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Adventure Music
Written by Mark Lovegrove
There are very few tutorials on the net for making music or a soundtrack to a point and click adventure game, and the one's I read never tell you how to do it. Therefore, I'm going to give you as clear pointers as I can, so you can walk away from this tutorial and actually compose something. Of course, they're just pointers - enabling you to define your own styles etc, but I thought I'd go through some of the key elements to making in-game music.
Before I begin, I must stress that I'm not going to teach you how to make music. That's up to you to learn. Learning the piano is one of the best ways to understand how music works and how to read and compose music. You're sure to find someone who teaches in the Yellow Pages or similar. I strongly recommend it if you've never composed music before in your life. Otherwise, you could take my approach which is not having enough time for lessons, and learning yourself. However, the first method is guaranteed to help you make great music, the latter is not.
We're going to be looking at the following;
1. Themes
The Main Theme
Repeating the Main Theme
Character Themes
Location Themes
Memorable Moment Themes
2. Background Music
Rooms vs Locations
Composing To Locations
3. Sounds Within Music
4. Cut-Scenes
Intros & Outros
Medleys
5. The Developer & Musician Should Be Friends
Common Practice
The Developers Composition
Introduction
Back in the early days of point and click adventures, games like The Secret Of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade placed pieces of music sparsely about the game. One in every five locations or so may have a tune, but everywhere else was silence. Day Of The Tentacle took a completely different method, with music almost everywhere in the game. And another, Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis mixed a Williams-style soundtrack with ambient sounds incorporated into the music files (which were MIDI). Deciding which style you'll go for is up to you, the developer - but there are certain ground rules you, your musician or you AS a musician should remember;
- Never use a different tune for every different room. Not only does it frustrate and annoy the player, but it also means the composer has to create lots and lots of tunes. The best option is to create tunes for "locations" (see "Rooms vs Tunes" in section 2).
- Try not to create a complex, heavy tune for locations where the player is in control. Keep the number of instruments fairly minimal or quiet.
- Try to keep the tune changing. There is nothing worse than a tune that repeats itself over and over (I made this mistake when making the soundtrack to The Adventures of Fatman).
- Always try and link the music to what is going on. If you're in a haunted house, with a headless ghoul in front of you, the last thing the player wants to hear is S Joplin's "The Entertainer".
With those simple ground rules in place, you've got the skeleton of what could be a great soundtrack when fleshed out. But don't worry, making music for adventure games isn't quite that gory ;)
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