25.4.14

Music ideas

Adam Fergler was kind enough to help me once again with the creation do a melody for the background of my game.
I've never been good to choose myself a soundtrack or even sound effects, but I do appreciate the importance of them.

I know Adam is busy with his own projects, therefore I never thought about anything different to a single simple melody looping in the background. 
After the first few days of talking about what kind of mood I was looking for the game, what the story was, the game play and the main characters personality, he started coming up with ideas of what could be done.
Because at this point I barely touched any sound related topics for the engine, I didn't know what restrictions I would encounter. My original IDE was to have a tune per stage of courage and simply fade in and out between them. 
After trying for a bit I couldn't find a way to make a smooth transitions and having sudden changes of music was not a good idea.
After some talking and considerations we came up with more practical ideas to represent Kamea's courage increase that in this level's case it increases 3 times plus the initial state:
A) have a the same melody 4 times with the exact timing, but with more and more instruments on each level. The idea was to have them all runnin at the same time in the background on mute and just turn the volume up after each courage checkpoint was reached. This created a kind of layering and would avoid an abrupt change of music.

B) have smaller melodies that sound good looping but that the ending of one is the beginning of the next one. With this method, we expected to be able to loop one until a courage point was reache, stop the looping and once the song is finish switch to the next one which then would loop until the next courage point is reach, and so on. 

I decided to make quick and rough testing playable levels to see if they would actually work. It turns out that the 'coding' behind it was pretty simple and managed to get both ideas to work.
Here's idea A and idea B
(Note that A doesn't line up properly, but that's because one song starts slightly later than the other, but the concept is there).
(Also! just noticed that you sometimes have to refresh at least once the browser window to get the audio working properly!) 

I think the easies way for Adam was to go for option B. He said he had more than one idea that he was already working on, more like Kamea's theme song! 
Maybe that melody will be used for the titles screen :D 
Really looking forward to hear more of it.

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