ABSTRACT
Music adds an entire dimension of immersion – just hearing the score to Tetris, Mario, or The Last of Us can put the player back in the game world.
However, game music has different requirements to film score. A player could breeze through a level in minutes, or get stuck in the same area for hours. A simple looping score would quickly become obtrusive and annoying – as anyone who’s ever worked in retail over Christmas could tell you!
A triple-A title can easily have 30 to 40 hours of game play – and that won’t even scratch the surface of an MMO such as World of Warcraft. It’s unreasonable to expect 40+ hours of original music to be composed and arranged for a game.
But as we said earlier – repetition breaks immersion. So how do we solve this? Well, one approach is to use a controlled degree of randomization.
Over the next couple of chapters, we’ll be setting up our FMOD music Event. In this chapter, we will:
