I decided to use "motifs" in two different ways in Worms Blast: one for major game events, such as losing a life, triggering a firestorm, triggering double-damage mode, etc., and another one for minor game events, such as picking up a crate, gaining some extra health,
I used motifs to
There were important game events in Worms Blast for which simple motifs were not sufficient to represent. These events included losing a life, triggering a very big and powerful weapon, or entering some special game mode. There were 18 of these major game events that were important enough, not only to play a motif on top of the background music, but to actually come in and replace the background music completely for a little while.
The way I
At the end of each two-bar "special event" pattern, I put a drum fill-in/build-up to create a natural-sounding transition back to the regular background music.
I can really think of only one major mistake that I made in the development of the Worms Blast music, and that was to sample all my instruments at 44.1 kHz, like I've always done. Through my
However, several months later I was told that the audio engine in the game would only run at 22.05 kHz. So, having some samples in 44.1 kHz would be a waste of resources since it would, in effect, be resampled to 22.05 kHz at the point of delivery. It turned out that I might as well have done all of my samples in 22.05 kHz from the beginning, as I had to downgrade everything to 22.05 kHz in order not to waste system resources with 44.1 kHz samples.
With DirectMusic Producer version 8.0, there was no easy way to resample samples. I had to go back to my original sample sources, use SoundForge to resample to 22.05 kHz, save each sample to a new filename, and then go back to DirectMusic Producer and highlight the sample, choose Replace Sample, and then find the newly saved 22.05 kHz sample on my hard drive. This may not sound so bad, but many of my instruments had many
Actually, it was after this process that I managed to convince the DirectMusic developers to put a "resample" feature in DirectMusic Producer, something that was available from version 8.1 — too late for me, but at least I feel I can take some credit for getting that feature included for others to benefit from.
I guess the moral of the story is when working with DirectMusic, forget your old method of always working on a copy of your music in the best possible fidelity and then downgrade as and when necessary. Instead, find out the sample rate that the end product is going to be delivered at before you do any sampling at all, and use that as your highest frequency.