Adaptive game soundtrack
What is it ?
Antegods is a game developed by Codeglue. The game is described as a "stonepunk arena battle" set in a world where the Mayans became a space faring civilization.
The game calls for quick, improvised team strategies and tactics and features procedurally generated worlds in which players avatars are Totems, defending and charging their teams Titan warriors.
As such, the soundtrack for this game called for an equally dynamic approach for which Claynote - known for composing adaptive music - had been approached. It is Claynote that involved myself for additional compositional input.
Adaptive music?
The premise of adaptive music is that it follows changes in the environment:
When the game is in a seemingly idle state (e.g. gameplay is in an exploratory phase) the accompanying music is more ambient in nature. When an enemy is sighted in the distance, a steady increase of suspense is achieved by introducing new parts to the existing music, where each additional part adds to the buildup.
When under full attack, the music responds as a full sci-fi battle pomp to maximise the impact of the cognitive onslaught.
Thus, compositions are never linear in nature and can evolve differently on each subsequent playthrough.
This calls for a different style of composition, referred to as "vertical composition" by Rik Nieuwdorp of Claynote. For Antegods, the following layers of intensity exist:
- Ambient (drone based)
- Nature (organic, acoustic)
- Human (introducing melody)
- Battle (engaging, sci-fi electronic)
- God layer (highest intensity, supernatural madness here)
Mayan music
Very little is known about Mayan music (except that it was mostly pentatonic in nature) but the premise of the game allowed for plenty of creativity:
On one hand we allow ourselves the South American cliché of panflutes, blended with primitive percussions (scraping metal objects, pounding drums), while on the other the storyline of the game calls for plenty of synthesis rooted in science fiction, coupled with other worldly processed vocals.
Update January 2019: Sadly, due to the development of the game having been cancelled, work on the Antegods soundtrack has been abandoned indefinitely.
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