Heroish is a hero-based castle defense game in which players choose between one of six characters and try to destroy their opponents with card-based units and attacks. While the game utilizes fantasy tropes seen in classic Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, Boucher said Sunblink Entertainment wanted to maintain a “more modern, more fun” identity. Game Rant spoke to Boucher about mixing modern and classical sounds like real medieval instruments to help Heroish’s world stand out.
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Getting Into the Groove
Boucher has been interested in music from a young age, singing into a dinosaur tape recorder while growing up in Massachusetts. He competed while playing trumpet in elementary school and performed at his local church, but by the time middle school came around, “I sort of realized girls don’t care about a guy who plays the trumpet.” He switched to guitar, which he considers his best instrument despite not playing as much as he used to.
Guitar led Boucher to playing in high school metal bands, where he wrote songs that were more story-driven than introspective. “I was doing pseudo-concept albums,” he said, gravitating toward other peoples’ stories. Realizing he couldn’t make a living with “a mediocre metal band,” he became interested in film music. Boucher joined summer programs at Berklee College of Music in Boston throughout high school, and would go on to study Film Scoring and Music Production & Engineering there.
Soon after graduating, Boucher worked under composer Geoff Zanelli - a fellow Berklee alum known for award-winning work with just about every Hollywood studio - at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions. Much of this work touched Disney films including Rango, The Lone Ranger, and two Pirates of the Caribbean movies: as a technical music assistant on 2011’s On Stranger Tides, and additional composer on 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales.
From Fortnite to Heroish
Though Boucher’s contributions to Pirates were in the background, this credit and work on games like Civilization 6 and Uncharted 4 caught the attention of Epic Games. The developer was preparing a pirate-themed Fortnite Chapter 1, Season 8, and messaged Boucher out of the blue - one of his few jobs not stemming from a mutual connection. This would be the first time Boucher led a live orchestra playing his own score, an experience “I’ll never forget.”
Epic Games has invited Boucher for Chapter 2, Season 6 (“Primal”) and Chapter 3, Season 1 (“Flipped”), among others. He said the game is a “great place to learn and grow” because of its sandbox mixing original stories and iconic franchise themes, though it isn’t his only gig. In recent years Boucher also worked on games like ReadySet Heroes, shows like the DuckTales reboot, and films like Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.
One day Boucher was invited to send a demo reel to Sunblink Entertainment based on the recommendation of Mark MacBride, whose company Injected Senses Audio has worked on Fortnite as well as Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. “It was one outsourcer recommending another,” Boucher said, but he immediately hit it off with Sunblink director of operations Nicky Britt. When he found some Heroish developers were also fans of his work on Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die! 3, Boucher felt everything about working on the mobile game made sense.
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Designing Heroish’s Musical ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’
Sunblink Entertainment was founded by Julian Farrior in 2019, who also started foundational mobile developer Backflip Studios in 2009. Backflip’s success on early casual smartphone titles like DragonVale led to Hasbro purchasing a majority stake in 2013. The developer worked on titles like Transformers: Earth Wars before it was shut down in 2019, two years after Farrior left. Boucher got his foot in the door at Sunblink’s debut venture.
Heroish and Orcs Must Die! 3 have a lot of similarities, blending medieval fantasy elements with modern metal influences - and “they don’t take themselves too seriously,” Boucher said. However, he feels audiences won’t necessarily hear this similarity in their scores. While Orcs Must Die! had a more established palette when Boucher joined the third entry, Heroish was more of a blank slate.
The mobile game’s score started modern to avoid soundscape comparisons with games like EverQuest and Skyrim, typified by demonic Lord Marduke playing electric guitar in-game. While some orchestral sounds carry throughout Heroish, each faction - Imperial, Feral, and Cursed - has a unique “sonic landscape” that becomes layered with instrumentation for on-screen heroes. This “jigsaw puzzle” of sound design became complicated with four-person multiplayer balancing tracks that include Marduke’s guitar, Queen Lavinia’s violin, Flynn Diamond’s brass, and more.
Beyond keeping musical loops recognizable as they flow into one another, Boucher also had the challenge of incorporating medieval and Celtic instruments like uilleann pipes or Irish flutes. Though Sunblink was worried about an “authentic” sound betraying its modern sensibilities, Boucher wanted a gritty, tactile feeling by incorporating the flavor of old-school instruments.
A lot of research went into making these instruments sound natural, as many had limited ranges and keys. There was even one case where Boucher had to change a single note in one track because uilleann pipe player Eric Rigler was physically incapable of reaching it.
Though heavy research isn’t always required for traditional orchestras, Boucher has spent time studying to “get his chops up” on orchestral composing and make up for his more rock-focused background. This came in handy for Heroish, which was “pretty special” for a mobile game in that it recognized the importance of live music. A 64-piece orchestra and seven soloists contributed to Sunblink’s debut effort, which Boucher said not every game would warrant. “This was such a wide canvas, anything I wanted to go in and do, they were up for. It was a fantastic experience.”
Heroish is available now through Apple Arcade.
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