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Delighted you’re right here! I’m online game composer Winifred Phillips. Welcome to the fifth and concluding installment on this article sequence based mostly on my Game Developers Conference 2022 presentation, “Composing for Lineage M: Modular Construction in Game Music.” You’ll discover the complete contents of my GDC lecture in these articles, accompanied by the entire included movies and among the photos from the Powerpoint presentation I used throughout my convention session.

During the earlier 4 articles on this sequence, we discovered about how NCSoft ported the unique world-famous Lineage PC sport from 1998 to cellular units underneath the title Lineage M. We mentioned how the launch of brand-new DLC content material for this cellular port raised an uncommon conundrum. How does a contemporary sport composer create new music that can work successfully inside a sport engine initially devised within the Nineteen Nineties? In the earlier articles of this sequence, we mentioned the favored DLC launch of Lineage M: The Elmor, and I described what it was like creating new music for such an superior sport with an amazingly lengthy historical past and enduring fanbase.

By planning out the music system of this sport with a modular philosophy, the skilled audio staff at NCSoft and I had been capable of lengthen the utility of the music throughout a big assortment of gameplay eventualities. Structural components akin to rhythmic values, dominant frequency ranges, tempo, key signature, melodic themes and musical sections had been all handled as separate items inside the modular construction, with a view to greatest allow the music to be disassembled and juggled into new configurations. You’ll discover all these concepts mentioned intimately in these 4 articles:

Part One: Techniques for Modular Game Music (Composing for Lineage M: GDC 2022)

Part Two: Structure for Modular Game Music (Composing for Lineage M: GDC 2022)

Part Three: Stemming for Modular Game Music (Composing for Lineage M: GDC 2022)

Part Four: Segmentation for Modular Game Music (Composing for Lineage M: GDC 2022)

We simply concluded our dialogue of the function that stemming performs within the modular method. So that brings us to the sensible implementation technique for the remainder of the in-game music. As we’ve mentioned, this gameplay music is made up of interchangeable element components, and we’ve examined how these modules had been organized – the guiding ideas that decided how musical content material can be divided into items and sections.

So let’s check out one distinct part of music from the modular system, and see the way it evolves – first as an ambient monitor, then transferring into a bigger combine, and eventually as a high-energy motion monitor:

As you possibly can see – when a system like that is rigorously designed, one part of a composition can cut up off into many elements – and these can go in a number of instructions, engaging in plenty of totally different goals. This mix-and-match philosophy significantly prolonged the utility of the in-game music for Lineage M: The Elmor. While this expanded utility stretched throughout the 5 territories that comprised the town of Escaros, the most important profit got here from its use in a particular timed problem mode, referred to as the Touchdown Event.

In the Lineage M Touchdown Event, gamers interact in large multiplayer battles throughout a wild free-for-all spanning the whole thing of the sport’s new DLC territories. Battle is structured round timed rounds, at 10 minutes every. In order to provide these battles some significant weight and a way of historical past, we mixed components from a number of in-game music segments to create a 10-minute megamix. By combining concepts from plenty of totally different music segments, the music of the Touchdown Event was capable of contact upon musical themes that had been beforehand skilled throughout different types of gameplay. This allowed the Touchdown Event to really feel significantly particular, as if it had been a end result of all of the occasions main up so far. In my ebook, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music (The MIT Press), I devoted a chapter to the significance of musical themes in video video games:

“We know that a musical theme expressed within the body of a video game is experienced differently than themes in passive forms of entertainment, like television and film. In a game, a musical theme accompanies an activity that the player s of the game are performing. The music has essentially become the soundtrack to the personal adventures of the players. When the music swells at a pivotal moment and a recognizable melody begins, the players hear that melody just as they are engaging in an activity they enjoy… Using a symbolic language, themes communicate eloquently, and give game composers a voice with which to speak directly to the player. This voice becomes an important tool for the game composer, and one of the most powerful ways in which we can express our artistry and our passion.” (Chapter 4, pages 56, 73)

In addition to those melodic and harmonic constructions, some of the dominant components through the timed Touchdown Event is percussion. This is the place the frilly percussion stemming course of got here in very useful.

The staff at NCSoft and I juggled the percussion recordings into a number of stem configurations through the runtime of the ten minute megamix, and this significantly prolonged the lifetime of the music throughout this prolonged gameplay sequence. So let’s see what that was like:

Lineage M – Touchdown Event – music composed by Winifred Phillips from winifredphillips on Vimeo.

So now we’ve mentioned the idea of modular development in sport music. We’ve thought-about how dividing a composition into segments can allow the order of musical concepts to be rearranged, and we’ve checked out why a standard tempo and key signature can allow this method. We’ve thought of how melody, counter melody, rhythm, and instrumentation will be developed into unbiased modules to be used inside the modular construction. We’re examined the significance of stemming, together with strategies for subdividing stems in a extra closely detailed approach – with each rhythmic and frequency traits used as guides. We’ve checked out these methods of their less complicated purposes for the consumer interface, and the extra advanced approaches that had been utilized throughout gameplay.

As we mentioned when this speak started, sport builders are usually obsessive about progress, all the time innovating, all the time trying to the long run. However, by composing music for a sport that had a stringently retro design, the staff at NCSoft and I had the prospect to use some trendy dynamic methods to a basic linear implementation construction. In the method, I bought a little bit of perception into why we make music interactive within the first place.

Dynamic methods not solely permit our music to react, additionally they permit us to squeeze each final drop of in-game utility out of the music we create. This offers up what we want most – extra choices.

Composing the music of Lineage M: The Elmor turned a chance to focus consideration on the previous, and in so doing, to study some classes for the way forward for our work as sport composers.

So that concludes this five-article sequence on the modular development of the music for Lineage M: The Elmor. I attempted to supply some concepts that may be taken into different sport music initiatives, and I hope you discovered them attention-grabbing! Thanks very a lot for studying!

Winifred Phillips is a BAFTA-nominated online game composer whose newest challenge is the Jurassic World Primal Ops online game (the official sport of the blockbuster film Jurassic World Dominion). Other latest releases embrace the hit PlayStation 5 launch title Sackboy: A Big Adventure (soundtrack album now obtainable). Popular music from Phillips’ award-winning Assassin’s Creed Liberation rating was featured within the efficiency repertoire of the Assassin’s Creed Symphony World Tour, which made its Paris debut in 2019 with an 80-piece orchestra and choir. As an achieved online game composer, Phillips is greatest recognized for composing music for video games in lots of the most well-known and common franchises in gaming: the record consists of Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Total War, The Sims, and Sackboy / LittleBigPlanet. Phillips’ has acquired quite a few awards, together with an Interactive Achievement Award / D.I.C.E. Award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, six Game Audio Network Guild Awards (together with Music of the Year), and three Hollywood Music in Media Awards. She is the creator of the award-winning bestseller A COMPOSER’S GUIDE TO GAME MUSIC, revealed by the MIT Press. As one of many foremost authorities on music for interactive leisure, Winifred Phillips has given lectures on the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the Society of Composers and Lyricists, the Game Developers Conference, the Audio Engineering Society, and plenty of extra. Phillips’ enthusiastic followers showered her with questions throughout a Reddit Ask-Me-Anything session that went viral, hit the Reddit entrance web page, acquired 14.9 thousand upvotes, and have become some of the common gaming AMAs ever hosted on Reddit. An interview along with her has been revealed as part of the Routledge textual content, Women’s Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound, which collects the viewpoints of essentially the most esteemed feminine composers in movie, tv, and video games. Follow her on Twitter @winphillips.