SHORT INFO

The Tower Game is a short arcade tower ascending game showcasing some elementary adaptive composing techniques. Have fun playing!

MORE INFO

CREDITS

Idea: Stephan Goebel & Thomas Hoehl

Game designed & programmed by Stephan Goebel. 

Music, Sound & Fmod Programming Thomas Hoehl. 

Notes // Explanation: 

Adaptive Music is not yet where it could be. Many video game producers still just add linear pieces of music to their games that are static and don’t adapt when a change in game states occur. When several pieces of music are used, you often hear hard cuts, bad crossfades, or even no transitions between tracks and bad loops etc. 

To help adaptive music get more attention, I came up with the idea of creating small simple games that use different composing techniques. My first idea was to create a game where the players climb up a tower with obstacles and the closer they proceed to its roof the more intense the music should be. I called Stephan, the programmer on this game, and he came up with this fantastic minimalistic, futuristic „tower climbing“ game allowing me to write some synth tunes for it. Next, Stephan added the sudden switch to the „dark“ level which allowed me to react musically on the change in atmosphere caused by the switch. A perfect example for showing that a very early integration of the composer in the development process of the game and a good collaboration between the composer and the programmers can help creating more immersive games!

Back to adaptive music. With the help of this short demonstration, game producers shall see, that simple adaptive music techniques can help making games more immersive and emotional.

In this example, the adaptive technique used is called „parallel composing“. The composer creates two tracks with the same tempo, the same key and the same length. According to the game state the game engine can smoothly fade back and forth between those two layers. 

In this game there is a „bright“ layer for the normal level music and from time to time when the colors change from bright to dark and the controls are inverted, the music switches to the „dark“ level music layer. In order to achieve a smooth transition between the two layers of music, the „dark music“ was created by filtering and processing the „bright music“. The dark music was directly derived from the bright one…

Consequently, the two pieces of music are different as far as their emotional impact is concerned but at the same time close enough to each other so you don’t get the feeling of switching back and forth between two independent layers. Normally, if you decide for this composing technique you add a layer which stays always on. Like that, the two musical tracks have a common element. But in this case it wasn’t needed because the effect I used on the „bright“ track to create the „dark“ track didn’t affect the drums. Consequently, the drum beat is the unifying factor of the two tracks allowing smooth transitions. 

Another composing technique was used in the music for the game: vertical layering. Both the bright and the dark track consist of 12 different tracks that are faded in and out depending on the level progress. Thus, if you succeed in climbing up, the music gets fuller in order to rise the tension before the relief on the roof of the tower. In this way, I wanted the player get more and more thrilled to reach the end of the level, I wanted to make the level progress more audible and perceptible. 

It was not my initial idea to use 12 tracks for each layer. It was more a trial & error process. I first tried 4 tracks per track. But then, the steps to the next tension level were too obvious and not fluent enough. To achieve a smoother transition from the low tension level to the higher tension level in the music, I had to work with smaller steps but at the same time add more of them. You see, immense testing is an integral part of being a composer for video games and you game producers out there need to hire people that love to play games ;) 

At the end of the game, the game jumps to a different music segment: the more positive success loop. I allowed the engine to jump there at every beat because it felt strange to have the players wait till the end of the recent bar. The delayed reaction of the music attracted too much attention. Again, a lot of testing was involved in order to create a good transition to the success loop. 

Also listen to the sounds of the game. There are only a few but most of them produce sounds that fit to the root note of the music. Like that, the game’s sonic world feels more consistent. 

I recommend you play both game modes: Easy Mode is for understanding the controls and for listening to the music and hearing how it reacts to climbing the tower. Hard Mode is the real game experience. It’s really a mean game, it can be very frustrating to be hit over and over by the enemies and to lose progress. But this mode let’s you feel most: Anger, frustration, hate but eventually joy ;) 

FUNDING

This project was funded in 2020 by the Hessische Kulturstiftung. Thank you so much for supporting us artists in crazy times like these.