[Dev Diary] Chronicles of Spellborn - Audio
Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 4:38 am
The Sound of Slywood
By: Matthew Florianz
In The Chronicles of Spellborn music plays an important role in establishing moods for area’s. As those of you who played the beta have found out a little (and a lot more had I done the volumes right ), music plays very seldom. Most of the time, you simply hear the ambience of an area. If you are in a forest, you’ll hear forest sounds, on the road next to the forest there is a road ambience and once you go out into a field, it’s different again. All of this is heard in gradual motion, as you move between the area’s.
Every so often, the music belonging to that particular shard comes in and plays. At the moment this happens every hour or so, though we plan to make it such that people can change how often this happens.
Jesper Kyd composed those pieces of music, now almost two and a half years ago and as you can imagine, we have made a few changes in the mean time.
Green District for instance is a completely new and was not discussed with Jesper when he wrote the music. Though I was able to shift music around to fit green district, I still don’t have music for every single new location in the game. Now we will of course call upon Jesper for big expansions, what he does I cannot. But for the smaller new area’s that are part of existing larger area’s I have done a little bit of ambient music. Where Jesper makes dramatic story-music, mine is more of a mood, an ambience so to speak. It’s not intended to do the same as Jepser’s work does and it certainly wouldn’t be used for the bigger moments, such as introducing a shard or huge new area.
The piece of music linked is intended for SlyWood, which has been introduced to you in the dev-diaries. I plan to play it once every so often during night time on the field between the hulking mills. What I like about ambient music such as this is that it transports you to a mood and while you’re in it, you don’t even notice it that much; when it’s over and the ambient sounds come back in, you realise you have been in a place that felt a little darker than where you are now. Even though you haven’t moved the sound gives you the impression of having gone through something. I think the hallmark of good ambient is that you don’t even notice it presence until you really pay attention to it, in which case it should have something interesting to offer.
Of course, the fact it’s abstract, weird sounding and oppressively dark helps for music intended to play in a place called SlyWood.
I have included crickets and forest noises so you get the idea how it would play in game, though this isn’t exactly how you’ll hear it.
Listen to The Sound of Slywood:
[url=\"http://www.tcos.com/images/content/slywood_forest_night_suspence.wma\"]http://www.tcos.com/images/content/slywood...ht_suspence.wma[/url]
[url=\"http://www.tcos.com/sbforum/viewtopic.php?t=11024\"]source[/url]
By: Matthew Florianz
In The Chronicles of Spellborn music plays an important role in establishing moods for area’s. As those of you who played the beta have found out a little (and a lot more had I done the volumes right ), music plays very seldom. Most of the time, you simply hear the ambience of an area. If you are in a forest, you’ll hear forest sounds, on the road next to the forest there is a road ambience and once you go out into a field, it’s different again. All of this is heard in gradual motion, as you move between the area’s.
Every so often, the music belonging to that particular shard comes in and plays. At the moment this happens every hour or so, though we plan to make it such that people can change how often this happens.
Jesper Kyd composed those pieces of music, now almost two and a half years ago and as you can imagine, we have made a few changes in the mean time.
Green District for instance is a completely new and was not discussed with Jesper when he wrote the music. Though I was able to shift music around to fit green district, I still don’t have music for every single new location in the game. Now we will of course call upon Jesper for big expansions, what he does I cannot. But for the smaller new area’s that are part of existing larger area’s I have done a little bit of ambient music. Where Jesper makes dramatic story-music, mine is more of a mood, an ambience so to speak. It’s not intended to do the same as Jepser’s work does and it certainly wouldn’t be used for the bigger moments, such as introducing a shard or huge new area.
The piece of music linked is intended for SlyWood, which has been introduced to you in the dev-diaries. I plan to play it once every so often during night time on the field between the hulking mills. What I like about ambient music such as this is that it transports you to a mood and while you’re in it, you don’t even notice it that much; when it’s over and the ambient sounds come back in, you realise you have been in a place that felt a little darker than where you are now. Even though you haven’t moved the sound gives you the impression of having gone through something. I think the hallmark of good ambient is that you don’t even notice it presence until you really pay attention to it, in which case it should have something interesting to offer.
Of course, the fact it’s abstract, weird sounding and oppressively dark helps for music intended to play in a place called SlyWood.
I have included crickets and forest noises so you get the idea how it would play in game, though this isn’t exactly how you’ll hear it.
Listen to The Sound of Slywood:
[url=\"http://www.tcos.com/images/content/slywood_forest_night_suspence.wma\"]http://www.tcos.com/images/content/slywood...ht_suspence.wma[/url]
[url=\"http://www.tcos.com/sbforum/viewtopic.php?t=11024\"]source[/url]