Composing for Games
A lot of my work revolves around composing soundtracks for games.
A good soundtrack will continuously alter itself to best fit the location/situation that the player is currently in, smoothly transitioning from the audio that was previously playing.
Below are some examples of this, using Unreal Engine 4 and FMOD.
Unreal Engine - Soundcues & Adaptive music
One way to make Adaptive music is to change the instruments depending on where in the level the player is.
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As you watch the video below, notice how the overall melody stays the same, but the choice of instrument alters the 'mood' of the music, reflecting the location that the player is currently standing.
Each individual instrument is separated into its own audio file, and imported into the game engine.​
​Using Unreal Engine's native coding system (called Blueprints), I can then control the volume of each instrument as the player moves through the level.​​​​
Instruments funnel into the same output, making them play in unison, and are picked randomly each time to make a unique and much longer lasting soundtrack.
Sound Design
While the sound design that goes into games is often in the background, usually ignored by the player, it actually plays a crucial role in creating an immersive environment.
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Ensuring that something as trivial as the footsteps of the character, or the ambience of the room sounds accurate, can go a long way to improving the overall experience.
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Headphones recommended!
Systems like these make implementing audio into games a LOT easier, since the possible number of unique sounds increases exponentially with every new sound file I add, so instead of creating hundreds of sound files, I could just combine 10 of them in interesting ways and get a similar result.
FMOD - Adaptive music system
FMOD is a fairly simple but powerful tool used for making adaptive music/sound design systems. It can be used in conjunction with a game engine such as Unity or Unreal.
I have created a system that alters a piece of music as different parts of the game change. There are two in-game parameters, both of which have values from 0 - 100:
Health - The player's health value as a percentage.
Intensity - The amount of "action" that is occurring (enemies nearby/moving quickly etc)
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This video below is an overview of the audio system. All of the other videos will go into more detail, focussing on the various aspects.
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Headphones/Fullscreen recommended!
As you can see, this FMOD project is quite large, containing over 3000 wav files!
When dealing with this much data, it is crucial to name everything properly. There is no universal naming system that applies to every use case, but giving everything a consistent, relevant name (separated by underscores) is a good rule of thumb.
Composing
When composing for software like FMOD, you have to think differently. You don't know how long the player will be in a certain "game state", and so you need to create a piece of music that loops indefinitely, but doesn't get repetitive.
To keep things fresh & novel, I created multiple versions of the same melodies, basslines and percussion that FMOD randomly chooses during playback.
Sound design
This project also contains some (subtle) sound design elements, such as electric shock sound effects that play alongside the synthesisers, and cymbal crashes that occasionally play during the 'Action' section of the song.