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Ahoy!
It's Jaime here, returning with a Junkfish audio blog after being adrift at sea for the longest time. This time I'm going to give you a quick write up on what our plans for the music and music systems are, and a little sneaky peeky of how it's sounding!
For those of you who played Monstrum 1, you'll know that the music system had a fairly simple set up: the starting ambient track led into the monster chase when you were first spotted, and then to that monster's ambient theme if you managed to escape. This worked quite well for a single-player game as we could set up some mystery, always knew what state the player was in, and only had to deal with one of them too!
Monstrum 2 has a bit more going on, quite literally at times, which means we have to consider a few more possible situations that players might find themselves in, and how the music should adjust to that. I'm not going to go into too much detail about what is going on with the music system just yet, especially before you can all experience it for yourselves! However, I will give you a little insight:
We had two main goals with the music system: how do we sufficiently ramp it up in line with what's happening in-game for each player, and how do we make sure that we don't give too much info away too soon so that the game balance doesn't get thrown off. One of the big inspirations for this was Monster Hunter World, and how they manage the music stingers and cues and you approach or escape monsters - if they've seen you and if you're in a hiding spot, among other things. Here's a little example: listen to how the audio goes from a lot of environmental and ambient sound to a musical motif, how that changes the feel of the game, and how things change when the monster flies away around the 4:30 mark.
On the topic of Capcom games, we also looked at Resident Evil 7's soundtrack and some of the sound design and choices that went into making that. You can read up on that on the Audiokinetic website here:
We also have a few callbacks to the first game, especially for the Brute and some of the instruments used, if you listen to the example below you might be able to hear some of them. It was important to make sure that the feeling people got when facing him in the original game was present here, so hopefully, you'll hear it.
Speaking of which, let's get on to what you're here for. Here's a quick preview of what will be the Brute's chase theme, going from "safe" to a full chase and back again, inside Wwise (it's the audio middleware we're using for the game). We're using a single main parameter to drive this which is fed a few things from the game, and some state changes to control some other elements like when you're in a hiding spot - which you'll have to play the game to hear! Listen out for the different layers that come and go as the parameter goes up and down!
And there we are. There's still some finetuning and polish to be had, and some more work to be finished with other themes, but hopefully, this little peek will let you know what you're in for!
Signing off,
Jaime