Below Decks at Ghost Ship: The making of Rogue Core’s soundtrack

Hello Reclaimers,

Since we covered a lot of Rogue Core’s recent development during this month’s On the Horizon livestream, I’m doing a good old ‘Below Decks’ piece instead of the usual development diary. This piece originated from an in-person talk by the sound design team about the Rogue Core soundtrack's development process. Hope you like it!

Shaping the soundtrack

Heavy bass is rattling the windows at Ghost Ship Games. Short intervals of shrill music interrupt the usual office murmurs, then stop as abruptly as they come. It’s blaring, intense music, but muffled. Like a nightclub swaddled in a big towel.

The disturbance is coming from the sound studio, tucked away in a corner on the fourth floor.

The studio’s glass walls seem to blur as they vibrate with each subwoofer blast. Sneering synth notes float out overhead. Every once in a while, there’s a short wail from an anguished saxophone.

If you peek through a slit in the orange curtains drawn across the glass, you’ll see three people packed in the warm little room. They’re surrounded by AV cables and spindly microphone stands, all nodding their heads and staring intently at the same computer. On the screen, Rogue Core’s soundtrack is taking shape.

This three-man team has been working on the Rogue Core soundtrack for the better part of two years. Musician Sophus Alf and Sound Designer Joachim Nyholm are co-producers, both helping write, mix and master the music. Mikkel Martin Pedersen, Game Director at GSG, consults to help direct the tone of each track, making sure this project delivers the emotions we’re aiming for.

Precisely which emotions those are, however, are up for debate. But the biggest challenge, now and since the start, is finding a way for this new soundtrack to be both familiar and original at the same time.

Make it new – but not too new

A new soundtrack starts with an empty screen.

The audio mixing program Studio One awaits, its vacant workstation daunting like a blank page on a word document. Mocking you for not having any good ideas yet.

Where to start?

When he began working on the new soundtrack in early 2024, Sophus Alf went for the familiar foothold of Deep Rock Galactic.

“It’d been a while since I’d been working on video game music. So I started by trying to make DRG music again, just to see if I still got it,” he laughs.

Of course, these tests just sounded too much like DRG. So the team’s first focus was to decide on some creative direction that would make Rogue Core’s branch into something new – but not too new.

“Following up on Deep Rock Galactic was sort of intimidating,” Sophus says. “I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome at the start. Like, can we trust what we did last time? Did we just get lucky? Who says we can do it again?”

This new soundtrack aims to draw on the same notes that worked for Deep Rock Galactic, but drawing too closely would seem derivative, just more of the same. So how do you replicate the ingredients of a past success without just rehashing it? Can something be both familiar and original? When does new become too new? These questions have touched just about every aspect of Rogue Core’s development, and faced the soundtrack team with particular intensity.

For Sophus, this made it difficult to set out in a new direction.

“Getting through the first drafts was tough. Like, when am I gonna turn this around and start making good sh*t?” he says. “But we got there. You pretty much always do. It’s about trusting your instincts and giving yourself space to experiment and try stuff that doesn’t work, and not to overthink the whole thing.”

Composing the right feeling

The soundtrack’s core goal is to provide an emotional backdrop for the rest of the game.

After those early experiments, the team decided that leaning into a cosmic horror theme would be a good way to steer Rogue Core into original territory. They dialed down the jaunty atmosphere of Deep Rock Galactic, and started listening to more horror movie soundtracks and dark synth music to set the tone.

A lot of inspiration stems from Game Director Mikkel’s favorite bands and movies, too. He’ll point to groups like Massive Attack and Depeche Mode, or the intense synth-y soundtracks from "Blade", "It Follows" and "Escape from New York".

These picks probably help give the game a bit of a time-capsule feeling, parallel to the clunky analog sci-fi tech in Deep Rock Galactic. Comparing Rogue Core’s spirit to DRG, Sound Designer Joachim Nyholm says, “If DRG is Eighties dwarves, Rogue Core is Nineties dwarves.”

Another key theme for Rogue Core is a military feel, reflecting the Reclaimers’ elite background and mercenary culture. To deliver on this, Mikkel really wanted a lot of military marching drums in the soundtrack, the type you’re used to hearing at the start of a war movie.

He really likes those drums.

“There was a point where Mikkel was reviewing what I’d done and said I didn’t have enough of the marching drums. So I went back and checked the tracks and 70 percent of them had it,” Sophus laughs.

Finding the right sound took months of experimenting, discussing and revising. It was the better part of a year before the whole team felt they’d landed on the ‘Rogue Core sound’.

From there, it was a matter of turning that sound into the right tracks.

