Since adaptive music is just that, music. I decided to start it like I start a normal song. I sat down on my piano played around until I found something I liked. Once I liked something I then notated it in a notation software on my computer. Of course I could have just played it directly into a DAW however with sheet music I gained an important advantage that a DAW can’t offer. I saw the complete composition at a glance.

To bring music in this century I used a DAW. I exported the composition as MIDI and important that into Logic Pro. Now I can use Logic Pro to add elements, that sheet music alone does not really enable. Things like drum patterns, shakers or even the exactly same bell sound that is also present in the Top Gun movies.

From Logic Pro I then exportet the whoe timeline as one audio file. Now since the game expects slices I created a program that chops that one audio file up into several based on the play duration. 4 states * 4 slices per state + vicotry + defeat = 16 + 2 = 18 slices. So that program ended up creating 18 individual audio files.

Those audio files were then imported into FMOD. That is a program that strives to streamline the audio integration with games. In a nutshell this program takes audio files, then you set up when those should play and you get fancy controls similar to the controls in a DAW but narrowed down to what you would want to control while the game is playing.

The adaptive music wouldn’t be very adaptive if it dint respond to the action of the player. For this events and states inside of the game must be mapped to music states. Unfortunately there inst a good way to explain this part to non programmers. The best option I could find was to write a strong simplification of the actual code. Essentially what this code does is it takes input like how much damage did the user take? Are there enemies nearby? How many enemies are there? And so on, all of these inputs are used to determine if the user is currently in a battle, just flying around or even won the round.

This code than talks to FMOD which then plays the correct audio snippet. And there you go, a fully immersive, adaptive music experience.

You can try out the whole adaptive score in this player.