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Weekly Update - Music Musings and a Potentially Problematic Nightmare

3 years ago1,990 words

Lots of indecisiveness this week about whether characters should wield musical instruments, and how Collie is portrayed in the new dream intro!

I got back to work this week after a week-long break, and I got a lot done... though I'm still not getting enough sleep and feel more tired than I'd like much of the time. So many things I'd like to do but just don't have the energy! Annoying.

Oh well, at least I did do some stuff. I wrote daily update posts on ∞ my Patreon ∞ on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and wondered whether to do that regularly, since it'd encourage me to actually do stuff so I had something to write about. That might just be overwhelming to people though, I don't know.

Should characters wield musical instruments?

When I started on Divine Dreams - intended as a MARDEK reimagining - around January of 2020, the characters wielded fairly standard fantasy swords and shields, as they did in MARDEK.



Last June, I revised the cast to stress that the game was distinct from MARDEK - Mardek became Dayvha etc - and as part of those revisions, I decided that the characters could wield combinations of weapons and musical instruments. The lore behind it was that since monsters and magic in Alora Fane are essentially formed from mental energy, music is a great way to evoke certain feelings or thoughts to conjure them up.



I came up with the idea of Atonal Dreams last June - a shorter, standalone prelude of sorts to Divine Dreams - and decided to keep this musical weapons concept in that. Just as the Jedi have their distinctive lightsabers, the Seraphim - and their Cherubim rookies - use crystal swords called resonars, I decided, which can slash to deal damage, or be played like a violin. Savitr had two, Collie had one and a shield.

At first, I tried to incorporate the music these played into the gameplay:



But I found it too annoying and scrapped it, replacing it instead with what was more of a brief sound-effect-like melody:



After the alpha test about 3 months ago, I revised the skill system to focus entirely on summoning creatures:



I prefer this for both gameplay and lore reasons (if you lived in a world where you could summon monsters with your mind, why would you ever get your hands dirty?), but this meant that neither character ever actually attacked with their resonars, so it was pointless for them to resemble weapons.



About a month ago, I removed the resonars entirely, replacing them with 'amulets' and 'bracelets' for offensive and defensive purposes, which just appeared as glowing gems on the backs of characters' hands.

But when I returned to the game after a week-long break, I found myself missing the resonars. It felt wrong for characters to just have nothing in their hands!




So this week, I brought back resonars in a different form. Now, they're purely instruments of music rather than violence, styled after a stringed instrument that Savitr plays with a crystal bow like a violin, and Collie strums like a guitar. I like their concept and design a lot, and I keep just ogling the characters' models in the menu!

But one of the reasons I revised the resonars previously was because testers said (and I agree with this) that the music they played interfered with the battle music in an annoying way, which is just as much of a problem here, if not moreso.



I included this video in a Patreon post earlier in the week. It shows three attempts at using these resonars in a musical way:

The first and second use a midi-like prodecural melody system where the game uses loaded-in note sets to generate music based on some text data, similar to what I had in Memody: Sindrel Song. Each monster could have its own melody, then.

The first is a long melody spanning most of the summon animation, and it sounds ghastly. The second uses shorter melodies, though the one for summoning the Celestronaut sounds terrible.

The third 'variant' (I'd just been watching Loki before I made that video!) uses imported brief melody sound effects; I imagined maybe each character could use a different one of these brief music clips depending on the element of the monster they're summoning, or something.

The second or third possibilities could maybe work with some tweaking... but I get the feeling it still might get irritating.

As much as I love the concept and lore behind these - music is such a fitting way of channelling mind, and there are familiar and widely appealing instruments through which it can be created - I suspect their inclusion might lead to assumptions about how the game should play, like how Memody being based around music was assumed to be a rhythm game even though it's more like a memory game. Perhaps people would complain that there wasn't more integration between the BGM and the characters' instruments.

I like composing music, and I like video game soundtracks in general. On those, battle tracks tend to stand out as people's favourites, so it's important that I have some full, clear battle pieces to include on those. I've already got a couple in the game that I like a lot, which I don't want to have to redo.

