Music and Sound?

I agree, when done right, game music is awesome. If you haven’t already heard of them, you should check out the bands The Advantage and YMCK

They rule.

For Plain Sight, we're still deciding what will make the best bombing and bot slaying music.

What does everyone think? We’d love to hear some suggestions...

Cheers

Robin

PS: We’ve got some really exciting news regarding sound and stuff coming soon - stay tuned...

It'd be hard to go past more Satchmo for the suicidal bot slaying. Get that BioShock feel happening.

Actually I have no idea and even less qualification to form opinions on the matter. Especially since I can't help but focus on the drums for any piece of music I hear, whether they're there already or I have to invent them.

Jojo Mayer?

Thanks for pointing out 'The Advantage', they somehow slipped through my net :/ .. being a huge fan of 'Press Play on Tape' (oh yes, Commodore 64 cover band!) and Minibosses (NES tunes). Oh and if you like chiptune I strongly suggest Anamanaguchi, in fact check their myspace.. thats kind of the music you should take an idea or two from.

Well if I was composing the music for 'Plain Sight' I'd probably go for some breakbeat loops with some eccentric bouncing bass lines, sketchy keyboards and then real metalic (steel string?) sounding guitars over the top (kinda like the guitars from the Futurama theme tune)

Anyways I'm sure it's gonna work out just fine, if it enhances the game experience then its a job well done, you'll just have to try out a few things, new and old styles.. why not make a few and give us some tasters.. and we can help you decide :]

Hey Just found out about the game. looks quite interesting. i like the graphical design, reminds me of defcon and audiosurf. anyway. in terms of the music i think something more procedural could be really beneficial. for repetitive games like this i usually find that if there is a constant soundtrack it bores the player our of the game. I think creating a music system which reacts to the actions of the game would be more welcomed. Or creating the all the sounds in the game to be completely customizable/ swappable for peoples own sound design. Seems like a good opportunity for an open source aspect to it.

At this point im totally speculating on just seeing the trailer.
love to give more imput if your still looking for testers.

hey highwayhawk,

We'd love to have a procedural soundtrack for the game unfortunately we’ve only got two programmers and neither of them are sound engineers! I agree that repetitive soundtracks for multiplayer games can become very irritating, for this reason we’re putting a huge effort into getting the sound effects perfect ...

Anyway, I think I can safely say that the sound in Plain Sight will be top notch – you’ll have to wait a few days to find out why

Robin

PS : you mentioned Daft Punk on your previous post - if only they'd do the music for us ! (the 2007 Alive album is one of my favourite albums of all time)

I don't know why i say this....but I am thinking something like Gorillaz music. What would really be cool would be retro sounding tunes. 8 bit but modern? Perhaps ocremix.org would be a good contest idea?

Hey Alexkavon,

Thanks for the link for ocremix, looks awesome and could be an opportunity.

Funny you should suggest the Gorillaz, we seem to be getting a lot of feedback along those lines.

The thing about music in mutiplayer games is that it can easily drive the players nuts if they dont like it (especially when they play the game for a long time) - we're finding it pretty hard to pick a genre/ style that everyone likes. Fingers crossed that we get it right !

one thing to keep in mind is that it should be intense. The intensity should increase as the game goes on. Take Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 for example.

The main menu screen should have a catchy theme that we can all whistle. If you could, I would suggest hiring John Williams ha ha.

For game play, give us ten or fifteen tracks that we can make into a playlist on the create game screen. Perhaps keep it innovative. We can make a map playlist and then select the toon per map. Don't forget to allow a random option. However, thinking about it this may not be a good idea. Selecting map track is but not the playlist option.

Music can make or break a game. If the music is irritating, it can completely ruin a game, but if the right choices for music are made, it can make an awesome game simply epic.

Take World of Goo for example.

The music help sets the tone, and it makes the theme of the game. Find something that matches with. Since the goal is a deathmatch in which robots kill eachother, then themselves, it should be something faintly morbid and creepy, and yet with a manic, uplifted, gleefully insane feel to it. If you've played it, many of the character theme songs in Disgaea are like this.

It needs to be, at times, fast and intense. But it needs that feel to it. The tone the music sets is more important than any other aspect of the music.

Plus, having neat sound effects that go along with the music and tone would really help n.n Perhaps a tone each time a robot lands on a surface and makes it glow their color would be interesting?

But I'm rambling.
And insane =D
But insane is good.
Insane music is better.
Insane music in an insane game that fits, meshes together, and draws you into the action...
Why... That's genius.

