The Cartrdge Blog

cartrdge.com

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We’ve moved the Cartrdge blog over to Medium

To all our followers here on tumblr, we wanted to let you know that we’ve moved the Cartrdge blog over to Medium. You can click on that link, or go to blog.cartrdge.com to check it out. 

We’re going to be a lot more active on the new blog. So bookmark or follow us on there for game developer interviews, tutorials, showcases and product updates from our team!

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Introducing the user search tool and the Hire Me button

Happy New Year everyone! With 2017 now upon us, we’re incredibly proud and excited to announce the launch of one of our most important features ever: the new user search tool and the Hire Me button.

Our goal with Cartrdge from the very beginning has been to connect the video game industry, get people collaborating and hired, and through all that to help more games get made! As a small team it’s taken us time to build the infrastructure and feature set necessary, but we’re now ready and so excited to be releasing these tools to you.

Heading to the Devs page on the site, you’ll immediately notice two things: the brand new user search box - and redesigned user thumbnails! The new thumbs contain a lot more information, and up to six of your posts:

With the new user search tool, we’re giving anyone the functionality to search for people on Cartrdge across multiple parameters.

Industry Roll

Geographic location

Multiple skill tags

The tool is a breeze to use; each of these fields can be used on their own, or all three at the same time. You can enter multiple Industry Roles as well as Skills at the same time, to really refine your search. 

Whether you’re looking to collaborate, hire or maybe just find new people to follow - it’s never been easier. Let’s say you’re a Los Angeles native who can program and create her own art, but you really need help with your game trailer. Or maybe you’re an artist looking for a programmer who has experience with Unity. With user search it’s a breeze to find these folks and then reach out to them.

Speaking of reaching out, you’ll also notice a new feature on your profile pages: the Hire Me button!

This feature allows folks to reach out to you directly through Cartrdge. Clicking the button opens up a small messaging overlay, with each message going directly to your email inbox. From there it’s up to you to follow up if you’re interested. The Hire Me button is purely optional of course; if you don’t want it to appear on your profile, just go into your settings and uncheck the box.

We’re very excited to bring you these new features and hope this helps more of you find work, collaborate, and make the games you want to make.

Until next time,

The Cartrdge Team

[cartrdge]

Your New Years Resolution contest: with Sketchfab

New Years: a time for games, family, food, and of course…Resolutions! You know what we’re talking about; the special promises that we make to ourselves at the beginning of each year. 

To keep yourself accountable to your resolutions, it always helps to have a friend. So we’re super excited to be kicking off 2017 with our friends at Sketchfab! For the first contest of the year, we’ve chosen this grand old tradition as the theme; your task is to incorporate “Your New Years Resolutions” into a 3D diorama depicting part of a level.

To help give you some inspiration, talented 3D artist Olly Skillman-Wilson came up with what this means to him:

How cool is that?

Guidelines

Needs to be a diorama depicting part of a level, incorporating your take on a New Years Resolution

Entries need to be 3D

Entries need to be uploaded to Sketchfab and posted on Cartrdge.

You can post WIP screenshots/Sketchfab models on Cartrdge during the weekend for feedback, as well as on the Sketchfab forums

The game and all visual assets must be made during the contest period.

You can use any existing tools, engines, languages, or programming libraries.

Multiple entries are welcome for this contest. You can only win one prize, though (your best).

Dates: January 6th - January 15th at 11:59pm EST

Judges

Olly Skillman-Wilson

Simon Kratz

Michael Calvert

Prizes

The first place entry will be featured at the top of Sketchfab, as well as in the Cartrdge landing page banner!

1st Place: Cartrdge “Gold” t-shirt, Sketchfab Swag Bag, 1 year Cartrdge Pro, 1 year Sketchfab Pro

2nd Place: Cartrdge “Silver” t-shirt, Sketchfab Swag Bag, 6 months Cartrdge Pro, 6 months Sketchfab Pro

3rd Place: Cartrdge “Bronze” t-shirt, Sketchfab Swag Bag, 3 months Cartrdge Pro, 3 months Sketchfab Pro

Good everyone, both with the contest and with your 2017 resolutions!

