After perusing a music site mentioned in another thread (www.Shockwave-Sound.com (http://www.Shockwave-Sound.com)) I got to wondering how many different music tracks would be necessary for a arcade-type game with many levels (say around one hundred 2-3 minute levels). Would, say, 6 different tracks be enough or would they seem too repetitive?

And beyond the number of tracks, I'm wondering if all the music should be in a similar genre, or if it would be better to mix it up a bit.

And (once I get going with questions it's hard to stop) I'm wondering in general what games really need music. One game I remember trying out recently had me thinking "this game would get boring pretty quick if it didn't have any music". Mostly it was due to the apparent lack of other sound effects and the slow pace of the game I needed something to distract me while I was waiting for something to happen.

Probably what my questions boil down to is me thinking out loud whether or not my upcoming game needs music. Mostly what comes to mind are negatives:

1) No matter what type of music I choose it likely won't appeal to a good number of players and at best the music will still become boring and repetitive given enough time. Personally I end up turning off the music for most games.

2) Unless I'm very careful music would distract the player from important sounds. As well, it would be challenging to find music that would fit the mood of the game and complement the sound effects that I have already.

3) If people wanted music they'd play a CD or mp3 of their own choosing.

... probably I've already answered my question. If I don't think my game would be improved by the addition of music then I probably shouldn't worry about it. I've got too many other things to focus on anyway (a feeling that I'm sure most everyone here shares).

But still interested in hearing your thoughts :)

::radiance::

Music is as important to a game as any other part - if you want evidence, check the defacto gish bash thread. There was more than one mention of the lack of music in the menus...

What you need to do is find/create music that creates the mood you want in the game. Sure, people will turn it off, but a game isn't complete without it. Note that it doesn't have to be real obvious. The music in Homeworld was hardly even noticable as music, but it did the trick and set the mood.

>Would, say, 6 different tracks be enough
>or would they seem too repetitive?

No matter how much music you have - it will get repetitive at some point. Usually you have rather tiny 25-35sec loops with a maximum of variation put in.

Well, the music itself is called "BGM" - background music. It's important that it stays in the background. It's bad, if it demands too much attention, because that's the point were annoyance starts. (Usually the volume is just lower by default)

However, I'm still not sure if I need music or not. Ah well... I'll see.

I strongly disagree that game music is the same as background music. Claiming that game music should stay in the background and not bother the player is the same as saying you should have anonymous and bland graphics so the player wont tire of it so fast... it is obviously silly.

There are of course situations and moods that are best conveyed with "background" music, but the same goes for graphics. In some games the graphics should be a bit more in the background and not too flashy as well to not distract from the gameplay.

Music can and should be as flamboyant as the rest of your game.

>Claiming that game music should stay in
>the background and not bother the
>player is the same as saying you should
>have anonymous and bland graphics so
>the player wont tire of it so fast

No.

There's only a small percentage of games wich are spun around the music itself. Dance Dance Revolution, Parappa the Rapper, Rez etc. And... well... all other games just aren't like that, therefore music is somewere between "less important (then eg graphics)" and "totally unimportant" for em. And it's usually put a bit in the background by lowering it's volume (eg to 60%).

Q3 has music - everyone has turned it off. Elastomania doesn't have music at all - it doesn't matter. It's a great game anyways.

Let's say you make a mini golf game - does it really need music? If so, why? Is there any mood set you need to emphasise? If not, why bother?

Let's say you make a mini golf game - does it really need music?
Funnily enough I am writing a mini golf game :) and have spent a fair bit of time on the music so far. To me, a game without music would be missing an ingredient it ought to have!

Also my music has been well-received in the past, so I hope it's going to be something positive for reviews.

(PS, if you want to check out my golf game, please do! www.amju.com/supergolf)

If your levels are split by themes a good way to go might be to map soundtracks per specific theme. E.g. if yoy have 30 levels split in 6 themes (5 levels per theme), you would simply need 6 soundtracks, excluding title soundtracks, highscores etc.

As for the subject of whether music should capture the player's attention, or just play in the background, I think it depends on the nature of your game.

E.g. if you have an FPS or RPG with the occasional battles it's a good idea to change to a more aggressive style, or to introduce a sense of impending danger.

