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| [ ABOUT | the team | Bjorn Lynne ] |
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Worms Blast - Creating the music
Worms Blast is the first game that I have created a truly interactive music soundtrack for.
I had done some music before in games such as 'Phoenix - Deep Space Resurrection', and 'Addiction
Pinball', where certain game events would cause the game to play a certain tune. But in Worms Blast, the
music is constantly reacting to what the players are doing and what goes on in the game. And it changes in
much more meaningful ways than simply jumping to a certain tune for certain game events.
It was a new approach for me, because normally I would work with music tracks of 3-5 minutes length and
each have their own sounds and instruments. But in Worms Blast everything is done in 8-bar musical parts
that the game put together in a different order each time.
I created 4 main 'sets' of music. Each such set contains about 60 different musical patterns that all
share the same set of instruments. When you start a new round of Worms Blast, one of 4 'music sets' is
randomly picked and loaded. At first listen, it may sound as though these are simply 4 different music
tracks, but if you listen closer, you will notice that each one sounds a bit different every time you
play. That's because each of the 60 different patterns in each music set all have different functions in
the game.
There are certain patterns within each music set that belongs to the 'calm' category. These are played
mostly early in the round before things get too hectic, or while the game is in pause mode. As you start
to play and the action picks up, the music engine will also start to pick more often from the more intense
sounding music patterns. There are 5 of these intensity levels, and each have their own version or mix of
each of the different musical patterns and melodies in the game.
Certain patterns don't belong to any particular intensity level, but were written for specific game
events, such as boat sinks or double damage and so on. There are about 20 of these special events with
their own music pattern assigned to them. When you get a double-damage event in the game, you'll hear a
double-damage tune. This in itself is really nothing special; after all you get that in all games these
days. The difference is that in Worms Blast, the double-damage tune is built into the already existing
music, rather than just jumping to it. If you listen carefully, when you perform a double-damage event and
the game plays the double-damage music, it sounds as though the music was actually written especially for
what you just did. The double-damage tune slips perfectly into the rhythm and key of the existing music;
with a little build-up at the end that takes you naturally back to the background music
afterwards.
The same goes for the various intensity levels of the background music. When a change occurs, the music
goes to a higher intensity level, but it doesn't do it the quick and dirty way by simply jumping to a new
background track. Instead, it ways for the next musically natural place to change, i.e. the end of the
musical bar that's currently playing, then it changes to the more intense music with a completely natural
sounding change over, and then the tempo also increases slightly over the next few seconds, so you won't
hear a jump in the tempo, but you may feel that the music does seem a little faster... because the tempo
is changing subtly over a few seconds.
When you listen to the downloadable mp3 music from Worms Blast (available to download from here soon!),
these are simply a representation of what the game could sound like in one particular round of play. The
next time you play the game, the actual melodies and riffs would sound the same, but they would be played
in different intensity levels, different tempos and in a different order. To create these mp3 files, I
simply played the game with the sound-effects volume turned all the way down to zero (so that only the
music could be heard), recorded the output, and encoded it to mp3.
I spent about 5 months writing the music for Worms Blast. Although it may not be obvious at first, the game
contains a lot of music. There are 4 main sets of music. Each of these sets contains about 60 different
patterns. About 30 of those were created in 5 different intensity levels with different mixes and
variations.
In addition, there are about 20 motifs - these are little jingles that play on top of the background music
when minor game events occur, such as collected a star or star exploded etc. Finally, there are separate
music bits for the main menu, the map screen, the loading screen, the win screen, the credits screen and
the options screen.
For the PlayStation2 version of the game, some of the subtle DirectMusic features were converted over and
works in slightly different way, because the music engine doesn't work in the same way as it does on the
PC. So the PlayStation2 plays the patterns as audio streams rather than individual notes and samples, but
the music is the same, and most of the interactive features were carried over.
By the way, you can hear more of my music for other projects at ::
[ www.ampcast.com/bjornlynne ]
[ www.ampcast.com/divinorum ]
and of course at my own main site ::
[ www.lynnemusic.com ]
Bjorn Lynne
Composer & sound guy, Team17; Sound Designer on Worms Blast.
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| [ ABOUT | the team ] |
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Worms Blast wird dir mit viel Liebe von Team17's internen Design & Entwicklungs Team präsentiert,
welches in den letzten 11 Jahren schon eine große Bandbreite preisgekrönter, 'runder' und sehr spielbarer
Spiele entwickelt hat. Mit Schwerpunkten auf Spielbarkeit, Action und Gameplay bestätigt Worms Blast
seine feine Herkunft.
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| Creative Director |
Martyn Brown
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| Producer |
Paul Kilburn
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| Ass. Producer |
[ Mark Baldwin ]
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| Design |
John Eggett
Kevin Carthew
John Dennis
Paul Dunstan
Grant Towell
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| Artists |
[ Dave Smith ] (lead)
Rory Little
Mike Green
Rico Holmes
Andrew Morriss
Patrick Romano
Jan Ruud
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| Programmers |
Charles Blessing (lead)
Stefan Boberg
Phil Carlisle
Andy Clitheroe
Paul Scargill
Martin Swaine
Andreas Tadic
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| Sound and Music |
[ Bjorn Lynne ]
Outsource Media & Audiogodz
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| Web Design |
Paul James
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| QA |
Paul Field (Manager)
Andy Aveyard (Lead)
Kelvin Aston
Ben Booth
John Egginton
Adrian Evans
Brian Fitzpatrick
Jax Li
Lee Varley
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Gamecube
Conversion |
[ ZedTwo ]
[ e-mail ] [ website ]
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Mac
Conversion |
Feral Interactive
[ e-mail ] [ website ]
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