I first met Elvira and Nicklas at GDC 2016, the day before Elvira gave a talk about how she and Rovio Sweeden’s Audio Director Jonaton Crafoord had managed to fit the complete set of sound effects and music in Angry Birds 2 in under 10 MB. It was an impressive talk, and I encourage you to watch the video of it if you have access to the GDC Vault. You can view the PDF of that talk here for free. We talk about this in depth on our podcast interview.
We also discuss the amazing story of how Elvira was chosen to write that music – as an intern no less! We also talk about how Elvira and Nicklas first met (in their very popular Melodic Metal Band Overworld).
We spend the the second half of the podcast talking about their “Stealth Project” Aragami for which they are doing the music and sound design, as well as the adaptive music techniques they used within the game. Elvira has used Fabric for both the Angry Birds 2 and the Aragami titles.
Finally, we talk about the game audio community in Sweden, often spear headed by Ben Minto of EA Dice, and how the development community in general is very close knit in Stockholm.
Here is how Elvira described their background, in her own words:
Nicklas and I met through the band Overworld in 2012. At that time we both studied, separately in different cities, game development. Nicklas studied Sound design for games, and I studied Game Design – still with the aim to work with audio.
Every rehearsal we geeked out about games, the music and so on – so we just at one point agreed it would be cool to work together. Flash forward half a year and I went to game dev party. I had gone to lots of those, but this one was special as I bumped into my friend Lina from Pixellight, graphics company. One of the few friends I always had persisted to show lots of my music to throughout the years – usually I didn’t like to pester friends with that. She wanted to introduce me to the guys making Hammerwatch – I pitched Nicklas and I, showing some portfolio work we had done over the summer together and so, they told us to send a demo. I called Nicklas and said “We need a company and a demo”. That’s how Two Feathers started, we were still students then and it was our first real gig!
We then proceeded both to get internships as part of our studies, me at Rovio – makers of Angry Birds, and Nicklas at Easy Studios makers of Battlefield Heroes.
Before that we both has always played and dreamed about working with music in games. Some people seem surprised that that was the childhood dream, but I think many in our age that do music and grew up with games, probably have similar thoughts. We’re the ones who look back at games like Final Fantasy 6 to 10 , Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Silent Hill with a pink shimmering nostalgic filter and say “Man, those games had good music.”
