Republic: The Revolution music system (2002)

Channel:

James Hannigan

Subscribers:

4,490

Published on March 25, 2018 9:51:46 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kej-l_L8agc

Game:

Republic: The Revolution (2003)

Duration: 4:57

2,314 views

57

A testing tool for the groundbreaking interactive music system of Republic: The Revolution (2002, Elixir Studios).
Devised by James Hannigan, Audio Coding by Andy Mucho

Musicians: The Slovak Symphony Orchestra. Soprano: Miranda Keys.

This score was created at a time when there was little in the way of off-the-shelf tools available for authoring and auditioning interactive music in games, and few guidelines for how to go about it at all (we were making things up as we went along). The testing tool shown was cobbled together late on in the process, simply to test the flow of music as if triggered by events in-game, but was not available during the game's development. Back then, one had to imagine how music would flow in real-time until implemented by the audio coder.

The music comprised what I used to call 'layers' and 'segments', which are basically along the lines of what are now thought of as the components of 'horizontal and vertical composition' in games. In coming up with this particular approach to Republic, I was building on ideas from earlier projects such as EA/Bullfrog's Theme Park World (1999) which used a similar kind of branching - but had no 'vertical' layering. Stems were used, but 'baked' into numerous composite music cells instead, endlessly spliced together by the music system in-game (the music grew 'busier' as the park filled up).

The music in Republic was divided into two categories: endless game state music for both day and night, and linear 'action' or narrative music which would kick-in for visual events (set pieces, cutscenes, etc.) - playing out in full before restarting the state-based music. The flow of segments (which were very short - sometimes only a few bars each) was aided by triggering new ones on a different audio channel, over the previous segment's reverb tail. Each segment had up to three vertical layers.

- James.

Other Statistics