Music Preparation

In the early stages of trying out music content for this game, I used a custom-made music system featuring a fairly straightforward background music track along with short sampled phrases of various instruments, each belonging to one of the different characters in the game. So if the Calvin character scored points or picked up a weapon, his instrument would play a motif at the next possible entry point, marked in the background music file with markers. The system worked well enough, but because all phrases had to fit anywhere in the background music, the music had to be very uniform, and it just didn't sound very inspiring or heartfelt. The music turned out rather bland in comparison to what I had hoped for. I scratched my head for a while and decided to give DirectMusic a go.

I had witnessed demonstrations of DirectMusic at a couple of game development seminars. I was impressed with the technology but less so with the resulting music. The concept of having a piece of music written to a set of chords and then overlaying a new set of chords to that music scared me. This was probably because the examples I was hearing, while interesting from a technical point of view, just didn't sound very good. Based on this impression, I decided early on that I would not use any of DirectMusic's chord features in this game. I was adamant that if I wrote a melody, I wanted that melody played back exactly how I wrote it.

I had never used DirectMusic Producer before, and as I loaded up the application for the first time, I admit I was a little intimidated by the sheer number of screens, options, and features. Much of the terminology was new to me: Segments, Bands, Styles, Groove Levels, and ChordMaps. I've written music for games for the last ten years and used just about every type of music and audio program available, but this was the first time I encountered these terms. Much of the first week was spent studying the supplied demo files and reading the online help documentation. Things began falling into place, and pretty soon I had my first sets of patterns and motifs up and playing.