Hello Kitty Island Adventure offers a Sanrio-themed take on the cozy genre, transporting players to an island where they can live among their favorite characters. The Apple Arcade title comes from developer and publisher Sunblink, which previously released the card-battling MOBA HEROish, with Sanrio serving as creative partner. Though the game has received praise from critics and players for a myriad of different qualities, one element that stands out the most is its diverse soundtrack.
The core premise of the game revolves around a roster of Sanrio characters fixing up an old theme park on a remote island, where players will work to spruce up the area to entice new residents, build vacation homes, and more. As players go about their days and nights in Hello Kitty Island Adventure building friendships with villagers, crafting, cooking, and exploring, the surrounding sounds will adapt in unique ways. The game's map contains several different biomes with their own style of music, and the soundtrack also shifts as the game cycles through day and night.
Screen Rant sat down with Hello Kitty Island Adventure composer Phill Boucher to discuss his creative process, the challenges of making such a dynamic soundtrack, and his favorite recording moments.
Screen Rant: I really liked how the music was so adaptive to the different areas in the game - I'm curious about your creative process behind taking all these different biomes and deciding the sounds for each one, what each sort of soundscape should be.
Phill Boucher: Yeah, we had a lot of early conversations me and Eric Harms, who's the audio director on the project, and he was talking with the game designers and the CEO and everyone involved at some length to come up with what the palette is of the score. So there were some pillars that were overarching for the thing, we wanted everything to have kind of a tactile feel and be pretty organic. There's some synths in the score, but they're used in very specific places like when you're in Rainbow Reef, and also in the new update that just came out for the little Twin Stars.
When we're in sort of the real world, the normal world, things should feel very organic, and then when we go to these more ethereal places we can expand from there. In of what made each of the different regions specific, there was a fine line between giving people what they want and subverting expectations. The very first thing that they said when they brought me on was, "No ukulele, no steel drums - we're doing an island thing, but we're not doing that kind of island thing." It relaxed a little bit as we went, like you get to Gemstone Mountain and we're definitely leaning into some of those Western tropes, but trying to always do it in a way that doesn't feel hokey and feels authentic.
It has such a fun myriad of instruments, too, like a washtub bass and a marimba, that sort of thing. What was the sort of journey like behind selecting all of these different unique tools and getting the right lineup for what you needed?
Phill Boucher: So this is my second game with Sunblink, we did HEROish before this. And I guess I started to get a reputation with them as the person who buys instruments every time they do a score, and that was very tempting for this in the beginning to say, "Oh, there's so many colors and so many things to explore." I could have maxed out a credit card just coming up with ideas.
But friendship is such a core part of what this whole game is about that I had to stop myself and say, "Hold on, if we're going to do this right, it's not just about me, it's about getting in so many friends and some family and some people from Sunblink contributing to this thing." It needed to be people that weren't just me. So then I started to think about like who do I know? What do they play? How can we get as many people involved with this as possible, while also within the different regions staying true to the instrumentation to keep things separated, so as you travel through the world you're not just hearing the same thing the whole time?
Do you have a favorite part of the composition that you made for the soundtrack?
Phill Boucher: Ah, that's a good question. I really like all of the choral elements; I don't really get to deal with vocals all that much, so that was an interesting thing to explore. Because each region has sort of a vocal identity - when we're underwater, we've got this ethereal vocal thing, and then when we're doing Gemstone Mountain, there's like the whaling soprano that takes you back to like spaghetti Westerns.
The really cool one was we got a choir in, and we did a group of five people that just all sang for Mount Hothead, and then they also sang the finale, when you're in the Icy Peak; a couple different areas to just bring more life than just hiring a soloist. You can't replicate getting a bunch of people in a room together. There's some footage floating around from them - they were called the DC6 - and they're just infectious. They were dancing the whole time and playing off of each other, and so those couple of days in the studio with them was just really special.
You mentioned when you first started the project that they put down parameters like no ukulele. What was the sort of balance like with that? How much direction did they give you on what they wanted the sounds to be versus you having your own freedom to just sort of experiment and come up with the biomes yourself?
Phill Boucher: It was a little bit of both, for sure. A lot more conversations early on in the process to just make sure that globally we're on the same page. I started with Seaside Resort, which is the most islandy thing, so making sure that we're on the right side of that line. Between that and the main theme, just getting those sort of dialed in with them, making sure that they're happy.
