G33X Nexus Entertainment > Precursors

Game Music

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topher:
Having a full fledge mp3 player along with our own music is my vote.  Not, just like the EA games where you have to copy and paste your stuff to a certain directory, but a full winamp style player.

whitelynx:
Reaka mentioned that a lot of game music sounds the same... If you look at movie music, the same could be said. Basically, music for games and movies isn't supposed to stand out, because it's not the focus of the game/movie. It's meant to provide mood and background for a scene. I still do think there is a lot that can be done on that front, as far as making the music more integrated into the game environment and making it respond more to the current state of the game.

One issue that we need to decide first... Do we want our music to enhance the feeling and setting of the game, or do we want it to be user-controllable? (the mp3 player idea) The problem is that you only get one of these at a time... As far as programming it, we'd have to do a completely different system for the integrated music than we would for the mp3 player. We can still have both in the game, but the user has to choose which they want.

I don't have a problem with including the user-controllable music player, but I definitely lean toward trying to integrate things into the gameplay more. With the previous game project I worked on, I had also started to do some work on "interactive music". We can still provide some user-configurability depending on what music style they choose.

The first thing to do would be to break up gameplay into a number of different "states" that would correspond to different music tracks. For instance, if the player is getting shot at, then fight music should probably be playing.

Dave

contingencyplan:

--- Quote from: "whitelynx" ---The first thing to do would be to break up gameplay into a number of different "states" that would correspond to different music tracks. For instance, if the player is getting shot at, then fight music should probably be playing.
--- End quote ---


I'm pretty sure I've made mention of Total Annihilation elsewhere in the forums, so allow me to make another reference to it:

TA has the ability to play music CDs.  MP3 wasn't popular when the game came out, so music CDs were as close as you could come.  However, it had the ability to control it via several means:

1. You could do random tracks off the CD
2. You could just do a straight play-through

Naturally, those two are standard on any CD player out there.  However, it also had #3:

3. The ability to assign tracks to certain events, and play them when those events occurred.  For instance, if you were just sitting around building, it would pay tracks that had been selected for "Building."  If you were fighting another player (shooting his units and such), then it would play tracks from "Combat."  If you were losing, or had lost a bunch of units and whatnot, you could select "Defeat."  There were a few others, but those are the ones I remember (and I'm in Linux, so I can't check it right now).  

I think we could have something along this line - get the best of both worlds. If the player wants to simply play tracks from the playlist, then they can.  However, we can also assign meaning to particular songs, having them play when certain things were happening in the game.

So in short: What whitelynx said. ;-)
~Brian

topher:
I like that contingencyplan...that way we just put in defaults, just like the gui and the user can fix it to their liking.

Chii:
I guess the only problem I'd have with people putting in their own music is that the music won't take on the life of the game. Every game has music that's associated with it...Mario music....you listen to that music soo much that it's embedded in your skull and you associate it with the game. That's lost if you don't create music for the game.  I suppose you could say you'd associate it with your music...but it's not the same. But that's just my two cents.

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