It’s the final night before the final day of the global game jam, and I’m alone in my dorm room trying to sort out the adaptive music system for our Deceptive Platformer game, which has yet to be given a name.
Titles are usually thought of last for a reason, and that was plainly exemplified here. On my way back to my dorm I got a call from Stefan about our heroine Sprite (whose name may have been Lucy, Alice, or lord knows what) and how she really just wasn’t working out, and we decided that it’d be best for both of us if Lucy/Alice/? and us went our separate ways. Alice/Lucy/? was to be replaced by the original little blue ball. Our title selections weren’t much affected by this decision since they were mostly about things involving iPad-bashing and Fish-Kabob. However, I worried that our game had lost some of its personality. We’d invested a little heavily into a hip 70s-but-modern pop art style, and I had contributed to this aura of cool with a funkadelic soundtrack. Would the little blue ball ever hold a candle to Alice/Lucy/? ?
Turns out I came home to find my friends drunk and playing silly games, and when I asked Aditi to come down and record cute ball voices she brought all the drunkards with her. Fortunately she did, because by luck Melvin Felix was there and strangely enthused about making strange abstract voice overs. He began with your typical Mario fare of whoops and woohoos meant to accompany typical platforming activities, but it wasn’t until he began speaking Spanish that the real magic began. Hearing somebody talk about blue balls and falling off platforms in Spanish arouses a certain level of hilarity within all who witness it.

As for the music, it’s got the funk. And, it’s adaptive. Or, at least as adaptive as you can get in 48 hours with an amateur development team. Not to say my teammates are amateur, I’ll take on the label of amateur, but I would like to mention how lucky and grateful I am to have been able to work with such a talented group of developers. The 7 of us just had it together. One of our artists was even an artist for Kuma Games!

Unfortunately I didn’t get to observe a lot of our artists work because I was buried in ActionScript trying to figure out how to get mp3s to loop seamlessly (which is a very bizarre workaround, by the way). However, I accomplished my mission, and am about to embark on designing the final version of our adaptive music system. The system works such that each level introduces a new layer of music on top of the old, but as you die the music will transition back to simpler versions until the player completes the level. Then it will shoot right back up again to the appropriate level of awesome, depending upon what level you just reached.

The word “layer” here is a bit misleading, and while I was using the stem concept for a while (since it does keep all the main tracks lined up even with audio lag), but ultimately decided to go for the node-transition-node approach. I’m counting fractions of seconds every update loop of a Flixel state, and Flash is unpredictable at best when it comes to playing back audio or video on some computers (at least on my XP machine it’s horrible). By resynchronizing the timer and the start of playback of a loop, the transition stingers will be much more accurate. I’ll post the game on this site once it’s complete.

Back to the jam!

Currently, I’m awaiting a response from a graphic designer for a logo for my portfolio site, which you’ll find at Bartnett.com in the near future. What you’ll find there now is a Mixpod playlist of some music I’ve written. Unfortunately there’s some songs on there that I feel could be improved, so to remedy that I’m working on a couple different portfolio tracks to add in. Tackling one or two of these at a time seems to be a good balance for me, provided I don’t have a midterm coming up or anything. Hopefully in a month I’ll have the two new tracks produced as well as a web site on which to showcase them.

Also, I went to the 127th Audio Engineering Society Convention and had a blast. Game Audio had its own track this year, and the tutorials and panels were incredibly helpful and informative. Scott Selfon from Microsoft made some compelling presentations about how to take the implementation of audio in games to the next level. He cited Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter’s wind system as an intriguing example of audio being a driving system in the game rather than say the visuals or physics engine. The wind effects were initially developed as audio-only–that is, based on environmental variables and a little random variation this wind system would generate wind sounds at an appropriate intensity and from an appropriate direction. Later when they wanted to have the wind blow things around on the ground like tumble weeds or tin cans, the system that rolled the cans around actually read the intensity and direction of the wind from the audio system, and used that to calculate how to blow things around in the game world.

Another great presentation was given by Richard Stevens, who has created this fantastic Game Audio Tutorial within the Unreal Tournament 3 engine. You can download it from his blog. Another panel I found invaluable was a demonstration of interactive music in action by Tom Salta,of Red Steel and Tom Clancy series fame, and Paul Lipson, the head of Pyramind Studios. Tom Salta showcased his work from Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., and Paul Lipson gave an amazing demonstration of constructing interactive music within FMOD. What was interesting is he started with a very dense string of material within FMOD’s interactive music designer, then radically scaled down the footprint using FMOD’s sound effects designer and an 8-channel WAV file, and then to keep the same reduced footprint, restructured the loops and arranged them into the interactive music designer again. I’m honestly tempted after college to just go to San Francisco and spend a few months at Pyramind’s training program absorbing as much information as I possibly can from this guy and his army of master engineers and musicians.

The last bit I’d like to talk about is what I’ve been doing at NYU. Basically, NYU has one of the best film scoring departments, but nothing for game scoring yet. Don’t take that as a knock against NYU, the only other major college that has a game scoring curriculum is Berklee College of Music, and that only happened after students started up a Video Game Music Club to raise awareness about how awesome game music is. I’ve been talking with Professor Sam Howard-Spink from the Music Business program in the music department at NYU, and he’s agreed to be the faculty sponsor for a game music club for NYU. So, I’ve been talking with our program directors in the composition program as well as music technology. Hopefully next week I’ll be able to find some time to talk to the film scoring directory, Dr. Ron Sadoff. I’d love to get a game music club going at NYU, not only would it be fun to do a game music orchestra, but I really see an opportunity for NYU to make a big leap forward in educating its music students for future careers. Interactivity is the way of the future, and it presents some fundamentally different problems in contrast to linear media. Also, I’m hoping to collaborate with students from the Computer Science department as well as the ITP program at Tisch. I’ve already met one motivated ITP student at a Tisch Game Center event last week. Exciting things are happening for games at NYU!

In the meantime I’m also exploring some tools to use for developing a game. Or, at the very least, a small section of a game with which I can demonstrate my music composition and integration, and sound design and implementation skills. After I’ve played around a little bit more I’ll post my findings.