Deep Dive: How the composer of Wizard With A Gun brought cowboys and wizards together

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren't really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as lessons learned from ten years of development with Ingress engineering director Michael Romero, how legendary Dwarf Fortress programmer Tarn Adams updated the game for its official Steam release, and how architect and solo developer Jack Strait made an entire horror game in PowerPoint.

In this edition, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine composer Ryan Ike delves into the score of Wizard With a Gun and how he worked through the disparate and conflicting sounds of two genres: cowboys and wizards. 

Howdy! I’m Ryan Ike, the composer for Wizard With A Gun, a cooperative survival game about venturing into the wilds of a magical post-apocalypse. Players navigate what’s left of a world ravaged by the primordial forces of Chaos, all while fighting monsters, crafting spells, and then, ideally, shoving those spells into bullets and using them to blast Chaos in the face.

Aesthetically, the game heavily blends two different themes: Wizard Stuff and Western Stuff. You’ve got ideas like the untamed frontier, the sound of guitar chords across a campfire, and cowboy hats hanging out side by side with fireballs, bubbling cauldrons, and taller, pointier hats. The two aesthetics pair well together, and I wanted the soundtrack to reflect both genres in a unique, cohesive blend I have been calling “Arcane Western” (mainly because “Cowboy Castin’” and “WizardWave” weren’t catching on).

In this article, I’ll break down how I went about creating the arcane Western