WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died, used with the permission of their family.
Narayana Johnson had never made a game before Cult of the Lamb, one of Australia's most successful games developed by Melbourne based studio Massive Monster.
The game, equal parts cute and dark, tasks players with growing their cult of woodland followers, defeating horrifying bosses and creating a base for their flock to live.
Johnson, also known as his stage name River Boy, was the visionary behind the game's music and the sound effects.
Cult of the Lamb is one of the most popular titles produced in Australia, selling more than 7 million copies as of April this year, and its cultural impact has spread globally through fan art, cosplay and artistic performances.
The team was gearing up for the next expansion, Woolhaven, which would extend the story for the millions of players invested in the game.
Then Narayana Johnson died.
Massive Monster producer Kelsey Gamble says it was a devastating time for the small team, who had to navigate the loss of one of their beloved coworkers while continuing to make a game of which he was an integral part.
"How could you possibly fathom something like this happening and then just move on?" she tells ABC News.
"The answer was, we couldn't. We stopped, you know, everybody obviously took time off to process."
Taking time to grieve
The studio stopped work on the expansion, instead prototyping small games, before returning to development proper.
The first step was to pick up the pieces already completed, with some tracks and the overall 'sonic identity' of Woolhaven already established.
That included finding Johnson's laptop, and then unlocking it to get the raw files already finished.
Johnson had been working with singer and songwriter Ray Vavasis, who performs as Arrowbird, on a couple of tracks for the expansion at the time of his passing.
Johnson's niece, and one half of his band Willow Beats, Kalyani Ellis also wrote music for the game.
JoJo Zhou, head of narrative at Massive Monster, says Vavasis's existing attachment to the project made a huge difference.
"Ray was an absolute godsend the way that she was able to continue the work that Narayana had started, even though often the rest of us were kind of scrambling about what we were going to do," she says.
"Ray would make something and it would give you this feeling that Narayana would have loved this and that was just such a good metric."
One small snippet composed collaboratively
Vavasis says while working on a teaser trailer for the game, she and Johnson developed a short snippet of music with vocals that was originally planned to be expanded to a full track.
While that never happened, it did become the foundation of much of the work after.
"When writing for the game I would use bits we hadn't finished yet, to pay homage," she says.
"Naturally that's what I wanted to do but it was also a way to process grief.
"That little snippet I ended up using in a lot of things, lots of different scenes."
"I was committed to this project but I felt like upholding that legacy gave me the strength of two people."
At the 2026 High Score conference this week, Massive Monster announced the memorial River Boy Scholarship to support composers to make music for games.
Funding, mentorship, access to co-working desks and studio space would be offered to successful participants Zhou says.
"The River Boy Scholarship is about helping composers make the leap from their discipline, into games," she says.
"Narayana didn't come from a games background; Ray doesn't, I don't, and it's incredibly important that we support that diversity of perspective in his memory."
The River Boy Scholarship will open for applications in 2027.