After that, we were off and running; everything would get sent through an approval process and there'd be little tweaks to make, but for the most part once we kind of got the big tone, and we'd have conversations about what I was thinking for the instrumentation for different regions, I'd just send stuff. I got very lucky that they were happy with everything I was doing.
As you were doing these compositions did you play an early build of the game at all to sort of get a closer feel for what you were making the music for?
Phill Boucher: Yeah, this is one of the few projects - it's rare that people get me a build when I'm working on a game. I always ask for it, but for security reasons there's all sorts of things that are in place that make it hard for me to get access to it. But being an Apple product, and having iPads and iPhones and things around, they're able to constantly update me on things, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not; things can be very broken when you're building a game and very temporary.
And so it was sort of a combination of using the build, I'd be working on a track and I just pull up the phone and start playing along and see if it felt obnoxious or if it felt like it was suiting the picture, but then other times it would just be concept art and conversations like, "What do you want this to feel like? Where is this going?" And also conversations about implementation. So we were talking about how throughout the course of the game day, it changes, so how do we want to reflect that in the music? What's going to change about the music at night so it gets kind of more reverby and distant and certain elements drop out? All of that is just more about experimentation, both for them to do it and for me to have the game and just try things and see what feels right.
And as a composer, you've worked across all different kinds of media - does composing for a game come with different challenges than composing for a movie or something like that?
Phill Boucher: Yeah, and every project comes with their own challenges, so even from one game to the next there's different things to figure out. One of the biggest things about games, the two big challenges that are different from other things are just the implementation side of things; there's this whole other puzzle to figure out about not just writing the music, but how is it going to work? How are we going to get this two minute loop to be exciting for 15 minutes or whatever it is, how does one track transition to the next track? And all sorts of interactive elements have to be considered.
And then the other side of it is going back to what I was saying about the build: there's a lot of imagination required when you're working on this. Because it's not like they go and shoot a film and then they come to you, and even if there's a lot of green screen,you can kind of get a sense of the pace and you get a sense of what things look like. With a game there's often nothing until late in the process other than - like I said - concept art or conversations, and they tend to focus on earlier parts of the game first.
So for whatever reason, for testing or for approvals, they want to make that beginning of the game feel polished, which can sometimes mean that stuff late in the game barely exists, if it exists at all. Hopefully, by that point, there's enough of a language established that it's not completely taking a shot in the dark and we've got some kind of foothold to latch on to, but there's a lot more sort of imagination and trial and error and adjusting things in games.
Did it feel like a special kind of pressure to be dealing with an IP as big as Hello Kitty?
Phill Boucher: Honestly, for me, I kind of didn't really think about it. To me, I was concerned about making something happy and making Eric the audio director happy. That was their fight, my fight was just making them happy, and then they can go have the battle of selling this idea to Sanrio. And I know early on there were some conversations about certain parts of the game that they were really excited about, but they didn't know how Sanrio was going to respond.
And luckily, at least on my side, I never heard anything about any issues or anything that we had to adjust. I knew that we had a massive fanbase with Sanrio, and we saw that as soon as the game launched a lot of people were really excited because they love Hello Kitty and love all the characters. If I was thinking about that, I'd be paralyzed; I had to put that away and just write.
What would you say are the biggest changes or evolutions that any piece of the soundtrack went through over time?
Phill Boucher: That's a good question. There wasn't really a ton of stuff that changed once we got going. Even the main theme - it's very rare to get it on version 1, but I think it was v-one or maybe one revision before we were really dialed in. And then it was shading, it was, "How can we improve upon this?" I guess one way that things changed - which is very rare for a composer these days - is between the mockups that I was doing and the final, because we had so many live musicians come in and add their flavor and their character, the the tracks really changed. They elevated. And when I was working with them, we'd have new ideas and parts would change.
Usually you have to be really careful. I being at the session and Frank Wolf, the engineer, was like, "These sound pretty different than the mock up," kind of warning me. And I was like, "Don't worry, I know we're going to be okay this time." Because we have a relationship, we have that freedom to work within; I know when I've gone too far, and I know what they're going to be okay with. It was a privilege, because otherwise you just get all these players and then you're stuck playing the notes on the page when you could take it somewhere else.
Source: Sunblink/YouTube
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is available now on iOS devices with an Apple Arcade subscription.