@Jason Colman

Hehe. Well, I just picked minigolf as "pseudo realistic sports game" reference.

The kind I had in mind is more like this:
http://people.freenet.de/ki_onyx/minigolf.png
(not my game - oh and it's old)

I also checked your game. It runs rather slow on my pc. 24-30 fps (k7 500, gf2mx, 128mb, sb128, win98se, 38.32deto, dx 9.0, opengl 1.3). I hope there's some room for optimisation. The cam system and the way to handle power seems to be not perfectly intuitive right now (for me at least).

However, the best idea would be starting a seperate thread over at the "News, Announcements & Feedback Requests" board.

Dear oNyx, thanks for the feedback! Yeah I posted an announcement (here) (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3112) but I thought it would be ok to mention it again :)

To kind of go back to the original topic, I would like to have a different track for each level in my game (there are 18). That's quite a lot of music for me to write.. so far I only have six tracks... but for that number of levels I think it's fair to expect a different track for each one.

In a game with, say, 100 levels that's probably not realistic. I was thinking over the idea of programmatically generating the music, but that would be a huge project in itself.

Ah well, not all game music is boringly repetitive.. I could listen to the Ocarina Of Time music all day :)

18 tracks is quite alot, but if you can do it in time it's good, I guess ;)

Originally posted by Jason Colman
[...]
Ah well, not all game music is boringly repetitive.. I could listen to the Ocarina Of Time music all day :)

Check out this remix:
http://www.ocremix.org/detailmix.php?mixid=OCR00150

All other remixes from "AmIEvil" are also damn nice.

http://www.ocremix.org/detailremixer.php?mixerid=3

Hmmm. It does seem like I would be taking a risk by not having background music. Especially in the menu system where music seems to be one of the things that identifies a program as a game. (I'd be freaked out if Photoshop started adding music to their preference dialogs :))

And I suppose that by not including music in-game I'd be missing out on a great chance to enhance the ambiance of my game and really draw the player into the experience.

As for finding music, is it generally OK to use non-exclusive music bought from online sources? I'm mostly doing that with my sound effects and I'm happy going that route, but somehow with music the risk of using a track that users could possibly recognize from another game bothers me more.

And then of course there's the issue of all the mp3/ogg files tripling my download size. Maybe I could just include the bulk of them with the full version.

there's the issue of all the mp3/ogg files tripling my download size.

At the risk of telling you something you already know, have you checked out formats like MOD, IT, XM ? Go to www.modplug.com for the low down. (File sizes are supposed to be smaller than mp3 because they are dependent on the number of samples, rather than the length of the song. Not good for all types of music though.)

There's lots of downloadable music there, so you might find a musician to work with too.

oNyx, thanks for the music links. Sweet! :)

>Claiming that game music should stay in >the background and not bother the >player is the same as saying you should >have anonymous and bland graphics so >the player wont tire of it so fast

No.

There's only a small percentage of games wich are spun around the music itself. Dance Dance Revolution, Parappa the Rapper, Rez etc. And... well... all other games just aren't like that, therefore music is somewere between "less important (then eg graphics)" and "totally unimportant" for em. And it's usually put a bit in the background by lowering it's volume (eg to 60%).

Q3 has music - everyone has turned it off. Elastomania doesn't have music at all - it doesn't matter. It's a great game anyways.

Yes. There may be somee games that are "spun around the graphics itself", but I think everyone agrees that games are a whole. Your argument is weird - that music is not supposed to have any importance unless the game is about music. That is like saying graphics should be bland in all games that aren't about graphics. Come on.

Elastomania may have no music but I am sure if it did it would be conceived as a better product by many and thus sell better.

>That is like saying [...]

No, it's not. I wrote "less important" (to totally unimportant).

>Elastomania may have no music but I am
>sure if it did it would be conceived as a
>better product by many and thus sell
>better.

It's 1.1mb. Even with "ogged" mods it would be bloated by a factor of 3. Wich ultimatly leads to less downloads. A better CR? Well, that's just speculation.

If you're doing a game with a high number of levels, you may want to include the ability for the player to supply their own music to be randomly included in the mix... ISTR the DX-BALL games linked you to a giant archive of .mod's to download...

