endless-sky
Game Music
If this game had music, what would you like it to be? I am a musician, and may be able to write something.
Thank you for that information. One problem is that I don't know what kinds of music most players would like. I'm thinking something synthy and a bit 80s, but, again, I don't know what would be most appreciated by players.
The music should suit the game. If it does, then the kind of people that like the game would likely like the music. Maybe just try some things and see how well it fits?
Look at music from similar settings across genres. Synth- orchestral is a pretty common mood setting theme. Take some trans Siberian and smash it together with some daft punk discovery-esque sounds and you might start finding something that gives you some real inspiration.
For reference, this is the sort of thing i listen to while playing ES. Though the lyrics can get in the way of the mood. This is like a tevh heavy metal with orchestral elements.
https://youtu.be/uozt4N72a5U?list=PLDp_PtuyOwCYS8mEf7sImnsoSiALQB9R9
i was working on this for a while, but like MZ says, there's a high bar - at some point i realized it couldn't live up to, say, the FTL soundtrack or something similar.
since we're doing song suggestions here, lemme recommend widek's album "journey to the stars".
I imagine music found on a channel like Electronic Gems could work well; the music there generally has a more retro sound to it, something that I feel fits with the game when I'm playing. I'd imagine though that music tailored for the game would be fairly minimalistic, nothing that's designed to pop out at the player when they're trying to focus on the game but just enough that it's something they'll enjoy listening to while just floating through space or hyperspacing between systems without being in the middle of combat.
I think there's also been talk about music changing depending on the situation, such as different music when you're in combat, possibly even changing depending on the faction you're fighting at the moment. Combat music could spare to have a little more pop to it, as the player will be focusing on the combat more than the music anyways.
Different music for different regions of space would be interesting too. Something like this just feels so Paradise Worlds to me, but something like this feels like it would fit more for the Rim, or this for the Core. (I'm not really sure how to explain each of those feelings, though.) Different races could even use different genres of music. Human space could take heavily from synth genres like I've been linking, but Korath space could have more rock stuff like @kikotheexile linked (what he specifically linked sounding a lot like it could be Korath combat music), and Wanderer space could have wind instrument and/or string instrument music, something like this.
@Amazinite I was thinking the same about different music for different parts, or even lack of it. The systems where the Drak have destroyed their star feels like something where there would be either no BGM or an ambient sound that would represent what the captain felt on that Drak system: "the words are accompanied by an emotion that you cannot put a name to" and "the words "prevent extinction" echo loud in your mind as if underlined by a nameless emotion".
I mostly listen to acoustic / folk music while playing, because Firefly has convinced me that outer space is better with banjos.
To chime in with the other perspective:
When I play games, I don't listen to music of my own- ever. I very much appreciate background music in games as a part of the creator's overall vision and intent. Game music helps to set the scene for the player, adjust their mood, and help them feel at ease- or not, with the game world, as the designer chooses.
When playing Endless Sky, I don't listen to music, because that would take me too much 'out' of the game.
TLDR: The bar should not be 'this music has to be so good that it makes players not want to listen to their own music'. The bar for music should just be 'does this fit the feel and design of the game, and is it unobtrusive enough that it is not annoying.' (There's a reason why most game music does not have lyrics.)
I see some great ideas here. I especially like the different genres for different races, even though I am not in a position to record a hard rock song, for instance.
Now, I did some thinking, and I came to the conclusion that something very atmospheric and subtle would be the best fit. Even with pirates, the game has a very laid-back feel to it, and this type of music would help shape the mood of it. It could be made uneasy/tense with a few harmonic tricks, maybe for use in battle, but still able to keep its same atmospheric qualities.
That type of music is also generally hard to judge. I agree with @solardawning wholeheartedly. Again, I honestly don't feel like music of an atmospheric nature would be easy to judge as "good" or "bad" or "amazing", for instance, mainly because of its very subtle nature. It would serve its purpose, and well, but I don't think it quite needs to reach the sky-high standards that I have seen being circulated.
I also feel like anything overly retro would clash a bit with the futuristic feel from ES.
@endless-sky I do the same thing! Brown Bird is pretty great Firefly-style acoustic folk music for playing Endless Sky to, if I can make a recommendation.
it would be really cool if there was a music engine so I can add the EV intro songs to play whenever I launch ES.
Other than that, if there was a dynamic system which picks songs from categories like battle music almost dead intense music menu music launch music music in syndicate space music in republic space music in hai space custom etc.. it would add alot of character to each region and faction. and new mp3-player button that plays songs from the custom folder the players can add music to. or just turn music off and play as is.
I personally dont like to play my own music as background and prefer the fitting soundtracks in most games.
would need the engine for dynamic music first and decide on categories. people can start contributing songs then.
Mission authors could be able to specify custom categories (or outright custom tracks) for their missions.
Wild idea: Danforth could say "Good Luck" (in voice) as you're lining up to jump into the final battle. (That message could also be displayed in the messages ticker at the bottom of the playfield at the same time)
For me, the music for ES is might be :
- Faction Music
- Mission Music
- Battle Music
- Victory after main mission music.
- Normal Roaming music.
- Death music.
Thats a music which should be added on ES.
Game music helps to set the scene for the player, adjust their mood, and help them feel at ease- or not, with the game world, as the designer chooses.
This. I can still whistle the intro music to every Escape Velocity game, and feel my 10-yr-old self's excitement at the impending space exploration/explosions.
For the uninitiated, here's the intro music for: Original EV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnBP7GwPw-U Override: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFIvLPF__L4 Nova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG-i6MSnuFQ
I generally don't like music in-game because it's a distraction from game-play, but that's because my normal gaming fare is intensive combat-fests like DotA where audio effects can be just as important to snap decisions as visual cues. ES is a lot more chill, and any time not spent in combat I'd happily have supplemented by mood music.
