How does the game music stay interesting?

The game has several states: Cruise, battle, intense battle, victory, defeat. With the exception of victory and defeat the states each have 4 slices. Each of those slices have 8 bars.

Inside of those 8 bars inside of a slice we have a musical motive, so a musical pattern that is coherent inside of those bars. But to make things interesting the bars are not simply repeated there is in fact some variety within each of those slices.

Because humans get bored fast when they get repeated music, the game does not simply play the same music over and over again for each state. Instead it randomly picks one of the four slices per state and stitches them together with a cross fade so you get a seamless listening experience with fresh music every time you play the game.

What were key musical decisions?

For the music itself I decided on using a Lydian scale, just because I have never used a mode before and I got curious. My online research also brought up that it appears to be a favorite scale of movie composers. Having had no prior game music experience, I seeked inspiration from movie composition.

I went with G lydian because I thought it sounded good. I feel like it has a heroic ring to it, perfect for the kind of game I was making. It has the added benefit that there is much overlap with common guitar pentatonic scales. So adding a human played guitar part would also be straight forward.

What would I do differently?

Next time I start an adaptive game music project, there is one thing I would change. This time I have treated it like a song at the beginning, just because I had experience with writing songs. However adaptive music is a completely different discipline, I would approach it as its own thing in the future.

Instead of starting out at my piano and experimenting with what sounds good, which works perfectly fine for a song. For adaptive music I would first think about the game, and consider how the music needs to respond to player actions and only then start with composing the music.