Frozen Battle ground BGM post-mortem

Game Level Music Design

The Brief

For this student project the creators wanted a few audio students to practice their composition skills and deliver sound assets to fit several game levels. With that in mind we formed a team of four and assigned ourselves the songs to be referenced.

Team roles

Joseph - Menu screen

Robin - 1st level

Clement - 2nd & 3rd level

Ethan - 4th level

5th level was scrapped in the final build of the game

Project Recap

Week 4

During this week we

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Composition

For this particular assignment the musical scoring required that all the tracks have at least a Harp of some sort. This being the only requirement and that the track should be loop-able and try not to go beyond 30 secs. Since this is a track that was for a competitive scenario the track will need to be epic and carry a simple tension building theme.

What went well

Final Outcome

Here is a link to the final which can be downloaded Frozen BattleGround

Here is the link to the

Lessons Learned

This project was a once off project but we did learn as a team we were able to create several simple melodies tied together with similar theme.

After seeking professional feedback we saw that all the songs did not have a cohesive structure because the composition of everyone fitted too closely to the reference tracks, it was suggested that we follow the design decision process that Mick Gordon followed in his composition for Doom in this video. "Change the brief if it makes the project better".

Tonal elements need to be the same or similar tone of the keys will sit well with the background. For example the last time question of this video is perfect when considering sound for games in future that I will look into. For example if a machine gun was firing in the level then the sound of the gun fired repeatedly will give a tonal sound which can be attributed to a certain key. Lets make an example that the key was in D major, then the background music to either be in the key of the D major or its relative 5th which is a A minor scale. The easiest alternative is the have the tonal key of the sound effects detuned to a note that exists in key of the final mix of the BGM.

In this project we did not look into the tonal elements that

In future even if the reference sources so long as we delivered to the end vision of the brief which was "wanted harpish sounds, but up tempo".