Anthymn – Converting music into Gameplay by Edward Bauman

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.