Astra: Game Design Upgrade – Music (Patreon)

Astra: Game Design Upgrade – Music

Hello Patrons,

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Today, we’ll be discussing the next game design upgrade we have planned for Astra – the BGM/OST! 

Before we get into it, just a quick announcement that Eric is returning to work on Astra. He is the musical genius that made the OST for Crystalline, KAS and Ethereal Enigma!! For Astra, we are going for a bit of a futuristic-synthesis vibe but without it feeling robotic or dystopian. We want it to have a sense of exploration and wonder! Please feel free to have a listen to the attached track to get a sense of Astra's sci-fi signature. :^)

And with that being said, the main content of this post is that there are two points of upgrade which will be discussed today. The first being the quantity of tracks and the second being track variance!

Track Quantity

This one is fairly obvious that the more tracks a project has, the variety of music that will be heard in-game will be greater. There are tracks that overlap but subtle differences can portray completely different emotions which really help in elevating the scene. Let’s look at how many tracks previous games had:

ACE Academy – 34 Songs

Crystalline – 29 Songs

Kaori After Story - 7 Songs

Ethereal Enigma - 17 Songs

ACE had the most tracks with slight variances, Crystalline had more scene specific tracks (especially location based), Kaori After Story was a fairly small game and EE, being a more standard school slice-of-life, had a lot of overlapping emotions (and thus, a smaller OST). Astra is planned to have at least 30 BGM tracks HOWEVER the main point to this is that the tracks will have a greater range of variance when it comes to emotions (whereas ACE and Crystalline tracks had some overlaps). That being said, we’ll be able to do this without compromising on the variance between similar tracks. Please read on to the next section on how we will do this!

Track Variance

What we noticed is that a similar track with a bit of tweaking can portray a different emotion. If you take a listen to track A and track B that are attached, you’ll notice track A sounds more somber while the B has a slight hopeful uptick. They both have a similar vibe but their difference can portray subtle mood differences. We plan to use this technique for all 30 tracks of Astra which effectively will give us 30 unique songs and 30 alternatives. Comparing this to ACE’s OST design, it would be the equivalent of 60 track!

The other aspect of track variance is using them in a crossfade during a scene for a more seamless transition. What that means is that if you noticed in our existing game, if a song had to change to a slightly different mood, we had to fade out the music track, then fade in a different track. This caused a silence in the music layer and depending on the players reading speed, it was jarring at time. With the new OST design, we can do a crossfade to a variance track. This is done by playing both songs at the same time but one track is set to 0 volume. If the other track is needed, the original fades to 0 volume and the alternative fades in to 100 volume. What it does is seamlessly transition into the variant track to match the emotion on screen without any jarring music stops and starts. You can take a listen to the crossfade example that is attached to see how it works between variant A and variant B.

Just imagine a scene where your character and partner are stargazing on the ship bridge as you travel to the next star system. She is talking about something that has been bothering her for a while and you give some positive advice so the mood shifts to a more upbeat note. A crossfade would happen as you the player picked the positive response, so in this example, a musical shift prompts that something good has happened!

This post ended up being pretty long, I hope you guys don’t mind that we are diving deeper into our development process! :P

That’s all for now, as always please feel free to share your thoughts below. Thank you again for your continued support. <3

- Dishu