Did you know that the music in Who’s Your Daddy is put together in-game while you're playing? My name is Mathias, and I’m the Sound guy @ Evil Tortilla Games, and today I will talk about how we use dynamic music to create an immersive game-experience.
So what is Dynamic Music?
Basically, dynamic music is ever changing music that reacts to the players in-game actions. Using “stingers” - a fancy word for musical effects - the in-game music is “Mickey Mousing” the players actions, reflecting what’s going on in-game. All of this without actually changing the main core of the song that’s already playing.
An example of dynamic music is when the baby enters the sick-state and the music gets more ominous and slow-ish, or when the baby gets cold and chimes start emerging in the music. Some actions create a more drastic change in the music, like when the player is set on fire or the baby enters a sugar rush.
But why?
Obviously it would be possible to make more linear music for Who’s Your Daddy, but seeing that Who’s Your Daddy is all about having fun and interacting with different objects in a completely wack physics based environment, I felt like the music had to reflect that. Being an educated composer I was really looking for a challenge and a way to test my skills, and making dynamic music, is definitely not a walk in the park.
The challenge with Dynamic Music
One of the bigger challenges with dynamic music in Who’s Your Daddy, is dealing with multiple player actions happening at the same time. What should happen to the music if the player is both sick, in a sugar rush and drowning? To accommodate this issue, the different states are weighted - in this case, the sugar rush music would prevail.
Another issue is game performance. When playing the music, the game pulls in the core song and adds a bunch of layers to accommodate the current player state/actions. As a consequence, if the game is running slowly or on a slow PC, there's a risk of the music getting slightly out of sync with itself. We’ve overcome this problem by adding a slight delay, allowing the game to align the different layers of the song when a player action happens.
The performance issue is something we’re monitoring carefully, as this could become an issue when Who’s Your Daddy is ported to mobile where the CPU power is somewhat lower.
The future of Dynamic Music
Dynamic music definitely has a lot more to show, than what’s currently in-game. As more interactable content is added to the game, more variations and layers for the already existing music will be needed. Furthermore, the plan is to make 3 distinct tracks for each character, which will require even more layers and variations!
Mathias,
Sound guy @ Evil Tortilla Games