The Project Structure

Worms Blast was my first project using DirectMusic, so I was still a little hung up on old ways of thinking about music as something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I set out to create four different in-game "music tracks," each with a dedicated sample collection and its own project folder. The game would then pick a random project at the start of each round, load it, and start to play music from it.

Half way through the project, I had some regrets about not creating all of the music in the entire game as a single project. Had I, it would have been easier to share instruments, patterns, and motifs. Looking back at it now, I've come to realize that perhaps it was for the best after all. By separating the in-game music into four separate projects, plus a fifth project for the front-end menu system, I had less of a temptation to reuse the same instruments in too many of the patterns. Since I was creating separate DLS instrument collections for each of the five music sets, I felt that I might as well make all the instruments unique to that set. This gave the music and instruments plenty of variety, an important issue for those wanting to play the game for hours.

Creating five separate projects kept the number of Styles, Segments, and Patterns to a manageable level. Each of my five projects contained about 60 different Patterns, 30 Segments, ten motifs, but only one Band. This helped reduce the level of confusion that can sometimes arise from the fact that, in a DirectMusic project, there are different Bands all over the place that can affect the instruments in unexpected ways. This isn't helped by the fact that Bands sometimes have to be copied from a Style to a Segment or to a Script. If you go and update one of those Bands, the other places where the same Band exists do not get updated, leaving you with several copies of a single Band with the same name, which you thought were all the same but are in fact different from each other. The fact that I had only one Band for each of my five different projects — even though that band had to be copied to about 30 different Segments, and in doing so were left independent of each other — helped ease the chances of getting into a mess with the Bands.