[cartrdge]

Cartrdge 2016 year in review

Happy New Year everyone! We’ve got some really cool features for you right around the bend, but before getting to those we thought it would be cool to do a year in review. A changelog, if you will! The site did change quite a bit in 2016:

Projects: We received a lot of requests after we launched for a way to organize related posts, and Project pages were our answer to that. They were also our first feature of the new year, rolling out in the middle of January. Four months later in April, we added Project Collaborators! We love this feature and think it’s really unique to Cartrdge. Multiple users can be part of a project, and each can then post the work they’re doing to it. Finally in August, we improved the data inheritance between posts and projects. 

Clickable Tags: From the start we asked for a lot of information, whether it was on your profile, on a post and then on project pages. But the site itself was fairly stagnant; you couldn’t click those bits of information to find related people/content. That changed in March when we made tags clickable. Autocompleting capability was added in September, which made the input of all this information a whole lot easier. 

Search: Shortly after, a true search bar was added. We continued to improve it throughout the year by integrating Elastic Search capability, and will soon be adding capability that makes finding the people you know easier. 

Following: in April we added Following and custom feeds. Follow your favorite creators, whether they’re artists, animators, game designers, composers...you get the point. 

Social Signup/Login: sign up or sign into Cartrdge using your Facebook or Twitter accounts. 

GIF Player & GIF to Video technology: one of our biggest (and coolest!) undertakings of the year, we launched an embeddable GIF player. We also integrated GIF to video technology into Cartrdge, making the site more fun by allowing us to autoplay GIFs in the feed, and vastly improving performance.

The best is yet to come to folks! In less than a week we’ll be launching some really great stuff, and have a whole lot more planned throughout the year. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2017! 

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Introducing the Cartrdge GIF player

Kicking off a couple of big feature releases these next few months, we’re extremely excited to announce the launch of our next great portfolio tool: our brand new GIF player! You may be thinking to yourselves, “but Cartrdge, you already support GIFs. What’s this player all about?” Allow us to explain.

Starting now, you have the ability to showcase the 50mb GIFs you upload to Cartrdge elsewhere on the web. We’ve designed the player to be embeddable, and have packed it with functionality from day one.

From a technical perspective, what we’re doing with the player is converting the GIF to a video. This allows us to shrink the file size exponentially, improving performance and keeping your GIFs looking extra crisp. So if you want to embed numerous Cartrdge GIFs on your own website, you can do so with the confidence that they’ll look great and you won’t crash anyone's browser.

This GIF to video conversion has also allowed us to auto animate gif thumbnails, making the site a lot more fun without worrying about performance:

Alrighty, onto the player - let’s take a look at the different ways you can use it.

Embed capability (including tumblr)

You can embed our player anywhere on the web, just like you would a Youtube video. For those of you that enjoy posting GIFs on tumblr, this will come in handy as it allows you to easily get around their 2mb limit - as you can see with the numerous GIF’s embedded in this post! 

As we mentioned, the great thing about using our player is that we’re converting these huge GIFs to videos, drastically reducing their file size and increasing performance on any web page they’re embedded on. 

All GIF posts now have the embed button on them. Click that, and the iframe codes appear (you have both responsive and fixed options):

Twitter and Facebook (with improved capability coming soon)

50mb GIFs on twitter? You got it. Put the link in a tweet and our player will open in it, giving you the ability to share high-resolution, large GIFs on twitter.

You can share your Cartrdge GIFs on Facebook too. Here’s how it works: paste the link to a Cartrdge GIF post on FB and and the player will automatically appear, whether you’re sharing it with your friends, posting it in a game dev group, or even just commenting on someone else's post; it works everywhere on FB. And it auto-plays, helping to draw attention to your stuff.

We’re releasing this now, but there is still some room for improvement. Because Facebook makes us compress the gifs , they can come through a bit fuzzy depending on the file you’re sharing. It can also take a try or two of pasting the link for the GIF to actually appear, so if it doesn’t work immediately then try it again. We are continuing to work on this and promise to improve it as we go.

We’re eager to hear feedback from all of you, including additional places you’d like to see our player supported. We want this to be the best tool for uploading and sharing your game dev GIFs, and promise to continue making sure this feature is as useful and awesome as possible.

Until next time!

The Cartrdge team

[cartrdge]

October challenge: Space in the Fall winners announced!

We’re excited to announce the winners of our first ever monthly challenge, the Space in the Fall contest! Congrats to these three, and a big thanks to all of our participants. You each made something gorgeous; colorful, imaginative and inventive across the board. You did the theme justice. 

