Pirates? Pirates!

In the Pirates? Pirates! game, you’ll become the captain that faces dangers and enemies, leads a crew of a bit crazy sailors, and seeks treasure, fame, and a way to escape an ancient curse.

You will explore islands with wild jungles, board other ships, and fight with sabers and pistols.

You will have to make lots of choices, and no one knows where they will lead you. But as long as you keep the balance between the four resources — Ship, Crew, Treasury, and Fame — your adventure will continue!

You can play this Reigns-inspired pirate RPG on PC.

Sound concept

Before starting working on the project, we decided that we would not mimic Hans Zimmer’s musical ideas from «Pirates of the Caribbean» OST or refer to them in this soundtrack.

Even though there is lots of humor and a full of mischief main character in the Pirates? Pirates! game, we wanted to find a unique sound for the project and not follow the beaten path.

That’s why we focused on making sure the music fully captures the atmosphere of pirate adventures, creates the right mood, supports the player in the moments of hard choices, and also reveals the fate of the central character.

We ended up with orchestral music with an emphasis on wind and string instruments, «native» to pirate motifs accordion (he also emphasizes the humor of the game), and harp, which adds sentimentality associated with the main character’s storyline.

The sound design in this project is close to realism. Its main task is to inform the player about what is happening, as well as about the consequences of one’s decisions.

Given the mechanics of the game, where you just swipe cards left or right, it’s the game sounds and art that create the feeling of «liveliness» of the whole process.

Challenge

In this project, together with the developer’s team, we faced limited resources, including the ones for music composing. However, we all understood that for the future players’ experience, we couldn’t sacrifice the number of musical themes.

That’s why we had to find a solution to stay within budget and add some variations to the soundtrack.

As a result, we created two tracks, the main and the adventure themes, which later became the base for both land and sea combat themes. The combat music was created thanks to the main tracks’ stems, which we changed a bit during the project to avoid unnecessary repetitions.

This approach helped us to convey the difference between exploration of the world and battles, and at the same time to form the right associations, as well as help the development team to use the available resources competently.

Result

You can listen to the full Pirates? Pirates! game soundtrack below:

To see how the audio works in the context of the game, you can watch the video: