Author : Arnaud Mimoun
For this week’s blog I’ll talk about the struggles I had to work on the music of our game.
For this major asset I made a total of 3 loops, each one’s preceded with a segment off music to create transition between each loops that compose the music of our game :
- Here is the original music from which comes the loops and segment of music.
I as Producer, Project Manager and Sound Designer of our game was charged to build the sounds of our game. Just like all the sounds in our game, I decided at first to get random sounds from flash developer resources sites. These site are “Soundfx” and « SoundBible », they are full of various sounds free to be used by everyone and therefore a great source to make my database.
Once gathering a certain quantities of different sounds I used a sound editor/creator, here fruity loops studio 12. With this software I modified the sounds I’ve collected, mix them together, edit the result once again to get something even more exotic and so one. This is the first time in my whole life that I worked at making sounds or any kind of music so It is a lot of experimenting and was way much time consuming than I would expect. I could take shortcut and simply add the sounds I’ve collected without modifying them but I think I will get more experience from creating original ones.
When I started working on the music of the game, I made sure at first to be done with all the sound effect of our game. The Idea was to be done with everything I knew I could do before getting started on a much harder exercise such as creating music which incomes wasn’t sure. When the Alpha phase finished I was almost done with all the sounds effects of our game and I decided to work on the music of the game for the whole Beta phase.
As the 2 weeks of the Beta passed I spended a lot of time trying to make a music for our game but at the end it revealed to be a waste of time. Once I was done with the sound effects of our game I was confident about the music and tried right away to build something using the same software I used before : Fruity loops studio 12. The result of this week of experimentation have been none and all I could end up with were 10 second loops that didn’t fit much together. It was a mistake too get right away to build.
I spended the second week of the beta watching a lot of tutorials about creating beats, and music loops on fruity loops studio 12. I felt way much less lost the more tutorial I was watching but the practice revealed to still be hard as a lot of the youtubers making the tutorials had plugin or used different version of the software. I tried making music again on the weekend of the second week but still could not end up with something worth putting in the game.
The revelation came on sunday when I was talking with a friend of mine from France that work in the music field. We discussed a bit about my problem to make music for my game and if he could help. He agreed to help me, then we started by playtesting the current game for a while. Talking about how loud the music was we ended up on the conclusion that the current placeholder music I used ( 349 Traxell – Voices ) for the beta demo of the game worked well but was not timed with the game. After brainstorming a while we realised it would be too much work to make a music for the game considering my actual competences, so we should rather make the current music work with the game.
To build a satisfying musical background for the game I first focused on what didn’t worked well with the actual music of the game. Reflecting on it I concluded that the problem with how it was at the moment was that more than once the music was not according with what was happening on the screen. I then remembered one of the courses we had about transition in levels and how the music should also adapt to that model. Therefore I came up with the idea to let the music play for a little while until it reach some kind of a loop (theses are present in the original music if you listen to it). Once a loop reached I could then create a secondary audio file that would only play the loop.
Using the logic of alternating between music and loop of this music I could end up with a satisfying way of implementing the music we were currently using to the game. I structured it so that when you start the game the music play until the first loop, then the loop is played over and over until you pass the fifth waves of our game. after the 5th wave passed the music continue playing until it’s second loop that is more tense and now again loop it until the tenth wave. After the wave 10 is getting destroyed, the music start going again and once the third loop is reached, it loop until the end of the game (the 15th wave). Once all the wave beaten, the music will continue until it’s end.
An advantage I take from of this method of incorporating music is the cadence it give to the game. Each loop is more tense than the precedent which give more rhythm to the game. Another advantage I get from using the same music is the transition between each loop that feel natural as all parts are from the same music.