And with that it’s time to check out the winners! 

1st Place: Justine Raymond

2nd Place: Joyce Plokker

3rd Place: Callum Harwood

For our monthly challenges we picked up “trophy” style t-shirts as prizes, with gold, silver and bronze versions of our logo. Here’s our artsiest attempt at a photo, along with the stickers that winners will be getting:

Congrats again to the winners! If you’d like to take part in our next monthly challenge, it’s already underway and the theme is Animated Voxels.

[cartrdge]

November Challenge: Animated Voxels

With Halloween behind us, it’s time for the November Challenge! For this months theme we’ve chosen ‘Animated Voxels.’ The inspiration for the theme came from two sources:

The awesome folks at MagicaVoxel, and the new animation capability they just added to the software. 

The impending launch of our new gif player, which you’ll be hearing more about very soon!

So for this contest, your task will be to design a scene using voxel art, and then animate it. You are more than free to use any software you’d like for the art as well as the animation; Qubicle, Hexels, Maya, C4D - it’s your choice! For those of you just getting started, MV does provide a nice option for beginners to jump in and start voxel arting (and now animating as well). 

We can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!

Prizes

For monthly challenges, judging is determined via community vote

1st Place

Entry featured on our home page banner for the whole month of November

Gold Cartrdge t-shirt (one for each teammate)

1 year Cartrdge Pro (for each teammate)

Cartrdge stickers

Winners badge on your profile

2nd Place

Silver Cartrdge t-shirt

6 months Cartrdge Pro

Cartrdge stickers

Second place badge on your profile

3rd Place

Bronze Cartrdge t-shirt

3 months Cartrdge Pro

Cartrdge stickers

Third place badge on your profile

Rules

Dates: November 2nd to November 28th at 11:59pm EST

Are teams allowed? Yes, feel free to team up with as many people as you’d like

Each submission must be original work by you/your team, and we ask that it be made specifically for the contest

Submission Guidelines

Final entries will be via a gif or a Sketchfab embed, showing your animated voxel scene. The contest will be community judged, so we imagine the most important criteria will be coolness ;)

We ask that you post your final entree on either Facebook or Twitter using our new gif player once it’s released (we’re still a plucky little company, so this helps us spread the word!). If you’re using Sketchfab to post your final, go ahead and use that - their player works on both of these platforms as well!

You’ll need to submit two WIP posts, and a final entry. If you’re on a team of two or more, each member will need to post only one WIP. All posts from you or your team will need to be collected in a project page.

You can name your entry/project page whatever you’d like

Tag your final entry: AnimatedVoxelsFinal

Tag all WIP posts: AnimatedVoxelsWIP

Tag the project page: AnimatedVoxelsProject

Resources

We created a channel in the Cartrdge Slack where participants can get together and chat. Request an invite to the room here if you’re not already a member!

A list of voxel editors

Useful blog posts: creating a project & a how-to guide for collaborations

[cartrdge]

Voting is open for the October challenge: Space in the Fall!

The Space in the Fall contest has officially wrapped up! A big thank you to all our participants; we’re a still growing and plucky community, so we had a small number of entries - but the creations from each of our five participants are gorgeous!

And with that it’s time to vote; the poll is below. Please choose your 3 favorite creations, in no particular order (four of the five entries have the same name, so make sure to choose the right ones :). You have a week to vote; the poll will close Thursday 11/3 at 11:59pm EST.

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Here are each of the five entries, which you can also view here

Space in the Fall, by Joyce Plokker

Artifact site, by Callum Harwood

Space in the Fall, by Brunna Giovanna

Space in the Fall (a video of an actual demo level they made!), by Stevie Cole and James Feakins

Space in the Fall (also a cool video of the scene!), by Justine Raymond

[cartrdge]

October challenge: Space in the Fall

Screenshots from top left: Campo Santo, Trudi Castle, Orsi Spanyol, Gurmukh Bhasin

As the leaves change color and the air becomes crisp, as you don your favorite cardigan while sipping a pumpkin spiced lat…alright alright, we’re done with the fall clichés. But it’s true that this incredibly festive season has arrived, and with it the Cartrdge October challenge!** **

This is the beginning of monthly challenges on the site, and we wanted to kick things off by celebrating this awesome time of year. And so we present you with this autumnal theme: Space in the Fall!

As the name suggests, you’ll be imagining what fall might be like in space, and using that to design a part of a level. Let your imaginations run wild on this one; it could mean designing “fall-looking” spaceships, thinking about what the season would be like on another planet, or what the void itself might be like if it experienced seasons. Feel free to use whatever art style you’d like, and to team up with as many people as you want.

A quick note; moving forward, the first place winner of each monthly contest will have their entry featured on our home-page banner!

Prizes

For monthly challenges, judging will be determined via community vote

1st Place

Entry featured on our home page banner for the whole month of November

Gold Cartrdge t-shirt (one for each teammate)

1 year Cartrdge Pro (for each teammate)

Cartrdge stickers

Winners badge on your profile

2nd Place

Silver Cartrdge t-shirt

6 months Cartrdge Pro

Cartrdge stickers

Second place badge on your profile

3rd Place

Bronze Cartrdge t-shirt

3 months Cartrdge Pro

Cartrdge stickers

Third place badge on your profile

Rules

Dates: October 4th to October 26th at 11:59pm EST

Are teams allowed? Yes, feel free to team up with as many people as you’d like

Each submission must be original work by you/your team, and we ask that it be made specifically for the contest

Submission Guidelines

Final entries will be via an image post, showing your interpretation of a level in a video game while incorporating this months theme. We know that a level can be anything, so just use your imagination and come up with something cool; a shot of a sidescroller, an isometric or over-the-shoulder view if you’re using a more three-dimensional style, top down - it’s totally up to you. The contest will be community judged, so we imagine the most important criteria will be coolness ;)

You’ll need to submit two WIP posts, and a final entry. If you’re on a team of two or more, each member will need to post only one WIP. All posts from you or your team will need to be collected in a project page.

Tag your final entry: SpaceintheFallFinal

Tag all WIP posts: SpaceintheFallWIP

Tag the project page: SpaceintheFallProject

Resources

We created a channel in the Cartrdge Slack where participants can get together and chat. Request an invite to the room here if you’re not already a member!

Social media hashtag: #SpaceintheFall

Useful blog posts: creating a project & a how-to guide for collaborations

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Autocompleting tags have arrived!

In anticipation of some major feature releases over the next few months, we’ve just made a really cool improvement with the addition of autocomplete tags. Check out the video below:

As you can see, the autocomplete triggers after you’ve typed in two letters. It will suggest up to the five most used terms based on those letters, in descending order of most-to-least used. Autocomplete has been built into post, project and user-profile skill tags. 

Tagging your posts and projects, as well as adding skill tags on your profile page, is already important and useful. But this will become even more apparent with the upcoming features we have planned. Stay tuned! 

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Better data inheritance when adding a new post to a project

You may have noticed that when adding a new post to a project from the Create a Post form, you’ve needed to input the various bits of information each time. No longer! As you can see in the video below, we’ve massively improved data inheritance for this functionality.

Moving forward, when creating a new post and adding it to a project, the Controls, Platforms, Genres and Engine information will all get inherited from the project automatically. We’ve heard from a lot of you that this is functionality you want, and we’re pleased to finally have it in your hands. Enjoy!

[cartrdge]

The Art and Animation contest: winners announced!

The Art and Animation contest was our first ever event, and a fantastic way to kick things off! There were a wide variety of entries, each celebrating in their own way the important roles that both art and animation play in video games. You can check out all the awesome entries here!

The submissions were judged by our fantastic and diverse panel; Orsi Spanyol, Glauber Kotaki, James Benson and Jobye-Kyle Karmaker. We also want to say a big thanks to our sponsors, SideFX, Allegorithmic and Sketchfab.

Alrighty, it’s time to meet our winners!

3rd Place: Climb by Sarah Doyle and Callum Harwood

Climb, an entry by teammates Sarah Doyle and Callum Harwood, was fueled by their love for classic RPG's, adventure games and platformers, 2D Zelda and Final Fantasy meets 16-bit Mario and Sonic!

2nd Place: Eggbot! by Trudi Castle and Cristian Villalobos

The adorable Eggbot is the product of teammates Trudi Castle and Cristian Villalobos. Trudi started things off with the art, with Cristian then taking over to animate it!

