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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperAudioHybrid Scoring Brain Dump - reBERth
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JustinSonicBloom
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« on: November 03, 2015, 04:21:11 PM »

Hey Everyone,

My team are working on a pretty interesting game where we're trying to take more traditional ways of music composition, and involving that early on in game development. The whole process is more reminiscent of movie direction and blocking than it is more traditional game development (of what I've witnessed).

What we're trying to achieve is a score that is both reactive to changes in the game (repeating loops, transitions based on area, etc...), and maintains larger themes and structure of scores that follow narrative.

The demo we're building has been scene blocked, e.g. Opening scene: Dialogue between ship and Mel (protagonist), the scene opens to a black background. A voice is heard "What is this? What has Gran'ma been hiding all this time?" A ship HUD blinks alive. Mel's face appears framed in a blue com-link type screen. She speak's again. How do you turn this thing on? A second screen opens, but an obscured, static image displays. "This is the reBERth...". The bay doors open, a blinding white light floods..."

We set the scene, the feeling, and we provide (what our composer tells us) scene blocking notes that is more common with movie scoring. Our composer scores based on his knowledge of the scene, and we begin to block out the level. What we end up with is a whiteboxed interactive scene that compliments the scoring. Since the scoring is a "sketch," we're able to make changes as the level starts to gel. This allows us budge room with gameplay pacing, and narrative placement in-game.

So far it's working out pretty well. We used a rough version of this process to build our first demo, but this new process is being tested as we speak.

I would love to hear peoples thoughts on this; hear questions; and more specifically, hear if anyone has done something similar.

Here is video of our first go. Please note that it lacks the narrative structure, but shows a little of what we're trying to achieve. We should have some of the new scoring up for people to hear shortly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RphAgeiswKo&feature=youtu.be
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JustinSonicBloom
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« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2015, 12:37:52 PM »

We've gone through a first round of sketching that plots out the demo we plan on creating that works for the vertical slice.

You can hear the audio here https://soundcloud.com/hey-lune/introduction-excerpt-1/s-eNiOq.

This is the narrative that goes along with it:

0:00 - intro (in the dark, text across screen)
0:25 - pace quickens (more text?)
0: 57 - doors open, Mel flies out
1:07 - Mel gets into the asteroids
1:52 - Mel enters the cave
2:22 - Mel exits the cave
2:30 - Mel enters enemy territory,
2:59 - Enemies get aggressive
3:26 - Boss Fight (intro)
3:46 - Boss Fight Main part (intense, loop)
4:14 - Boss explodes (at the calm before the storm)

There are a lot more details that go along with this, but we don't yet have the design in a public place. SOON.
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JustinSonicBloom
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« Reply #2 on: December 16, 2015, 11:45:10 AM »

Here is a write up our audio composer, @hey_lune, did concerning musical themes. He breaks down how to vary a character theme to get musical cohesion and manage the tone of music. Here is a snippit:

The scale motif is even reflected in both melodies practically note for note! If that’s not recurring, I don’t know what is.

“But Larry,” you might ask, “isn’t just rehashing familiar tunes going to be boring?” WELL. A composer has ways of spicing up recurring material by varying other elements of the music around it. We’ve pointed out how they’re similar. Now let’s see how they’re in fact different:


You can read the whole thing here: http://reberth.com/2015/12/15/recycle-recurring-themes-and-reharmonization/
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