Postmortem

Although we plan to expand the system that we created here as the game evolves, it is always a good idea to go back and look at the various things that went right and wrong in a project.

What Worked

Player Music as a Purely Social Game

If someone asked me what I am most proud of working on in Asheron's Call 2, it would be the addition of music as a purely social game. No one has ever created a dynamic music system quite like it, and we have already witnessed people getting to know each other because of the music system. These types of systems are what build friendships long after the core gameplay has become stale and provide people with new outlets for their creativity. I can only hope that the music played in-game inspires someone to pick up an instrument in real life, as music is something that fundamentally makes people's lives better.

Figure 20-4: During the last four hours of the beta test, users gathered on top of the Deru Tree to play music together. Part of this jam session is included as an MP3 track on the CD.

Layered Approach

I cannot express enough the importance of starting with something simple and expanding it. Revision and the willingness to throw things away is part of what makes a project work well in the end. At any given stage in the project, we had something interesting working. As we added new layers to the mix, things just kept getting more interesting. Many of the solutions and concepts presented above were not part of the initial project and were continually added or refined through the entire process.

Music as Sound Design

While style is not something you have, but rather something you cannot get rid of, the choices we made within our style have worked out very well. The combination of polyrhythmic structures and modal melodic structures not only allow our system to work in interesting ways but also do not tire the ear as much as other stylistic choices would have. We also paid particular attention to blending these stylistic choices with our background environments, treating them as much as sound design as music.

Music Is Informative

The monster melodies and use of groove levels in the game provide a kind of musical information that I believe positively enhance the user's experience of the game. They layer another kind of musical tension into the mix based on the user's situation and give arrangements of monsters a unique musical sound. One of our designers even realized that the game engine was not creating monsters in the right locations just from hearing the music.

DirectMusic

DirectMusic was truly the only music system that could accomplish this type of holistic musical vision, and while the system is far from perfect, it does some things amazingly well. The ability to adapt a section of music to multiple key signatures allowed us to get a range of moods from a single piece of music, while the synchronization and small data rates of the file format allowed us to work within the network-based parameters that an online game such as ours requires.

What Didn't Work

Not What People Expect from an "Interactive" Music System

In some ways, we did not do what people expected from an "interactive" music system. When people hear this term, they usually think that the music is going to kick in when they go into combat, play a victory melody when they win, and go back to its normal state again. Instead, our system is ambient in nature and does not provide the painfully obvious kick at the right moments. While what we did was more advanced (and I am very glad we did it), sometimes the simple things are what people want. I do believe these types of situations can assimilate into the current system, but this type of easily quantifiable change is often what tires the ear of the music in the first place. The trick is to achieve a balance between immediately noticeable effects and the more subtle effects that do not tire the ear. The color and density changes controlled by the groove level provide some of this functionality, and I suspect that we will work more in that direction in the future.

Learning DirectMusic while Creating the Project

Not fully understanding the functionality of DirectMusic made the initial creation process much more painful than it needed to be. However, I do not know of a better way to learn anything than to do it, and many of our "mistakes" lead to interesting benefits in the end.

Lack of Support

Most sound designers fight with a lack of support in their endeavors. In many companies, it is hard to get the proper resources for sound, as the industry tends to focus heavily on graphics. In addition, many people have no idea how we create sound and music, let alone how they affect the experience. The original coder assigned to the music system worked on the user interface and localization of the game. Both the music and UI require two huge systems. In addition, she did not know much about sound and music, so explaining things often took an exorbitant amount of time. Moreover, once someone found a bug, verifying bug fixes always required Geoff or me to be present. Additionally, the code proved very unstable at times, so much so that during the last few weeks of development, we had to rewrite the entire system from scratch.

Dan Ogles, one of our graphics programmers, rose to this monumental task and did a fantastic job with it. However, I cannot imagine how much easier it would have been had the focus and support been there in the first place.

Future Work

In the future, I am interested in prototyping the two main concepts of the system separate from each other before integrating them together again. If we created a system of pure player music, we could implement a host of new controls for users, allowing them to control things like tempo, chord and color choices, effect properties, and more. We are also very interested in pursuing a system that allows users to create their own melodies through a very simple interface, which would give them a much greater degree of musical control, while still protecting them from bad note choices. I would like to see how far we could push this system by itself, as there is potentially a lot more room for control within the mix.

I would also like to spend some time prototyping a purely film score-type approach, where the speed at which the music adapts to the current situation is stressed. I would also like to try integrating traditional Redbook audio tracks into the mix to increase the sonic quality while still maintaining the interactivity.

Once we have gained experience at pushing the boundaries of these systems separately, I would like to take that knowledge and see what parts of the two systems can be combined without limiting either system. Can we create a truly adaptive score, one that adapts to any situation, with the sound quality of Redbook audio, while still maintaining an interesting player music game? How much more control can we give to the users before they strangle their ears with it?

I also think that we need to spend some time learning other areas of DirectMusic and exploring what other features lay hidden under the hood. For instance, we did not make use of ChordMaps for variation in the project, and we barely touched on the things that scripting can provide. We also did not use chord changes to write our background score and instead used them for player music and mood changes. How would the system differ if our background score used the more traditional style of writing in DirectMusic? Could we solve less with composition and instead use DirectMusic's functionality better in the end, providing a higher degree of recomposition?