1st Place: Kira by Katherine Diaz

A solo effort from Kathy Diaz, this concept character named Kira is shown in an awesome "fighter” idling position, ready to strike. Congrats Kathy!  

Thanks again to everyone who participated! This contest was the first of many, and we’re already planning our next fun event. Until then! 

[cartrdge]

Our first ever Contest: Art and Animation

Welcome to the first ever Cartrdge contest! To kick things off, we wanted to celebrate the collaborative and diverse nature of video games with something that encourages teamwork.

And so we present to you the Art & Animation contest! For this challenge, each submission will be an entry that displays your skills in - you guessed it - art and animation! We chose this theme because of the important role that both of these things play in a video game, and even more so to encourage collaboration and engagement in the community. We know that many of you can do one but not the other, and so we very much encourage you to team up for this contest!

For some of you that’ll mean getting to work with your specialty, but for others we want to encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and try something new. We also know that there are many of you that can do both art as well as animation, and so while team-based entries are encouraged, you can enter solo if you’d like to.

If you want to participate and need a partner but are having trouble finding someone, we started a Slack channel for everyone to chat in during the contest. If you’d like to join it just fill out this Google form and we’ll send over an invite.

Prizes

We have some fantastic prizes for you, including licenses to software from our awesome sponsors Allegorithmic, SideFX and Sketchfab!

1st Place (per teammate, max of two)

$100 giftcard to your choice of either Steam or Amazon

1 year Houdini Indie

1 year Allegorithmic Substance Painter Indie + Substance Designer Indie + some sweet Allegorithmic merchandise

1 year Sketchfab Pro account

1 year Cartrdge Pro account (when we launch it)

Cartrdge Stickers

2nd Place (per teammate, max of two)

$50 giftcard to your choice of either Steam or Amazon

1 year Houdini Indie

6 months of Allegorithmic Substance Painter Indie + Substance Designer Indie

6 months Sketchfab Pro

6 months Cartrdge Pro

Cartrdge Stickers

3rd Place (per teammate, max of two)

$25 giftcard to your choice of either Steam or Amazon

1 year Houdini Indie

6 months of either Substance Painter Indie or Substance Designer Indie

3 months Sketchfab pro

3 months Cartrdge Pro

Cartrdge Stickers

Judging

Criteria: final entries will be judged on the quality of art and animation, but mostly just based on how awesome they are.

We have a fantastic panel of judges with a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences. These four hail from across the industry and represent its diversity well. And as mentioned, they will be hopping on from time to time during the contest to check out WIP and give feedback. So if you’d like to take advantage of that as you work on your submission, we highly recommend posting your WIP over the course of the three weeks. 

Glauber Kotaki is a pixel artist and animator based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His current projects are Chasm and Duelyst, with previous ones that include Rogue Legacy.

James Benson is an animator based in the UK. If you hated Firewatch or Ori and the Blind Forest, you now know who to blame.

Jobye-Kyle Karmaker is currently a Senior World Artist at Monolith. He was previously a Senior Level Artist at Ubisoft, where he worked on franchises that included Far Cry, Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six.

Orsi Spanyol is currently leading the art team at Thekla Inc. She spent the previous four and half years working on The Witness, responsible for one third of the island.

Rules

- Dates: June 29th to July 20th at 11:59pm EST.

- Each submission must be original artwork by you and your teammate, and of course must be animated.

- The art style, length of the animation and all other details are completely open. We want to encourage a variety of entries and participants, and likewise can’t think of a better way to celebrate the diverse nature of video games themselves! This is our first ever contest, so we thought that leaving it open ended would be a great way to kick things off.

Submission Guidelines:

- All entries are to be submitted using a Project page. The project will contain your final entry, which will be a single post showcasing the best combination of art and animation you/your team can put together. You will also need to put up at least 2 WIP posts, and if you’re a team then that means at least 2/person. There is no guideline on when to put up the WIP posts, but we encourage you to post throughout the contest as our judges will be dropping in from time to time to comment and provide feedback. And besides, it’ll be more fun if everyone is posting regular updates!

- Final entry post can be in the form of a gif, video or animated Sketchfab model. WIP posts can be images as well.

- We ask that each submission be an original piece for the contest.

