Advice on how to create music for a game and how break it down.

Hi..

I could use some friendly advice, I have a shoot em up game, my first and I'm going to use my own music for it, so I thought one option could be to make things more interesting is to break up my tunes into 4x4 bars and use my games power-up feature to implement the next bar of my track, you dig? - you start my game with the basic rhythm & some bass etc then you get a power up and then the music changes accordingly, I plan on having a reasonably sized music loop playing, could make it smaller for export-sizes etc but the tune wouldn't be off-beat by a random power-up.. it would be waiting for the next bar before a change if you get a power-up...

So what you think? what's the best option for sound files? I'm gonna be on Android I think, but either way I'm looking forward to creating the music with this in mind, now are there any decent script ideas I could look at for a nice timed-loop for smaller audio files, I'm sure I could sort something out, but any advice now would be a boon, I'm planning ahead you see and I'll be thinking about music for my game at the very last call I think... anyway cheers

 

This is a good question, and I've wondered the same thing. I guess you might call it semi-procedural music, but not really full blown procedural music because I think that means that basically every note/instrument track might be varied depending on whatever game factors.

Anyway yeah something that could handle timing up transitions on unique chunks of a beat would be interesting.

I wonder if there might be a built in way to check audio tracks current overall progress (like with possible slow latency considered) and with that info you could just have a state machine switch up to the new active audio state at the end of the current playing loop... I guess! I hope somebody can answer who has tried this.

 

It already exists. It's the Psai Engine:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/29347

 

Looks like that is about what were after, but I'm wondering, are you required to purchase the music from them? Or buy their software to edit your own tracks? I hope you can use your own audio tools to edit short tracks, then import those into psai. But, without downloading and trying I can't tell.

 

I'm sure you can use whatever audio you like. It just helps you assemble the pieces.

Our plugin Master Audio has a layered soundtrack feature set called Synkro that does something similar. But it also has lots of features for sound effects as well such as weighted random variations, voice limiting, custom fades, and tons more.

However...you said you're probably target Android. Generally you don't want to use layered audio on mobile platforms. There isn't really a good way to do that based on your audio options. Explanations below.

1) Stream multiple clips or multiple mp3s to layer the music - multiple streams takes up too much CPU. Multiple mp3's takes up too much bandwidth to decode during runtime.
2) Use uncompressed audio for multiple layered audio clips - makes the total size of your game's download too large.