[This is a guest post by Meghann O'Neill, who wrote the dynamically generated combat music for Sunless Sea.]

Hi,

My name is Meghann, or you may know me from Failbetter’s forums as Firky; after Firkraag, the red dragon in Baldur’s Gate 2.

Let me introduce myself by saying that I play a lot of games, largely because I was fortunate enough to have a father who brought home an Exidy Sorceror in 1980, when I was two. I honestly can’t remember more than a handful of days in my life without games in them.

For the past seven years, I’ve also been a columnist, reviewer and interviewer for Australia’s PC Powerplay magazine. And I’m a music teacher, both in the classroom and as an instrumental tutor.

I’m writing to tell you about the music you will be hearing in Sunless Sea’s combat, because I made it, as well as the related system.

It’s a small contribution, but I think the process, from conceiving a prototype, pitching it to Failbetter, working alongside Maribeth, and then having my composition realised in the game, comprises an interesting journey.

So, this story starts very simply, with me struggling through Dragon Age 2 on Nightmare difficulty. Do you know what happens, aurally, when your party has low overall health? A dissonant chord in the strings fades over the top of the combat music. It sounds tense and is really evocative. As a predictor of death, the chord is frustratingly accurate, too. I surely died more than a hundred times in one playthrough, but I only fought back from the Dissonant Chord of Death three times.

I became well acquainted with that chord. The more I heard it, however, the more I wondered at the potential of the idea. Could the musical material, in fact, be more closely related to the harmony and pulse?

Much of Dragon Age 2’s music is cinematic-style in implementation. A discrete track is triggered at a location, cutscene or event, to illustrate the action. This is quite common for contemporary games, generally. But, for dynamic gameplay, like combat, the opportunity to more organically transform the player’s aural experience was something I became very interested in at this time.

As a modder and amateur designer, too, with some years of experience chipping away at small projects, I started trying to see if I could make minimalist piano music transform seamlessly, especially with an unbroken pulse, by using Twine as a kind of sequencer.

As a result of these experiments, I formalised two ideas. Firstly, yes, when changes happen without breaking the rhythmic pulse, the result is very satisfying. As importantly, though, if I wanted to keep the coding simple, I was going to have to find musical solutions to seamless transition through composition, rather than making the model more complex. Think of it as reimagining music, or reorganising expected elements, rather than creating the ideal environment in which common musical conventions should exist.

As I switched to experimenting in Unity, I realised I had a model I would be able to pitch to developers without needing to ask them to license middleware like FMOD. (Having said this, versions of FMOD are now free for use with commercial Unity projects.) It was this initial stricture, however, which led to designing features like transient melodies, stackable rhythms and concurrent variations. I’ll use examples from Sunless Sea to explain this in more detail soon.

In approaching Failbetter in November 2013, I made a prototype in Twine which showed their (then) published screenshots over a minimalist musical base and transitioning between winding melodies tied to location shown. There was an icy flute in the north and a bassoon for the Chapel of Lights, both working with the background music, and contrapuntally, but in contrast to each other. I was trying to hit a minimalist/impressionist, alternative, turn-of-the-century kind of style.

Alexis liked my idea but he was also negotiating with Maribeth at the time. When he allowed me to listen to her music I was delighted by how engaging and complex it was, even at a very early stage. Honestly, I told him to choose Maribeth as composer over me. As counterproductive as that might have seemed to my pitch, I knew my model still needed time and that her experience far surpassed the strength of my fledgling idea.

As it happens, though, Alexis invited me to try out some music on a provisional basis, for the experience. So I listened carefully to Maribeth’s music and used elements from her recurring pitch motif, Db, D, E, F, Db, to form the harmonic basis for the combat pieces. I referenced the string colours, pitched drip sounds, hand percussion and aspects of the electronic manipulation, too. Liam suggested examples of other game music to illustrate an approximate energy for combat. And, by January, after learning two new programs and pushing my knowledge of music production to the limit, I had one track that sounded like it should work for the game and context.

So, I returned to experimentation with the model. In Unity, I coded for several simultaneous variations of music for each of three, long combat pieces. These variations all play concurrently but you only hear the one that is relevant to your combat state.

For example, when Dripping Requiem plays, you are hearing the core variation when you are undamaged and the game is rolling. (It’s a minimalist piece with busy hand percussion, a drippy marimba ostinato and a sliding, string bass. If you would like to refer to excerpts of the piece, they are linked below.)

Undamaged https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/168597598/SS/for%20blog/damage_0.mp3

Paused https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/168597598/SS/for%20blog/pause.mp3

Damaged https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/168597598/SS/for%20blog/damage_1.mp3

Very Damaged https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/168597598/SS/for%20blog/damage_2.mp3

End https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/168597598/SS/for%20blog/end.mp3

As you pause, the core variation fades out and the pause variation fades in at the same point. Now you are hearing a reduced rhythmic version of the same piece as if the performers had simply started to play in a less busy fashion, particularly in the marimba part.

Similarly, when you are moderately damaged, the conga line gets heavier handed, as if the performer has decided things are getting a bit serious and accents are appropriate. A ghostly choir is added, which changes the tonality to a less curious, more somber pitch set.

Then, when you are very damaged, you get the further addition of a watery pipe organ. It is tenser at this point, but my favourite part of the model actually occurs when you leave combat, through death, victory or otherwise. You are left with only the pipe organ. I didn’t originally plan for this but, suddenly, I realised I could compose a “requiemesque” variation alongside each of the combat pieces. For Dipping Requiem, you will hear the pipe organ. Another piece provides tremolo strings and another again is a submerged choir.

And you know what? This progression feels a bit like Dragon Age 2’s Dissonant Chord of Death to me, which is quite cool, even if it is more contemplative than tense. It is also more of a progression than discrete, heralding material. It gives all of the game’s creatures, great and small, a gentle, watery end. I like that.

This system of combat music is not final at this stage. (Currently, there are fifteen different combat tracks in the game, to make three pieces.) You will also note that each combat piece has an obvious cadence in the middle. This is so that combat music may be triggered randomly at either the first or second entry point. You will soon be either hearing Dripping Requiem, for example, in sections as either A, B or B, A, or A, A or B, B, just to vary the aural experience further.

Also, Liam and I have been discussing whether to vary the parts in order to alter the music when the ship is illuminated. And, there is still some question as to whether the most damaged variations fade well with pause. Similarly, should pause always have formal percussion in some form or just percussive elements? Within a model which provides so many possibilities for composition, making final decisions is difficult.

(If you have any feedback based on playing the game, hearing the music or imagining the system, I would love to hear it. And I’m still tweaking the actual music based on hearing it in game. I probably will continue to do so until Liam tells me to stop.)

For road testing dynamic musical ideas, the opportunity to contribute to Sunless Sea has been an exceptionally valuable experience. I’m very grateful to Alexis for inviting me to try this out and to Liam for patiently helping me hone the model with realistic suggestions for code. Most importantly, working with Maribeth inspired me to make significantly more detailed music than I’ve previously attempted. Learning her music has, in fact, been my favourite part of the entire experience.

Thanks also to the feedback and support provided to me by Paul Weir of Thief 4, Darren Korb at Supergiant Games, Mike Laidlaw of BioWare, Brad Gentle at Sydney IGDA and my old high school music teacher, David Clayton. (And my husband Ken Evanoff who provides weary, but consistently useful, feedback.)

One of the best things about musicians I find, in many aspects of my professional life, is that we are adept at sharing knowledge. I hope I have shared something useful, inspiring or interesting with you in this post. Thankyou for reading it.