Hey y’all, Sebastian here!

We just added some new music into the game that I composed. The old music had no drums or anything so it was quite important for a game like RPS to get something else in there. Something with a steady beat that’s hard to miss.

Sadly I’m having trouble to link you readers to any excerpts of this music but I’ll show you in pictures as well as I can and will explain as good as I can. First off: the Battle Music.

Life’s a battle

For the battle music to work we needed a steady beat, a kinda low tempo (at least for the first few levels) and still have enough going on so that it doesn’t sound boring.

In the picture above you can see the soundwave of our battle track. The steadiness of the beat is pretty obvious even in picture form. I chose to make this track with only percussion and a few sound effects to make the beat as clear as it possibly could. This would, hopefully, help the player to faster get a hang of when to press the attack buttons and when not to.

The Final Countdown

I also had this plan to have a countdown when you get close to an enemy that prepares the player for the upcoming combat. Like an audience cheering for their favorite sports team chanting down “RHYTHM, PAPER, SCISSORS” before the showdown is about to start. I knew that this would bring a few problems along. Would the player feel bored after a while, having to wait for the same chant over and over before every new battle?

This would give the player a chance to react to the battle. The bridge was composed to be short, fitting tobe played at the start of any beat and still having this excited audience sing-a-long feel to it. In Wwise I set the track as a transition piece when any Verse track (non-combat gameplay) was going to change over to a Battle track.

After some testing I found a problem in this, though. We never had the time to code a delay for enemies before they start attacking you once you’re in range for battle. Because of this, enemies could attack you before the transition segment had even started playing - making a somewhat unfair start of the battle. On top of that, it kinda ruins the point of the transition track.

However, we kept it in game since it was part of our vision to have it. Maybe we’ll be able to fix it in the future?

Mix it up!

To add in some variation for the player I composed 4 alternative non battle music tracks. Each of them are randomly selected to be played once the current one isn’t playing anymore. Since out game is infinite it’s important that the player doesn’t get bored of the music t hat keeps playing. Making it unpredictable is a good way to start if you ask me. These tracks, while being somewhat similar, they are also different enough to surprise the listener. Different but familiar.

Wwise let’s you easily randomize a selection of segments if you just put them into the same playlist and checks in randomize. Very handy!

Just set the playlist as a “Random Continous”, add weight to the tracks you want to be played more often than others and subtract weight from those you want to be played more rarely. Set Loop Count to infinite on the playlist.

All in all I feel like I’ve learned a lot in Wwise and how it connects with Unity. And once you get over that first, big hurdle of implementing it properly so that you get access to all the cool things it can do I highly recommend it.

That’s the last you’ll hear from me here since the course is pretty much over. Thanks for reading! :)