Writing Game Music based on a Picture

[Jonnie91 1,149]

Writing Game Music Using Pictures

 

So I thought I'd start bringing back the tutorials inside The Music Room from myself. This one is a direct paste from a tutorial I wrote here, but you can also read it here if you'd prefer. If you have ideas for other tutorials that you'd like to see my write then don't hesitate to let me know!
 
Intro

For me, music has been an important part of my daily life, I grew up with a family that loved music, from a young age my mum used to enjoy cranking up the most epic of tunes from our little CD Player. We then used to dance around the living room singing the lyrics at the top of our lungs. Whether it was Living On a Prayer by Bon Jovi or Chop Suey! by System of a Down we had a great connection with the music and it was always able to bring us up when we were feeling down. Music was something that connected me to all of my friends, in some way or another, whether it be Ska and Funk or Heavy Metal, it meant that we always had something to talk about. As music never keeps still, it moves on and changes and develops, kinda the same as life.

I've been writing music for a few years now, and something that's cropped up quite a lot is how developers seem to put music last on the "to-do" list. There are a great selection of amazing Musicians around the little area of the internet I live on. Something they’ve all managed to capture is that music that is enveloped into the game itself. It’s not thought of as a last resort, but something that is brought into the game early on and is integrated into the emotion of the game. Just as much as music has been and still is a part of my every day life (the music in your projects whether it be film or game) should be integrated into the game itself! With the IGMC contest finally underway I’m here to help you out creating/choosing themes for your own competition entries!” like this



When you first get hold of your game assets, whether they are 2D or 3D it doesn't matter, you should think: "how do they sound", What do I want this art/image/sprite/character/map chip tileset/mesh etc... to represent in game. Take a minute or two to think, if I was to choose a "theme" for this, what would it be?

If your answer to this question is: " I have no idea..." then this tutorial series is just for you. I'm gonna show you step by step how to choose/create a theme for your own games. So let's begin:
 

Re & Apophis Screeny

Here is a screenshot from Re and Apophis by Diaeitsch. Here today we're gonna figure out what we could use as a theme but before we begin a little comment to make here.

Music is subjective. there are tools that can help, but there is no correct answer, there are many many different possibilities that you could use for this screenshot, and each of them will capture a slightly different emotion, anyway onto my analysis but anyway onto my analysis and creation of the track

1. Setting the Scene

So first things first, when you look at the cutscene/map in your game that you're looking for music for you think about the emotion you're looking to capture. If you're looking at a beautiful forest such as the maps from this beautiful tileset by Celianna you might want something that portrays a light and magical feeling such as The Gentle Forest or if you're a fan of dark horror scenes using these horrific (but equally as beautiful) tile-sets from Frontier Works you might go for something that is a little more dark such as Obsession.

Going back to the screenshot above, the style of the tiles and the sprites bring you to believe that it's an Egyptian game (which is then supported by the title and the fact the dev himself states it's an Egyptian game on his website.

Once we've figured out where the game is set, we need to work out what is actually going on in your scene

From what we gather there is a group of what appears to be soldiers ready to march at the command of the guy at the top.

Now the guy at the top, he looks and speaks as if he's a character of power.

Power.

That's the first emotion and feel we've got...and nothing says power more than Brass instruments such as Trumpets, Trombones etc...

So let's get this track started with some brass 
 
Brass Demo
 
Something I also noticed whilst looking at the screenshot, was the look of the guards/soliders at the bottom, they were almost enthralled by him, they were all incredibly attentive to what he is saying. They seemed almost hypnotized by the Leaders comments, they don't want to look away they believe he should rule the world and take over everything! This idea of crowds of people responding almost hypnotically made me want to almost replicate the enthralling nature of a Leader/Dictators speech.

Through the repetitive nature of the brass, it keeps a set rhythm which sticks in your head in hours to come later you will all be in my control!

Now let's mirror this with some hypnotic rhythms...
 
Brass and Drums Demo

Lovely, adds a sense of urgency, and somewhat hypnotic rhythms.

2. Developing the Idea

The thing about making music for games is that you'll hear the same thing quite often over and over again, in different cutscenes, so you've gotta ensure you can keep the attention. Sometimes you'll want something to be highly repetitive, but there's a point where things just get a little bit too annoying to hear the same music over and over again.

What we've got so far is brilliant, but it's less than 30 seconds long, which will mean that, that 24 seconds will just loop and loop and loop and never stop, it's great at first, but we don't want to loose that hypnotic effect that the repetition brings forth. So we need to take the idea and develop it further.

The process of developing an idea can be a little bit of a minefield, and can be pretty tricky, especially if you over think it. from the end of this 25 second loop we could go pretty much anywhere...we could take it to a place where the music gets faster and all you can hear is the thundering of drums. We could add a new tune aka "motif" so that the player isn't sick of hearing the same notes over and over, we could even create a happy upbeat second section to show how a soldier is fighting back against the Leader and wants to do good rather than take over the world....

The possibilities are endless, anything you can think of, you can do it.

So where do you start?

Well, the golden rule of creating music for a scene, go back to the source material if you are unsure, go back to your image, and see what that scene tells you to do....so let's do that..

 

 

Thankfully in this screenshot Diaeitsch has written a little bit of the Dialogue, which can give us even more of an insight into this scene.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but he doesn't exactly seem like someone who you'd take home to see you family and friends, especially with all the enslaving of enemies, and the power hungry need to rule the entire continent (at least it's not the entire world...)

So let's play on that a little more...we've got the hypnotic part, now lets develop the brass line to spike a little bit of fear...
 
Brass and Drums Section 2 Demo

Here we've added a slow and desolate overlay to the repetitive and also broken up the drums slightly to make it feel a little more urgent...and dangerous.

So this is great, but I think that we could add a little bit more, the second section is good but I really want to rap up the feeling of fear, and that something big is about to happen, this is where a lovely aggressive string section can come in, and really ramp up the pressure:
 
Strings Ahoy!

Perfect! This little string section adds tension by slowly adding alternating octaves adding more urgency and more concern to the piece, and adding that to the Drums and the Brass we have the following:

 

Putting it All Together Example

 

Almost perfect... however everything feels just a little bit dull, and just...missing something a little "sharp" just to really hit home how dangerous this guy is...so let's add some metal! (cymbals/gongs) just to finish it off!

 

 

 

So that's the end of this little tutorial, I'd really appreciate it if you let me know what you thought, whether you found this tutorial useful and etc etc. Also if you want to know anything else about composing music, I'm happy to write another one!