- Tag your Project: ArtandAnimationproject

- Tag all WIP posts: ArtandAnimationWIP

- Tag your final entry Post: ArtandAnimationFinal

Resources

- Social media hashtags: if you want to talk about the contest on Twitter, FB etc, we recommend using the #CartrdgeArtAnimation hashtag so that everyone can keep up with the conversation!

- The official Slack channel for the contest. You can sign up for it here in this Google form. It will convert to the official Cartrdge Community channel after the contest.

- Useful blog posts: creating a project & a how-to guide for collaborations

[cartrdge]

Upcoming contest: Art and Animation

We’re very excited to announce that our first ever contest will be kicking off next week! Stay tuned for more details in a few days, but what we can tell you is that the theme will be “Art and Animation.” We have four incredible judges from across the industry, and some fantastic prizes as well. One more hint: we just published the “Collaborations how-to guide” ;)

More soon! 

[cartrdge]

Social Signup and Login

We just launched Social Signup and Login! You can now signup for a Cartrdge account using either your Facebook or Twitter accounts:

You’ll then of course be able to login to Cartrdge using either one (and note that you’ll still be able to create a separate password and then login using email/password, if you’d like):

What if I already have a Cartrdge account, you’re thinking to yourself, but still want to use FB or Twitter login? You can connect them from your profile settings!

As you can see above, once an accounted is connected the box will un-grey. In this case, the FB account is connected and the Twitter is not. 

We hope you enjoy this new feature! 

[cartrdge]

Collaborations how-to guide

Collaborations is a feature we built into our project pages, allowing multiple Cartrdge users to belong to a project and to add posts to it. Here’s a quick guide on how collaborations work!

You add collaborators in the project settings page. You can do this when creating a new project, or of course for an already existing project. Scroll down the page, right below the tags input box, and you’ll find the collaborators section.

As you can see above there are two columns. In the right column are the users who are already part of the project; the person who created it will always be part of it, and cannot be removed. The left column is where you’ll search for collaborators. As you type in the searchbox (you can use either a name or username) results will begin to appear:

To add a user to the project, just click on the ‘+’ next to their name. They will then be moved into the righthand column:

If you’d like to later remove them, simply click the ‘-’ sign and they’ll be off the project.

Once a user is part of a project, a few things will happen. Their avatar will automatically appear on the project page, which makes projects an awesome way to show off your team:

Each collaborator will also be able to add posts to the project, which can be done in several ways. The first is from the create a new post form. As you can see in the image below, when creating a new post you will have the option to add it to any of your existing projects (and a search box to help sort in case you have many to look through):

You’ll also be able to add existing posts to a project from the project settings page. We used the same two column approach, with the left column used to search for posts and the right column displaying posts already part of the project. An additional detail we added is the ability to add any or your collaborators’ posts to a project. They’ll appear in the left hand column along with your own!

Something to note is that currently, all collaborators on a project will have near-admin privileges. This means they can edit the settings, but not delete the project entirely.

And that’s your Collaborations how-to guide. We hope you enjoy this feature!

[cartrdge]

Dynamic Music

Today’s guest post is by composer Robby Duguay, writing about the dynamic ways you can compose music for your games! 

A long time ago, in the halcyon days of the early 90s, a young Robby (then, Robert) came to realize something while playing Super Mario World. It was a simple detail, yet something that would go on to shape how I view game audio today: when Mario is on Yoshi’s back, you hear jungle drums. Not just a sound effect, or an ambient tone - a new, synced part of the arrangement made a simple change to the feel of the music, and there was no way to jump onto Yoshi to make it sound wrong or out of time. The game's music adapted to one circumstance of gameplay.

What was happening? As simply as I can explain it, the jungle drums were always there as one channel of the music, but that channel was muted. Jump on Yoshi, that channel turns on. Jump off, mute channel. This was possible then because of the way sample synthesis works on the SNES. Once games moved away from MIDI-style music triggering, memory space and processing power became major limiting factors for multi- track music - but with today’s technology we can achieve the same kind of interactivity with even greater fidelity and flexibility!

So what does that mean for us, as composers and game designers today? It means everything. If we're writing music with only the same linear mindset as when composing for film, we aren't capitalizing on the creative opportunity we've been handed. Games are interactive, so we should use every tool we have available to make our music enhance the players' experience.

Here is a more recent example of dynamic music, using a slightly different approach: Destiny.