A good song isn’t a good track

Making a good soundtrack isn’t the same thing as making a good song. Often enough, a good song makes for a bad track.

When you’re playing a game, the action should be front and center. You’re focused on whatever you’re aiming at, tuned into your surroundings, listening to sound cues from telegraphed attacks or approaching enemies. A soundtrack shouldn’t get in the way of that.

“A good soundtrack needs to make the game shine. It’s more of an effect on the atmosphere, something in the background,” Sophus says. “A song is different — it has to stand on its own, so it plays with your attention and emotions in a different way. It’s just got a different goal. But when you’re working on a soundtrack, the number one thing to remember is your goal is to serve someone who’s there to play a game, to listen to music.”

A musician by trade, Sophus found it tough not to kick into “songwriter mode” while working on the soundtrack. By the end, he kept a running loop of Rogue Core gameplay on a second monitor, just to help keep his compositions on track.

“At the start I’d cook up a new track and be like, you guys, I made a banger, listen to this! And Mikkel and Joachim would listen and say, yeah, this is a good song, but is it serving the game? And then I’d have to go back and fix it,” Sophus says.

If a track becomes too song-like, it’s not necessarily a loss. When he was working on Deep Rock Galactic’s soundtrack, Sophus recalls a synth riff getting cut from the project for being a bit too attention-grabbing. He still liked it, though, and was able to pick it up and rework it into the main guitar part for a song with his own band (which you can listen to here).

Diagram from the team's own presentation on the soundtrack's development.

Four moods, four types of tracks

Rogue Core’s soundtrack falls into four different categories. Each serves a different purpose, coming into play at different times during a run.

Every run in Rogue Core consists of several different cave systems, each with their own elevator extraction sequence, periodic waves of enemies throughout, and a big boss fight at the very end. These four different categories are distinct gameplay experiences, so each one calls for its own type of backing track.

Here’s how the team makes music to match each sequence.

Level music

This is the baseline backdrop of the caves, the atmospheric background stuff that plays while you’re exploring each mining facility. It’s not meant for the “red alert” moments, but should still suggest some sense of danger around the corner.

• Track length of 4-6 minutes

• Low intensity, slow tempo

• Themes of military movies, heroic feel, slightly sinister tension

Wave music

This gets cued up during a Core Spawn attack, immediately switching the mood to a high-intensity fight sequence. Because an average swarm in Rogue Core only lasts about a minute, these tracks have to hit hard and fast, getting right into the action.

• Track length around 2 minutes

• High intensity, fast tempo

• Pulsing beat, hard-hitting from the start – no gradual buildups.

Elevator music

Not elevator music in the traditional sense, though early builds of the game did feature "The Girl from Ipanema" playing in the elevator. This category is for tracks that play when you’ve called the elevator at the end of a level, and need to stand your ground while you wait for extraction.

• Track length around 2-3 minutes

• Medium-high intensity

• “Ticking clock” theme in beats + rhythms, sense of a heroic standoff

Boss music

These tracks only play once per run, at the end of the final level when you’ve got a big classic boss fight show down. Boss fights tend to last longer than the average swarm, so this is more of an endurance fight, rather than a drag-race fast action sequence.

• Track length of 4-6 minutes

• Medium intensity, heavy sound

• War drums, sense of brooding evil, epic cinematic scale

You can listen to a sample of these different categories below.

(Note: Steam's having trouble embedding videos right now. The link should still work. We'll delete this note when embedding works normally again.)

The final cut

The Rogue Core soundtrack is very nearly finished. It’s now made up of 24 tracks, with a total runtime of an hour and 16 minutes. Along the way, lots of demos, rough drafts and experiments got left on the cutting room floor. Sophus estimates that about 15 more tracks ended up not making the final cut.

There’s still some mixing and mastering to do, like working with fine-grit sandpaper to smooth out the last little details. Then it’s time to plug it into the game and ship it.

For Sophus, being done with the project is bittersweet. There’s relief at the finish line, but it’s a bit empty now that the race is over. Mostly, though, he’s looking forward to getting it out into the world.

“I think we did a good job separating this one from the original Deep Rock Galactic soundtrack. It’s more mature, in a way. We worked on this one for longer, and everyone who worked on it is a little older and more experienced. It’s a bit darker and more serious, sort of a more mature aged product. By the end of the process I hit on some stuff I’m really proud of. Now I’m just excited for people to hear it.”

Note on the complete Rogue Core soundtrack: We intend to release the finished soundtrack along with Rogue Core’s Early Access launch. It’ll be available for purchase on Steam, too. Stay tuned for more updates — and thanks for reading.