Mock-up round-up (what-up)

As I'm making these videos to find out What The Hell I'm Doing™, I'm starting to distinguish more broad categories.

I've already looked up a bunch of articles on game music. Generally, music can reinforce/break a certain mood and, more importantly, globally tell us what is going on. Tense music indicates a tense moment is incoming. Sad music when someone dies tells us that we (should) care about the guy who just got another means of breathing by Mr. Bill's samurai sword.

I think that really, really generally speaking, music in visual media serves two purposes:
- say something about the world. (time, place, setting, pace)
- show non-obvious value to stuff happening in the world. (tensity, mystery, wonder, awesomeness)

That second category is harder to do in games because you never know when stuff is going to happen. Even in linear games where you know I'm going to meet the bad guy, I can still be very bad at this game and take forever, or this is the fifteenth time Ive done this bit and Ill have it done in two minutes. So most games tend to have triggers for specific musical cues. If this room is where really fast-paced action is going to take place, I can signal that by playing something tense in the room before that as soon as my hapless victim enters that room.

That's fine and definitely helpful, but that leaves all the other rooms in the level, where potentially a lot of action is going to happen, and it is definitely worth supporting that too with your music. However, you REALLY don't know when it is happening or even how a player is going to defeat the challenge. What I think has been happening is that game developers have been looking for as much of the above-mentioed situations as possible, where they know for sure what is roughly going to happen, and fill up the rest with either silence (to build more atmosphere), or provide a more generic tune that falls into category one.

Lately, there are more and more games who try to define more generic situations to score (Dragon Age comes to mind, where they tried to separate "combat" from "noncombat").

This gets harder in multiplayer, where the room where action happens is not known. In fact, what kind of actions happen can even be largely unknown! So, if you want to score that with more than just setting, you're going to need some kind of system to determine what's roughly going on in your game.

So far I've tried to make a system for tension (the first mockup) and now level of danger. Im going to try to find a game where you do different things (Command & Conquer 4 comes to mind) and score what you're globally doing. Either way, that is the way I'll be going and Im prety excited to see whats coming up :)

Second mockup!

My second mockup is done and is waiting to be rendered.

Like the previous one, it's a movie of game footage with music based on parameters observed from the footage. In this case, I used my brother's recording of a World of Warcraft arena game (2v2). I've edited music based on the level of immediate danger to your life (or your team mate's).

- ....Whát?
During these arena matches and most other competitive formats in games for that matter, you generally do a bunch of stuff to ultimately defeat the other team(s). In some games, like Street Fighter or Super Smash Bros, you are constantly seconds away from victory or defeat. However, this is not true in all games. Strategy games have a period of resource collecting and basebuilding that last anywhere from minutes to hours or even days (curse you, Civilization!). During this time, noone is really in any real danger. Several other games also have built-in "rest" periods where nothing really happens, because players are moving to different positions, regenerating health/mana/tentacles or whatever. Conflict is not constant in all games, but instead has ups and downs (just like the tide, maaann)

- ....Whý?
First of, I think "level of danger" can be a valuable parameter to show a player, like health can be. Level of danger is not a direct parameter in the sense that health is - you don't gain 4 level-of-dangers if someone attacks you - though it cán provide some information that is harder to read from a game.
Giving out this information can definitely be useful in giving some sort of overview on what the bleep is going on (I imagine new players especially would benefit). It can also be useful in games that require you to process a lot of information at the same time, where maintaining an overview is half the game.

When it is done rendering, watch this space :)
It's rendered!

Multiplayer: check

After a week of creative Messing About™ with unity tutorials and network code, I've made a game that can host games and request a list of all available games of that type, and join it. As soon as it joins, it calls a function on all clients that for now just outputs Hello World. In the future, though, that can be "load a level" or anything else we want. Essentially, we have a framework for multiplayer! \o/