CLIENT
Self Initiated Study
Composition and Implementation
ROLE
Verdant Protocol
Verdant Protocol is a self-initiated study in music composition and implementation for an open world video game.
The project imagines a fictional game as a creative foundation: a peaceful but dangerous post-apocalyptic landscape populated by ancient robots, where players explore lush overgrown terrain and take on bounty contracts against massive mechanical enemies. Think Horizon Zero Dawn meets Breath of the Wild, with a cozy undercurrent drawn from Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot novels.
The goal wasn't to design the game. It was to design a music system that could serve one.
Music System
The soundtrack for Verdant Protocol is built around three distinct music systems, each responding to a different dimension of gameplay: exploration, discovery, and combat.
Rather than writing a linear score, every piece of music in Verdant Protocol is designed to behave, adapting to where the player is, what's nearby, and what's happening.
The exploration system is generative, built from layered music assets that assemble probabilistically based on the player's context in the world.
The Nature layer forms the foundation, an ambient musical bed that's always present during exploration. On top of that, proximity-based layers blend in and out depending on what the player is near: a wandering Merchant whose music entry is quantized to the nearest two bars, a Polluted Swamp where darker layers become increasingly likely as the player approaches, and a Magical Tree whose music begins as diegetic sound in the world before transitioning to non-diegetic score when the player enters the interaction menu.
When an enemy is nearby, a warning layer fades up within the Nature music before combat is triggered, giving the music a chance to telegraph danger before the full combat event fires.
The Ruins are scored separately: more structured, pulse-driven music with stronger narrative weight, evoking a melancholy nostalgia for the lost civilization.
Combat Music
Verdant Protocol's battles are long, asymmetric fights between a small player character and a much larger robot opponent. The music needed to match that scale.
The combat system tracks ten distinct states across the arc of a battle, from the initial stinger that transitions out of exploration music, through escalating phases like First Blood, Battle Intensifies, and Climax, to resolution states including Enemy Defeated, Player Escapes, and Enemy Escapes. Each state has its own musical character, and transitions between them are designed to feel earned rather than mechanical.
The system is built to scale. For a minor enemy, you might only use a handful of states. For a boss encounter, the full arc plays out.
Ambience
One of the more interesting design questions in Verdant Protocol was where music ends and ambience begins.
Rather than treating them as separate systems, the exploration score uses a trading mechanism between melodic instruments and spatialized environmental sound. Every ~30 seconds, there's a 50/50 chance of hearing a melody phrase from the score or a bird call positioned in the 3D environment. The ambience responds to the same proximity triggers as the music, adjusting its prominence to support or recede as the music demands.
The result is a sonic world where the boundary between soundtrack and environment is intentionally blurred.
Why do this exercise?
At Sanctus Audio, self-initiated projects like Verdant Protocol are how we stay ahead of the work.
Experimenting without a client brief or a deadline gives us the space to think deeply about hard problems, try approaches we haven't had the chance to use yet, and build fluency in systems before we need to deploy them.