Inactive The Terasology Symphony

[Chrisk]

Hey guys.
As I already mentioned before, I am planning to compose a 40-60 minute symphony as an overworld soundtrack for Terasology. The symphony should contain all the themes written for the game.

I worked quite a lot on the symphony itself, but it never felt right as an ambient soundtrack for Terasology because the beginning was messed up and there were no highlights or advanced orchestration techniques used to get some alternation going that would keep up the dramaturgy so I decided to start from scratch again and use my new orchestra library for this huge project.

I started this thread in order to plan things a little bit more and maybe work out a sound system for the engine, that could be used to split up (?) the symphony and randomly play different parts of it, I was also thinking about implementing battle themes without leaving the actual symphony.

Existing themes I want to include:

• Heroes
• Snowflakes
• Shooting Stars
• The flute from "Night Theme" as contrapart for other themes, also as kind of background support layer
• Light and Shadow
• Sanctuary
• The vibraphone from "Chamber of Darkness" in a lighter harmonic context
• The english horn from "Fluids" as background support layer
• The flute theme from "Ancient Temple"
• The drums from "Hunt" as additional battle layer

The rest is pretty much impossible to include because it is not thematic enough or simply to dark and I wanted the overworld soundtrack as emotional as possible.
I also want to compose a complete drum layer for the whole symphony that could be put on top if the player is inside the battle. That way, the music wouldn't have to switch and we could still provide a more dramatic feeling.

Current problems:

• Keeping up the dramaturgy over 40 to 60 minutes is really hard, especially with different themes and emotions
• Figure out the start, since it is the first thing you hear inside Terasology.
• Since the symphony is to complex, the structure should be clear right from the start. Composing this huge thing from scratch is really hard (Taking notes should be the solution, but I don't know exactly what to plan out)

Btw, do you think the symphony should be splitted up into pieces, or should it always be the same symphony since it would be a lot easier for me to compose it as a whole?

 

[Cervator]

I also want to compose a complete drum layer for the whole symphony that could be put on top if the player is inside the battle. That way, the music wouldn't have to switch and we could still provide a more dramatic feeling.

Specific quoting this because it is smart! Very handy solution

As for the rest that's a lot of music wizardry

Right now the big advantage to the individual pieces is that they can be injected piecemeal into the game with different "bias settings" for when they should play. I think that's the big advantage from the code side, but I can see your point in it being an advantage from the music side to write one long symphony. Yet, it also sounds like a grand piece will be harder to do than the sum total of all the small pieces? Because of the ... dramaturgic backbone? That's me totally making up a term and hoping it fits!

If you'd like to do the symphony piece because, well, it's a symphony! Then I say go for it, but don't necessarily worry about fitting it into the game to be used 100%. Do it for the artistic value and to say you've done it, then if we can also use it whole in-game then great. If we use it in one piece only at an exact event (say, after a victory condition and as long as the player stays in-game to keep playing) and then use the single pieces "normally" I'd say that's fine too.

I kinda like the idea of keeping it more special than having it start playing every time you start the game. As a post-victory event piece including the combat overlay it would give the player a special 40-60 minutes of play time, with a lower risk of overexposing a grand piece. But that's just IMHO