I say just use the Stargate theme music for the intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFQlVT2UBo :D
Just a heads-up: The EV Nova intro music sounds like Gustav Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War, from The Planets, written in 1914. It's often used in various soundtracks. Gustav Holst lived from 1874 till 1934, therefore his music is in the public domain.
Having dynamic music would be a really nice addition. I, too, still remember the trilogy intro tunes. (although to be honest, I'm thrilled that ES loads so much faster than any of the trilogy, so it doesn't really need an intro piece to keep my attention.)
Just to mix genres, if there was any way you could compose something that was reminiscent of the Mass Effect "New Worlds" song that played while one was looking at the galaxy map as music that triggered when looking at the map, that'd be awesome. Call it a tribute or an easter egg to another great space faring series.
Mass Effect 1 had IMHO near-perfect space opera genre music. That music struck just the right tone and feel for a game like it, or Endless Sky.
Since it's open world the game can have a few different "songs" it can play in between times of quite. Different conditions, like locations can have their own tracks that the game mixes together as they change. For example, an exotic Si-Fi instrument can fade in once the player enters Quarg space. That being said it is possible we may want events to interrupt the "song". That being said combat is going to be tricky.As @BearbaBear said there is a difference between when a hostile ships targets the player and when the player is actually going to be mentally engaged in combat. The current combat alarm eventually becomes the "Welcome to this system!" alarm. My idea is we came the alarm for utilitarian purposes but the game still waits to see if the player will stay in combat then gradually change the music or wait until a transition point in the music. Nonetheless someone has to get started on the engine.
Unrelated unpopular opinion: Retro music is cliché.
Is anyone familiar with the game SUPERHOT? If you aren't (or you are and you just didn't notice this), it contains a soundtrack that most people don't seem to ever realize is there. It definitely is there, though, and if it wasn't, people would notice. It simply exists to fill the space. Endless Sky has nothing, and that's why (to me, at least) its audio always sounds so empty. And yes, space is supposed to sound empty, but I think adding a bit of background ambiance would make things sound so much more natural. https://soundcloud.com/the-fummies/sets/superhot-soundtrack
I'm not even thinking about music anymore. Now I'm just thinking about how to make background noise that sounds like it could be in space. If sky-high standards are expected then it's gonna take a while to make a worthy soundtrack, and I wouldn't want ES to sound so empty for so long. Background noise would be pretty simple to implement, since it wouldn't require accounting for combat situations or anything. Until a soundtrack is completed, this would be best for the game.
A technical consideration: Currently the whole game is loaded to memory at launch and the only other times the it loads from disk is changing save files. Is loading assets (such as music) asynchronously out of the question? And if we can do that, what is the minimum hard drive read speed we can expect?
One thing we need to make a sound track is know how big the music files be.
i guess music would be stored as mp3, like the ambient sounds. that's a few MB for a 3 minute-track (can vary greatly depending on quality), so with over 50MB of images we probably don't need to worry about that.
Could even just compress it an ungodly amount and call it an "artistic decision"
On my system Endless Sky uses 358Mb initially, then dropped to 324Mb when I was wandering around hunting Korath with 30+ Shield Beetles.
Given that the standard build for computers these days have a bare minimum of 4Gb, with 6 or 8 GB being quite common, I don't think having an extra 50Mb of data loaded at startup is going to cause any hardship for anyone. We shouldn't bloat the game just for the sake of doing so, but I think 50Mb of extra memory usage in order to have 45-60min of music would be quite reasonable. (For comparison, my 12 year old laptop that is so old it can't run ES has 4 Gb of RAM in it. And laptop standard specs have improved at least a little since then...)
The only caveat I can think of is having it set up so that if the user unchecks the music option (or sets the volume to 0), then the music files aren't loaded. This would give users running on edge cases where the difference between 350Mb and 400Mb of RAM usage is actually critical the ability to save that space.
On the topic of background noise, would it be possible to have different versions tied to aspects of the ship? It'd probably be best to just make one good one for now, but as a potential goal down the road, it'd make sense for different ships to, well, sound different.
Working at it the other way, one could have background noise type sounds for power generation outfits, engines, and one per manufacturer (Tarazed, Syndicate, Korath, etc). These three elements would then combine to make the background noise, and would result in everyone's ships having slightly different acoustic signatures.
The game is already designed to stream MP3s from disk rather than loading all the music files into memory. Given the bitrate of an MP3 and the speed of a hard drive, it's unlikely to stall unless there's an issue with the disk.
I think at this point we've established that
a) Situation based music is really damn hard. b) none of us is likely to create a universally accepted soundtrack, in part because c) People prefer different kinds of music while playing ES.
So what about this: Have a an outfit that basically functions as radio. The player can choose between channels, and each channel randomly plays several selected songs of similar style (one banjo channel, one for ambiance, etc.).
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Such a system would be very customizable. Adding a new channel is as simple as creating a small plug-in with a few lines of text and some music files. (Would work best with #707 for ease of use)
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It solves c) very elegantly, by just giving the choice to the player.
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It even makes some sense within the game itself. We already know there are hyperspace beacons, so there might as well be radio stations using the same technology.
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However, it'd also throw the idea of situation-based music out of the window.
Additionally we could have some cool effects, like have the nano bot swarm transmit a creepy-crawly loop that is layered over the music.
That's actually a great idea. Things like radio hijackers would be cool for pirates to have on their ships. In regards to the music, would it be only user-set music, or would the game ship with original music in different styles?
We'd definitely need some "stock" channels. We can't force players to download plug-ins just to use a functionality that is part of the game. The limiting factor would likely be filesize - think 5-10 tracks per channels, that's already 40-80MB just for 3 channels (assuming each track is being used in one channel only).