left brain vs. right brain
ah, another day in the ongoing struggle to reconcile “writing good music” with “writing music that works in the game”. a struggle made more difficult when that game music is “interactive” and “dynamic” and “other buzz words”.
to focus too much on the “good music” part is to compose with reckless artistic abandon, writing whatever works musically with nary an eye toward how it will ultimately get integrated into the game. this is a recipe for big headaches down the road, like when composers-for-hire happily write a bunch of music, get paid, walk away, and leave it to the devs to work out all the tricky stuff.
but focus too much on the “works in the game” part, and you run the risk of not so much writing music, but satisfying a list of requirements…checking things off a checklist. “in order to dovetail with the design, this piece needs to be in *this* style, be *this* long, have *this* many sections and *this* many variants of each, at *this* tempo, in *this* key, meet *these* filesize requirements, and be linear enough to sound composed but non-linear enough to take into account that we never truly know what the player will do next”. piece of cake. piece of twelve-layer-nearly-impossible-to-create-and-then-transport wedding cake.
hey wait…we own ID now. maybe i’ll just borrow some of those old DOOM midi files. while that may not actually solve the problem at hand, it would certainly bring great joy!
