Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
will take to move through the game world. The challenge here is to make
music that won't drive the player crazy by being too short and won't
drive the producer crazy by being too long and thus taking up too much
i le space.
To solve these issues, a composer may create a piece of music that can
be broken into many smaller pieces of music and work together as a
whole, no matter what is going on in the game. It's a dif erent aesthetic
approach and an interesting compositional challenge to write music
that can i t together like a puzzle in many dif erent ways. Another thing
to keep in mind is that games can be long—a i lm is usually about two
hours long. Now imagine writing music for a game that is made to be
played for as long as 100 hours! Yikes, that is potentially a lot of music!
Image adapted by Scott Looney from Sam Catanzaro.
Game composers face a host of issues and challenges that don't exist
in linear mediums. The complexities and requirements of the game
environment raise many questions:
• If you don't know how long the player will stay in a game level, how
long should you make the piece of music for that level?
• If the action and intensity speed up as the player goes further into the
level, should the music speed up and slow down as well?
• Will the music sound dif erent on dif erent devices?
• How do I know what format to deliver my music in?