When fighting a boss, you want the player to be hit with all the right beats at all the right moments. The problem is, one group might take 5 minutes to beat it while another takes 15. That's too wide of a margin to write a linear piece of music that will match the action - you have little to no chance that the climax of the piece will line up with the boss' final moments. The solution, in the case of Destiny, is checkpoints. At the beginning of the fight "section A" plays, and if you don't make any progress that 16-32 bars of music will loop forever. Once you've beaten the first wave, drums are added (section B). Halfway through the boss' health, the next loop switches to section C, and adds a swell and horns at 25% health. Once the boss falls, the next loop switches to a victory fanfare and conclusion. With this system, the length of the music scales to the player's experience, no matter how long it takes them to beat the boss.

If you’ve read Winifred Phillips’ book “Composer’s Guide to Game Music,” you are already aware of a few different ways music can be interactive in games. The two most straightforward and satisfying methods I’ve recently used are ‘vertically adaptive’ music and ‘horizontally adaptive’ music. Vertical adaptivity is like Mario World, where the layers of instruments are added, or track volumes are adjusted by the gameplay. Horizontal adaptivity is a system like I described in Destiny, where game variables dictate which section of the music is played next and when to progress. These two techniques are often used in conjunction with each other to create some very interesting variations, sometimes even ways of playing your music that you hadn’t initially considered!

When I was composing the soundtrack for Fate Tectonics, I saw a major opportunity to make the music dynamically follow the player’s progress. I set out to make all the different elements of the game into a member of an ensemble, and let the gameplay dictate how those parts would be heard. Each character has a voice (Penelope is a Flute, Hogweed is a Bassoon, etc), and they are arranged in such a way that the music will always sound like it belongs together. You only hear certain instruments when their associated character or element is present in your game. When you use grass tiles a lot, you’ll hear a string accompaniment. If you use water tiles most often, the accompaniment will be clarinets. This layering is the “vertical” adaptivity of the music. Composing in this kind of system takes a lot of time and forethought, but I feel it was definitely worth it.

The arc of the game is separated into three “acts.” For each act, I composed 5 different sections of music, labeled A to E, all of which looped and could transition nicely to any other section. Originally they were played in-game using preset forms, like A-B-A-C-A- D-E (to anyone who is classically trained, this is not a new concept). Eventually the developer used those forms to create a system that determined which section should play next, procedurally (this is called a Markov chain). This is the “horizontal” adaptivity of the music. Progressing from one act to the next served as a major checkpoint, all the while the volume of up to 16 instruments change on the fly at the same time. Even though I only really composed 15-20 minutes of music (if all instruments are at full volume), but because of the dynamic system it’s “performed” a little differently every time you play.

At first glance you might feel a bit overwhelmed - because that's starting to get pretty complicated, but there are many games that push the envelope of dynamic audio even further. For starters, you can check out Disasterpeace's January to catch snowflakes and hear a tune at your own pace. Dyad's whole music system is based on an in-game sequence of instrument samples. In Sound Shapes, the level is a 1:1 visual representation of the audio sequencer. There are a ton of creative ways to make music dynamically performed in-game (here is a cool look at some others). “Vertical and horizontal adaptivity” are just terms we use to try and describe the ways we make our music tie in more closely with gameplay. At the end of the day, my point is to make you consider how we can do this more effectively and maybe inspire you to come up with new and interesting ways yourself.

Try a simple test: instead of bouncing a whole track as a completed mix from your DAW, export the percussion parts separately from the rest of the music (make sure they are exactly the same length). Play both of these files at the same time in the game, and then adjust the volume of the drum track depending on the game state or proximity to an enemy. It’s possible to set up this kind of interactivity in an engine like Unity, or middleware like FMOD without too much of a learning curve (here are some tutorials). For Fate Tectonics the developers had already made a custom mixer system in their engine, so I made changes from an external xml file. It takes different implementation for different kinds of tech, but in the end it’s the same result: dynamic music.

The more you can connect the elements of your music to the interactive elements of gameplay, the more your music will become a part of the gameplay. Don't be afraid to have multiple variations of a piece based on a player's choice - file sizes are becoming less and less of a problem. You don't have to go completely granular, but if you even do a small layer of interactivity, your music and your game will benefit immensely from it, I guarantee it. Let's use the tools we've been handed to compose better gameplay experiences!