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Note Crunching: Composing Music for Games under Extreme Deadlines This article is written by Impressions Games' composers Keith Zizza and Henry Beckett. (Their current projects include, "Pharaoh," a city-building game set in ancient Egypt, and "Civil War Generals 3," a real-time strategy game set in the Civil War. This month's column is a how-to on surviving a frightening deadline.
Here's a classic situation that sooner or later every game composer has to deal with. It's Friday at 7:00pm, and you're heading out for the weekend. All of a sudden, a producer runs into your office with a two-minute video trailer the art department just finished -- for which they need a full Ancient Egyptian score by 9:00am Monday. Oh God. What do you do? "Two minutes? Two days?" you think. "Impossible!" And yet, caught in the enthusiasm of the moment, you shout, "Yes! You got it!!" Well you have done it now, haven't you? You've committed yourself. You know that if you can pull it off, you'll be a hero, and if not, you'll look like you don't have a handle on how long you need to do things. But the question remains, once you've committed…how can you possibly pull it off, without seriously lowering your standards? The heck with standards, how can you even begin writing a decent piece in two days?! Oh yeah – we've been there. Our goal here is to help you should you get stuck there too. Or at least to give you the benefit of our experience and past panics! First, we offer the usual, but sincerely heartfelt, disclaimer: We don't claim to have the best answers to these or any other questions. All we can offer is some opinion and some experience. You have to decide what's valuable information to you and what just won't work in your situation. So, 48 hours? Let's get to work: Let's say our sample project is music for the two-minute piece described above. Like most composers, we've got at our disposal some MIDI gear and our favorite sequencer. And 48 hours give or take. We'll have to factor in at least a little sleep in there somewhere, or it may end up sounding like an outtake from the White Album sessions…which may be fine for some games, but not this one…. So those are the guidelines. How do we attack the project? We believe time management is the biggest issue here. Here are some ways we might handle it. 1. Relax and familiarize.First, relax and get your bearings on the task. Take a few deep breaths, go for a walk and think about the big picture. What kind of music is it? What sort of sounds might work? How might it develop roughly in your mind? Who is the intended audience? Ease into the project rather than diving straight in, even if only for an hour or two. Don't record a single note yet; instead, spend this time thinking about the overall plan of attack. In a hip-hop tune for example, you might think "what kinds of basses do I have?", "do I have a great snare sound for this?", etc. Taking this time will make the task feel at least a little familiar and give it some definition and boundaries. If you meditate on it for a little while, you'll find you always have a frame of reference once you start digging into the details. This should hopefully save you lots of time. 2. Start with what you know and gather your resources. Because of the short timeframe, you should stay close to home for this project. You may have lots of cool new ideas, sounds and things you want to try someday, but today is not the day! So, what sound modules do you know really well? What patches can you count on? What processing has proved effective in the past? What production techniques have worked for you? Power up the gear, get some of those sounds running through the mixer at good levels, play some notes, and just get started. |
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