The player plays music in Anthymn.. click to enlarge

Some of the music in Anthymnis part of the core game­play. Jessie’s post talks about the cre­ation of the game’s music, but there was an impor­tant process to con­vert that music into gameplay.

In the game we’ve pro­to­typed, the boss plays a song first, while the player can run or use spells to defend, attack or heal. The player then per­forms the first part of his com­po­si­tion while the boss can run or use spells to defend and attack. The bat­tle has the fol­low­ing struc­ture: Boss -→ Player → Boss → Player → Boss. After the last boss sec­tion, the bat­tle is over, but the player can fin­ish her off before that last sec­tion depend­ing on his performance.

Both the boss and the player need stinger sounds for spells. In Pro­Tools, we have placed mark­ers into places we believed would deliver good playa­bil­ity using notes, rep­e­ti­tion and exist­ing mechanics.

An exam­ple of mark­ers placed in the file for the stinger sounds. Those mark­ers are then played by the player. click to enlarge

Each marker was then named and assigned to its spe­cific note fol­low­ing MIDI guidelines.

A spreadsheet list printed with time indicators and sound effects listed. click to enlarge

A spread­sheet from the mark­ers was exported with the tim­ing for every note, name, num­ber, note type, other game-specific labels. This doc­u­ment can be used by any per­son on the team to refer to the playable music design, but it is cru­cial to our pro­gram­mers when imple­ment­ing the timing.

Even­tu­ally, an XML doc­u­ment was cre­ated where any per­son on the team could input this tim­ing to alter the game’s bal­ance and its spe­cific notes and release tim­ing could be directly embed­ded in the game code to take a load off of our programmers.

Play-testing is still being donee to bet­ter cal­i­brate the num­ber of key­strokes and musi­cal playa­bil­ity of the game so that it’s an immer­sive play expe­ri­ence and flows the way we intend.

Anthymn has its own blog, where you can check out more details about our process including paper prototyping, creating the pipeline for the company and dealing with clients. To check out the full blog, please click here.