Audio Moves: Dynamic Music in Canvas City
Skating games tend to have very memorable soundtracks, and while Canvas City is mechanically a tactics game, we also want the music to live up to its skating-inspired setting. That has made music a major consideration for us, but the structure and pacing of a tactics game presents some interesting challenges for how that soundtrack works.
A player might spend twenty minutes in a battle, or twice that depending on how much time they spend experimenting with team loadouts, planning routes, testing different strategies and more. Battles also have distinct phases that benefit from different musical considerations. During the Planning phase, when players are working out the best moves to make, the music shouldn’t be intrusive or distracting. While watching turns play out, you want the soundtrack to help create a more cinematic experience.
Not knowing how long a battle will last, or how long a player will spend in each phase, makes it difficult to compose music in a linear progression from beginning to end. Instead we’ve been exploring ways for the soundtrack to respond to the battle itself, changing as play moves between different states and dynamically shifting as players progress towards victory.
Varied Musical Styles
In Canvas City, the characters and their crews drive the musical style, which is eclectic in the best way, allowing for multiple musical genres to influence the soundtrack over the course of the game. We have:
Player Crew – The Fire Starters: The player crew, whose musical influence is a blend of hip-hop, funk, rock, driving guitar and electronica.
Rival Crew #1 – The Choir: A dark synth-pop musical mashup, with plenty of harmonic vocal layers coming into focus.
Rival Crew #2: A K-pop/J-pop inspired crew with infectious beats and memorable, ear-catching melodies.
Rival Crew #3: Rave/Techno music, with a touch of raw, underground EDM vibes.
Rival Crew #4 – ACU: – Dark, heavy-hitting dubstep-style music with intense synth bass elements.
Dynamic Battle Music
In Canvas City, like with most tactics games, the player can spend upwards of 30 minutes on a single map (depending on playstyle), so we wanted to explore ways to keep the background music as varied as possible to keep things interesting for the player.
The potential options we identified for battle music were:
- The classic looping BGM track
- A playlist of tracks that play one after another
- Basic layering depending on what phase of action the player is in (planning/action)
- Fully dynamic music that changes based on various gameplay factors
- Some mix of, or all of the above!
For the Canvas City demo, we had the aim of creating a battle music track that morphed from the “enemy crew music” to the “player crew music” over the course of the battle, as your player crew made progress towards winning.
We have implemented this in the Choir battles including levels in the demo, so you can hear the battle music shifting from majority Choir Crew-influenced dark synth-pop and harmonic vocal layers towards the Fire Starters style music style.
- Balanced Choir and Fire Starters music
- Choir-leaning music
- Fire Starters-leaning music
We have done a lot of experimenting a lot with how and /when those music shifts should happen, as there are many factors to consider when deciding how much the player is (or isn’t) winning the battle. In Canvas City, it makes the most sense to have the amount of enemy characters left in battle be the main determining factor for how the player is progressing towards victory. As the player defeats a certain % of enemy characters, we start to switch out layers of enemy crew music and gradually switch them out and replace them with layers of Fire Starters crew music.
The Challenges
As you can probably imagine, battle music that switches between two completely different genres while also supporting several having in-between states of partly/halfway in between both of those genres presents an interesting compositional challenge. Different genres don’t always work well together, and they may have vastly different tempo in some cases from the get go. We also need to find chord progressions that work well for both styles of music, so as the crossover states feel cohesive will need to be shared musically too.
There are multiple options to explore even within the layering system we have built/worked with so far, including options with less musical crossover and more direct switch ups of rhythm and tempo. The trick will always be to feel out what works for the genres that we are working with in each individual battle, while making sure any dynamic changes are always in service of making the battle more exciting and varied for the player.
Road to the Full Game
As we go forward creating music for the battles of the Fire Starters crew vs the other crews, we will be continuing to focus on the main goal of the music: to keep it engaging for the player. The dynamic battle music is a great way to accomplish this, but not the only way. We will take advantage of the dynamic music capabilities in battles where it works, and we will keep looking for other ways to keep the music as engaging as possible. With many different types of battles to come in the game including boss battles and various types of objectives, there will be lots of other opportunities for new ways to keep the music fresh and interesting as the game progresses.
To hear everything we have got so far, please check out the Canvas City Demo and have a listen!