Last week I spent looking at Wwise 201, which deals with music composition within video games and making a score adapt to players gameplay. I’ve now come to regret not going through Wwise 201 sooner, as I’ve now discovered another layer of love for the Wwise middleware program because of its musical capabilities. I also regret not doing this sooner as I now want to create a huge adaptive game soundtrack.
Wwise essentially makes it possible to create music that is different every time but also holds some sort of structure. If you have music that is 8 bars long, and you create several other pieces which fit, you can have Wwise play each musical “chapter” if you will, in a random order, making a new song every time. This ‘chapter’ can be further broken down into an instrument by instrument basis. If you export each instrument separate from your music DAW you can create playlists with each instrument in. This allows each instrument to have different takes, variations on melody or arpeggios, building rhythm sections. This can then all by randomised by Wwise! meaning your Chorus, Bridge etc. can sound different every time. But, if you want to keep a building rhythm, for example, Wwise can also keep that particular instrumental structure intact, allowing the rhythm to build whilst other instruments play random takes.
I found myself listening to the music provided for the lesson on repeat for ages because it kept changing and the amount of variation kept me from getting bored.
Before goin through wwise 201 I had composed battle and exploration music, which consisted of an 8bar loop which I made a variation of, 8 tracks in total. Now I want to completely rethink this, If I can somehow find the time I want to create some sort of dynamic score, that being said, it’s a HUGE endeavour. If I can’t manage to make it a part of this FMP I will certainly develop one straight after, I’ve actually been putting together an idea for a game myself, however that’s a story for another time.