Originally posted by oNyx
>That is like saying [...]

No, it's not. I wrote "less important" (to totally unimportant).

>Elastomania may have no music but I am
>sure if it did it would be conceived as a
>better product by many and thus sell
>better.

It's 1.1mb. Even with "ogged" mods it would be bloated by a factor of 3. Wich ultimatly leads to less downloads. A better CR? Well, that's just speculation.

Well, that shows how little you know about what size good quality mod music can be. I could supply 20 minutes of diverse decent quality music (sound quality wise) for ~300kb uncompressed. That is not even very optimistic. Of course, this is because I know mod music very well and I know how to compose with small samples. I am just saying it can be done.

And a better CR? Come on. Game with and game without music? The CR is NOT going to go down if the music is good. The reason I never wanted to buy that game is that it feels to thin. The graphics is pretty much ok for the game, the sound effects are very mediocre and there is no music. It has amazing physics and core gameplay and nothing else. Yes I speculate that the CR can be improved for that game.

What about DirectMusic? MIDI files are incredibly small, and it is reasonable to assume most people have DX6 by now.

"Ogged" mods, anyone know how to keep the repeat points at the same place, especially when the samples can have a different size on the next computer (due to compression/decompression)?

@Karukef:
Interesting, do you have any examples of prior work. I am still looking for unobtrusive background music for a puzzle game. I can only play the MK mod files though (with limited effects, any number of channels). :)

Well I look at music as not only being an important aspect of the game experience, but also as an opportunity to have fun and get creative musically. I wouldn't want to leave it out.

I'm not really interested in tracker music (in games, or in general), so yeah, the download size will go up as music, even ogged music, is pretty data intensive. But I'm using as many tricks as I can to minimise this, and anyway, it's worth it.

How much music do you need? As much as you can afford. I think 6 tracks might be a little low for 100 levels. However the "different theme for each world" thing can work - just make sure each track is quite long in this case, and don't have it go back to the start at the beginning of each level.

As for music getting irritating, it's nothing to do with the volume really, and not even so much to do with the size of the loop. Some music is just a bit too in-your-face. That Iago Rage music, for example, going "Ganymede Rage, Ganymede Rage" over and over... it became irritating almost immediately. Whereas that guitar thing that played in Diablo, I seem to recall was rather nice, even after hearing it quite a lot.

And of course, like everything... it all depends on the type of game, right?

Anthony: Of course there are some things that are musically un-wise for games, just like using too much colored lighting is annoying graphically.

I would personally completely abandon using tracked music for games if it weren't for the size limitations on demos. And even with size limitations, considering that the demo only need perhaps title music and music for a demo level, streamed music may still be best. But nevertheless, tracked music is the only format that can deliver lots of music with as little filesize as you can wish.

KoekTromL: I have been wanting to make sort of a "what can be done in 300kb" or something demo for a while. Right now I only have this one song which is about 113kb zipped (87kb 7-zipped). I don't consider it one of my better songs, but it sure shows what kind of quality you can get with very low filesizes.

I'm attaching the song in .IT format. If it sounds weird, try using another player :)

An .ogg rendering of the song using my preferred player can be found at www.omnidimension.com/scarve.ogg

>MIDI files are incredibly small

Yes, but they sound usually rather poor.

Alternatively there is RMF (beatnik) wich is damn easy to use in the java world. It's like a hybrid of midi and mod. You can make a rather nice song with about 45kb (~90sec) and plain midi tracks are even smaller.

Unfortunatelly there's only one editor (300$) and the amount of artists/tracks is rather low. Also the price for single tracks is usually around 400$ :/

Originally posted by oNyx
>MIDI files are incredibly small

Yes, but they sound usually rather poor.


???

Are we talking about the same thing here? I did't mean, the "Bliep-Ploink-Toof" stuff from the Adlib (FM), but I am talking about the digital wave stuff that the Microsoft Synthesizer generates with DirectMusic using the Roland DLS. That's not too bad is it?

I saw a demo of Atomaders with it, and I was quite impressed with the audio.

As far as I know, it should be possible to include a MID in your game, play it using DirectMusic when available (DX6) or just play it over the Adlib (FM) part of your soundcard. It should also be able to benefit from hardware accelerated stuff like SB Live, Audigy, etc.

