One of the most interesting parts to implement on the LUNA game project was defenitly the music. The whole game is ment to be in a Patagonian, ancestral world with magic and dangerous enemies in your path to become a master, so the whole musicalization needed to have something to add that energy and variation whenever the player is entering the trial, fighting and finishing a level. All those concepts where created thanks to the music system for the game and the creation of an original score by Ramis Lao.
The game had three main components for the music. The first and the third one, the main menu music and the finish music, where regular tracks being played by an FMOD event whenever you entered the Main Menu and when you finished all the trials and completed the game.
The complex part of the music was during the gameplay stage of the game. In order to create and help the team's composer to create music that was able to fit the expectations of the developers, I created a prototype with temp music, as a proposal on how the music could be a bigger part of the progress of a trial and not just a background music playing to fill the space.
The very first step was to separate the trial selection scene. This is the very first place where you spawn and eventually you will return to the same place every time you finish a trial. With that in mind, the trial selection was perfect as a reset point for the music on each one of the levels.
The trials had more changes to the music. Each trial had its own gameplay mechanic but the four of them shared some basic rules: Defeat enemies, destroy all the ice cores. They also had a small cinematic introduction for each one of them that allows you to see the whole map. Considering all those rules for each level, the first prototype looked like this.
The concept for this system work as followed. Each trial will have a series of states depending on what was happening during the level.
State 0: Start of the level. A small music track will play during the cinematic and until the next state was triggered.
State 1: The trial starts. Here, the level will start to spawn the enemies for the trial and it will play a calm combat music until some action happens. With the help of Command Instruments inside of FMOD, there are two types of music playing on this state.
Calm fighting music during the whole wave process of the level and it will change if there is any damage dealt to the player or if the player damages any enemy, which means, if there is a combat happening.
If there is combat being triggered, the global parameter "Combat" will turn true and the music will change to a more aggresive style and it will remain that way until the state changes or if there hasn't been any damage dealt in the last five seconds, in which case, it will return the combat parameter to false and the music will go back to a calm fighting style.
State 2: Core vulnerables. After you defeated the wave of enemies and the cores are vulnerable for you to attack them, a music change will happen until the cores go back to their invulnerable state, if there is more than one core, the trial state returns to the state one.
State 3: Final core. Whenever you are in the final core being vulnerable, the music will start to sound like an energetic and quick theme to tell the player that this is the final moment of the trial. This state will remain looping until the last core is destroyed and the "Win" global parameter is set to true, which will make a transition to the music and finish with a victorious beat.
Here is a video with some gameplay sample of the system!
Even though the system was functional at first, the complexity of the levels was increasing as you progress the game. This created some issues in how to implement the system in the next trials where there was more things happening and specially on the final trial, where you can have both vulnerable and invulnerable cores at the same time.
With that in mind and as a requirement from the developers, they asked for a more simple system that still kept the start, fight and finish parts, but without so many changes in between. That resulted in a more simple but still dynamic system that worked for each one of the trials during the whole game,
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