Its good to have everyones views on this, as its clearly an area where opinions can vary a lot. Hopefully we can merge everyones wishes and desires into one supreme most awesome soundtrack of all time. We haven't made any decisions on it yet though, so keep the suggestions coming...

I think ambient sounds relating to the environment would be a nice addition. A different sound for different explosions, a sound for whenever a bot touches and lights up a building, perhaps sounds made by the bots being destroyed in an explosion... There's a lot of potential for music to come from the chaos, aside from the background music.
Active music is always interesting, too - music that changes based on how crazy a match is getting, with the presence of a powerful robot that's ready to make some huge explosion, that kind of thing.
I realize that last part would have its downsides and potentially be irritating to implement, and might take away from the possible background music of the game, however.

Just a few random suggestions n.n

Level themed music might be good if you can't do procedural stuff.

Depends how long the games are too - a track of a few minutes repeated ad infinium can get boring.

Procedurally though, if you had a chance, it'd not be too hard (well, depending on your sound code) to up the tempo as your size increased, or even just alter the music in the last minute of the game to a faster tempo.

And finally, you could just have some menu music I guess, a lot of multiplayer games get away with this

I'd suggest a decent sound effect for the explosion - which varies with size. The one at the Expo was okay I guess, but I am sure you can come up with better ones. A sound for when a piece of land is made a colour would help identify movement too (which varies with size so people sound different).

I don't suppose 5.1 Surround will be included too? That'd make it great for people with surround headphones or whatnot.

If you have any plans for voice acting, at least in a robotic kind of way, there you could go out of your way with a variety of neat little sounds to play randomly, or at least a decent amount for a few key events (attacks, blocks, killing someone higher then you, or whatever).

I presume there is no plan for an announcer voice ala Unreal Tournament / Team Fortress, since it's mainly deathmatch, but if there was, a notification of the time left in the map is usually a nice idea. Visual cues are difficult to see in a fast game - it doesn't have to be spoken either, a klaxon bell or warning sound can always work well (or ticking clock, or alarm, or whatever).

Anything I've missed? Hmm, there needs to be a GUI sound for mouse over and selection (missing in the beta right?) that sounds well placed. There is always the post-match sounds too, eg; in Mario, coming first got you an upbeat little bit of music, while coming last got "Uh-oh, you really didn't do too well" - that might be awesome (and reusable in all maps, and also short too).

I also really liked the trailer music. Have that has a bonus track if you can

Hi Andrew,

Yeah, we'd love to do some kind of procedural music generation, it's pretty awesome. However, unfortunately, it's not really anything we know much about. So, unless someone wants to do it for free – i don’t think it’s going to happen

The general consensus in the office is that music for multiplayer games has to be non repetitive otherwise it’ll drive you bananas. Because of this we’ve so far really focused on the sound effects which you can vaguely hear in the game clip i posted last week...

The robots do talk, the pitch of their voices depend on the number of points they have (ie. the bigger they are, the lower their voice)...

As for GUI sounds, yes we’ve put them in however for the beta please don’t expect much of a GUI – it’s minimalistic to say the least! (that’s what you get when you spend all your time on gameplay)

Cheers!

Screw the GUI, the gameplay is what counts, thumbs up from me

Okay, awesome, I didn't notice the pitch modulation during the beta (although I played on the soundless laptop more then once).

Non repetitive is key for sure.

As for procedural music, I'd offer help if I had more XNA experience, since I'd not mind learning about that area, but oh well

check out 16x16's amazing game Rescue the Beagles. I dont know if the music is procedural but the rest of the game is:

http://www.16x16.org/category/rescue-the-beagles/

also, check out Dyson (by our friend Alex) it's fantastic:

http://www.dyson-game.com/

Or indeed many of the other wonderful games in TIGSource's Procedural Games Compo.

MMORPG Tycoon was a conceptual fave of mine.

As for music, you could have 4 (or more) separate audio tracks with increasing beats per minute. The audio mixes in the extra tracks, adding layers to the music depending how frenetic the action is (dependant on kill frequency, or total held points in play). You could also have different fill phrases that activate for when the action spikes or suddenly hits a lull so that any major change in temp isn't too jarring.

So play starts with a slow pulsing thrumb, punctuated with low-key fanfares (a drumroll-splash maybe) for the first kills. If someone is on a roll then a stocatto drum beat is layered over the top and the fanfares have a little more flourish to them. Next level would be some synth and lastly a dirty sounding guitar for the top level. The fills also bridge jumps over 2 or more levels and the odd special one for multi-kills and when a powerful player gets taken out.

Not procedural but it is dynamic.