Not familiar with RMF, but will look into it. Where does it get the waves from or is FM based as well?

What's the story with ogg anyway, do you decompress that realtime and play it back, or do you just do a 10 Mb malloc and decompress it once?

>Are we talking about the same thing here?

Since you ask, no :)

Thought you ment plain oldschool midi files.

>That's not too bad is it?

Dunno. If you have a demo floating around just post it.

>Where does it get the waves from or is
>FM based as well?

There are the usual midi insturments, a bunch of new ones and you can include additional waves if you want to (therefore I said it's like a mod-midi hybrid).

>What's the story with ogg anyway, do
>you decompress that realtime and
>play it back, or do you just do a 10 Mb
>malloc and decompress it once?

Sound effects are decompressed ahead of time (raw pcm) and music is streamed (decompressed in tiny blocks). That works reasonably well and memory usage is "as needed".

Lemmings has 28 songs for 120 levels, totalling 705 kB uncompressed ;-). (you can get the music on http://exotica.fix.no/).
Most tunes seem to last around 1 min, and loop. The music in Lemmings changes at each new level, and obviously the same music was used in several levels. Some were only used in specific levels, like the "Shadow of the Beast" or "Menace" levels.

I think it's a good approach. Write say 10 songs and change the music at each level...

For the minigolf game, I think 6 tunes should be enough.. Just use each tune in 3 different levels! I'd rather listen 3 times to the same good polished music than 1 time to 18 average quality songs ;-). (I'm not saying your songs will be bad! But unless you're very good, I guess it takes time to polish your music.. like everything else)

As far as ogg/vorbis is concerned, my game has a 4 min tune compressed in ogg quality -1, which makes it 1.2 MB "only"... So it's bad for downloadable games, but not too much if you only need one or two songs...

>Not familiar with RMF, but will look into it.

Ok. I just decided to C&P a little demo together :)

http://people.freenet.de/ki_onyx/rmfjuke.jnlp
(Java 1.4 or better required.)

The demo is ~96kb in size and contains 3 tracks:
frenitian-full.rmf (~47kb)
kraftytechy-full.rmf (~12kb)
synchotronic-full.rmf (~22kb)

All 3 songs are ©Beatnik/HeadSpace.

Well you've convinced me that it's worth looking into using mod/midi type files. I'm probably leaning toward midi since it seems like it's easy to use under Mac OS X (which is all I'm aiming for, at least for the moment) and the file sizes are very small: without looking too hard I found the Halo theme which was about 14K for almost 3 minutes of music.

Edit: Although looking around further I guess mod or similar format has much more variety wrt the sounds and instruments available.

Does anyone know of good sources/artists for mod or midi type sound files? I can find sites that have files for download but most of them don't seem like they'd be legally usable in a game.

And thanks to all for all your answers/feedback :)

Ooops. That demo sounds like <badword> without a soundbank. The (minimal) soundbank adds a about 350kb.

So... I guess it's even more useless than I thought. Sure with tons of songs it's a different thing, but with only a handfull of songs you could aswell just use a tracker format (wich is easier and much cheaper to produce).

Another plus for sample trackers over midi - with midi, you can't actually be sure that what you're getting on your soundcard will sound the same on others.

Sorry it took so long to reply, bit busy...

@oNyx
I don't have a demo at the moment, but checkout Atomaders at www.kraisoft.com. I am sorry I couldn't run your Java proggie, but 350 kB for a GM waveset is not bad. I suspect that would be rather limited or based on FM though, as the smallest GM soundbank I have seen is about 2 Mb.

@Anthony
This is not necessarily true, because all the digital waves are stored in a DLS (Roland). So the 'base sound' should be the same on all platforms. When applying stuff like reverb however, they may sound slightly different from soundcard to soundcard.

It is also possible to add your own DLS to the game with custom sounds (like you were talking about earlier) which makes it even more interesting.

Anthony, if you are interested in how to use this for your games, send me an email, I have some good stuff coming up...
(NZ developers only for now, sorry)

@radiance:
For music try Equinox, Michael Huang, or try and find some off-the-shelf stock MIDI files if you just want cheap filler music. And off course, NZ's http://www.CastlesMusic.co.nz.