Designing the basic beat for Dragon’s Song

By: Anders Hagström / February 11, 2015 /

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The first 3 weeks of the game development group assignment is over and my Team 16 has started to get into the groove with a working engine and the most essential art and FX assets in place for our pre Alpha milestone this Thursday.

This has been my first opportunity to take the helm of the Sound & FX department in earnest and actually produce some sounds. The first semester was highly theoretical and conceptual which left little room for me to flex my artistical skills.

So today we’re taking a look at some sound samples created for our game Dragon’s Song (Working title), to bring you up to speed I’ll first just shortly describe the main mechanics of our game which are intrinsically linked to the sound and FX.

Dragon’s Song is a musical rhythm game where the player controls the Dragon Riff who fights Crystal monsters by shooting sound effects at them. The player needs to keep the Dragon flying by hitting the spacebar to the beat, different rhythms will move Riff up and down the screen in order to line up shots and avoid attacks. Changing the altitude affects the musical score which makes the player feel as if she’s contributing to the music.
The enemies pulsate to the rhythm of the music and the player needs to hit them on the beat in order to score points. Hitting the enemies at the correct moment will produce a sound that fits to the beat, making the player able to add to the music. The player plays the game, but also plays the song.
Hitting enemies successfully makes a progress bar fill up and at increasing intervals this will add elements to the music making the soundtrack more and more intense. Every intensity level will add a score multiplier so to get the best score the player needs to get the multiplier up fast and keep it there.

So to make this happen I need to produce layers of the same one song to be added to the soundtrack depending on player performance, to begin with I started with the drum section which works as the game’s ‘layer zero’ that always plays. The second layer is bass, the third is an arpeggio, the fourth is a lead melody and the last one is a so called raiser that creates a sense of perpetual elevation of the music.

Naturally a game centered around keeping a steady rhythm and grooving to the beat while disposing of nasty crystal critters has to be jamming some seriously bouncing tunes. To make the the game easy to pick up and play I decided to go with a House/Trance style theme with a clear 4/4 beat. For those not in the know this means that the bassdrum plays on every count of the beat the way most popular music does today. The bassdrum goes 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 etc.

This was challenging as I could have easily made something lavish and multi-layered. However, this is a game that’s supposed to be easy and friendly so I had to curb my artistic pretentions and deliver an uplifting beat without too many embellishments.

The final mood board for the game included a picture of a large dance music festival. In fact, the original mood board proposals contained several more of these as one of our goals with the level design was to try and mesh fantasy landscapes with something inspired by the lights and mood of a large festival gig.

Trying to mix dragons with house music would become really challenging when I started adding instruments on top of the beat, but for this artifact I feel it went well. I had to force myself not to make a more complex rhythm but it was always clear what the basic beat had to be in order for the gameplay to work.

The work has been done in Steinberg Cubase 8 which is an industry standard for musicians much in the same way that Photoshop is for graphical artists. I have used a technique called sidechaining to make the percussion ‘bounce’ slightly with every beat of the bassdrum. I will further utilize this technique as I add layers to the music in order to create a sense of pressure, as if the music’s really exploding with energy.

More on this next time when I’ll be talking about the bassline, the floorfiller gauge and how they work together to make our game one big party.

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Postat i:Introduction to Game Development Tagged: 5SD033, GAME