A couple of people suggested that maybe a way to reduce the irritation from the resonars' music would be to have them essentially activate hidden parts for the BGM based on each characters' instrument for the duration of the summon animation. I like the idea in theory, but the effort involved would be way higher than the procedural melodies or brief music clips, since every battle composition would require me to write four instrument parts that span the whole duration and which would sound okay if they started and stopped at any point... and I'd have to import them all and ensure they play in unison, which is especially tricky since the tracks are already cut up into sections due to the dynamic music system I recently wrote about.

It also means that maybe the music pieces shouldn't use the four characters' instruments, maybe? The battle track I have currently though is based heavily on the violin because that was meant to represent Savitr. You could say that I could have that part be the one that plays or goes silent depending on whether or not he's summoning, but that'd mean much of the time the music just wouldn't sound melodic at all, which would be very unsatisfying. I think a melody that dips in and out would be way more annoying than brief music clips that play above the main music!

Perhaps next week I'll experiment with composing something that could work like this, to at least test the feasibility since it does seem like a good solution. Maybe something like a underlying rhythm, primary melody with a non-character instrument, then four parts for the characters' instruments that play repeating patterns that match the chords rather than melodies as such...

But then what about the characters in Divine Dreams, if I do make that and use a similar system? There are a bunch of those, and it wouldn't exactly be practical to have a whole lot of different instrument parts... Unless characters use classes of instruments and there are only four types total... Ehh...

Some other, less difficult ideas come to mind - like maybe the background tracks are just entirely percussive rhythms, and music only plays during attacks - but it all feels like it'd become a whole other kind of game, plus there wouldn't be any satisfying music tracks really, which is the part of RPGs I personally love the most.

So I don't know... I love the concept a lot, but I've been wondering over the last few days whether it just might not work, or it might introduce more issues than it's worth.

But then what's the alternative? I could just go back to the amulets/bracelets thing - or a revised version of that - though I like the idea of the characters holding some kind of distinctive tool. One vague idea I had was for characters to have 'mementos' - objects that are special to them and which remind them of various feelings - but I don't actually know what those objects could be, and they don't work nearly as well as weapons or instruments.

I could also just use wands or staves or something, since they're the usual go-to for channelling magic in fantasy settings... but it just feels so generic. I don't know.

A Problematic Nightmare??

Unsure about how to resolve the resonars issue, I spent the last couple of days of the week doing some work on this new intro that I've written about in some other posts. Essentially it's Collie having a nightmare of being in the Blight Wolves, and ~Dreamy Savitr~ comes and saves her; a guardian angel rescuing her from hell to heaven.



I thought a bit about how to actually present this, and wondered whether it could use battle mechanics, but all the UI is hidden (which isn't yet the case in this screenshot), Collie is attacked but can't actually die, and her only skill is something called 'Salvation', as some kind of call to get out of this horrible life.

For her first couple of attempts to use it, this 'Beast' - a representation of all she hates about the Blight Wolves - would interrupt and mock her, but on the third attempt it'd summon Savitr, who - after comically talking about how intensely attractive he finds her; this is a dream, after all - helps her believe in herself, she summons a Pawnite, she says it's still not good enough, then - at Collie's urging - Savitr casts Enlighten and Collie wakes up drooling on the real Savitr's shoulder.



I've already written a few times about how Collie's character is potentially problematic because she's Savitr's apprentice, calls him Master, and expresses blatant sexual interest in him. Very different to the strong, independent women we're all supposed to be cheering on constantly in everything these days.

I watched the latest Pixar film, Luca, yesterday. I liked it! But I noticed that both the main female characters were of course brash, outspoken, etc. Made me wonder when I last actually saw a shy, submissive female character outside of anime (though I don't exactly watch anime so I'm just assuming they're in those). Are women just not allowed to be depicted that way anymore - even briefly - because it's politically unacceptable?

Not that Collie is shy or submissive. If anything, she's supposed to be rough and brusque because of her upbringing, though in this intro she doesn't even fight back? That'd probably give entirely the wrong idea. But how would she fight back if she's using this musical instrument? Maybe she fights the urge to fight back, to rise above her nature and be something 'better'? Hmm.

Since this is the first scene that the player will see, I need to be careful about how I write it. The whole point of Collie's character - and the story as a whole - is that she had a tough childhood and joined the Seraphim - and admired Savitr - as a way of rising above that. But a somewhat-skimpily-dressed girl being both verbally and physically abused - while she doesn't fight back - might not exactly be the most inviting start for an RPG, right?

I'll need to spend the next week deciding on these two things!