6/7/99

As you might have noticed some kind of burn-out is happening with some of the people who write these daily updates. To make sure all the updates are still interesting for you to read, and to make sure they contain enough interesting and new content, we have decided to bring some more people on to write updates. I guess you have seen Jim Gardner’s last week, who is one of our programmers and we’ll try to rotate more people in as time goes by. On Friday I went up north to meet with Brian Williams. Brian is the composer for “Torment’s” music score. Over the past few weeks he had submitted a number of sketches and ideas to us and it was time to go over them together and nail down the exact direction we want to take with certain tracks. Unlike many other computer games, in “Torment” we try to create an adaptive soundtrack that blends in nicely with the game. This means that depending on what is going on, how the story evolves, and which people are on the screen, the music will adapt on the fly. As a result we need a large number of different themes, motifs and snippets to make sure we can cover a wide variety of ‘feels’. Just to give you an idea of how we try to accomplish that, here’s what we plan to put in the game. Each area you can visit has its own soundtrack, although some of the smaller ones are grouped together under one theme that works for all of them. This ensures that the ambient soundbed always reflects the mood of the location you are hanging out at. These location themes are often very ambient so that they don’t intrude with other motives, and more importantly to avoid getting too repetitive. The last thing we want is people turning off the music because they’re annoyed by some ever-looping happy tune. All the NPCs and other main characters in the game also get their own character themes. These themes are obviously much more distinctive - actually they are the most distinctive ones of them all. We want to make sure you can get some basic information about characters simply from the music cue and the way it flows. Of course we also use these to make sure you know when you are dealing with some important person, although important does not necessarily mean he is overly relevant to YOUR story. It could just be an important social status that could call for such a personalized theme. Of course the factions need themes to make sure we can create a general flair for areas that are strongly inhabited by faction members, or when you have the feeling something is happening that might throw the story and balance in a certain faction direction. And then we have the battle themes, which are customized for the different areas and locations once again, to make sure it’s not getting too repetitive. It’s great to remember the combat theme from “Final Fantasy VII” but when you hear it for the 785,653th time, it’s just not quite as fresh as it used to be. The battle themes are more powerful and agitating variations of the location themes to a degree to make sure you feel the urgency that lies within combat… as if you need that. If the opponents whack you over the head, you’ll realize for yourself really quickly… and still we thought it’s a neat idea that would help increase the impact and importance of combat in general. Since we’re dealing with a large number of locations and characters, I am sure you see that we will require quite a number of independent themes that nevertheless play well with each other. Brian does a great job with his music, capturing some of the dark elements of Planescape, but it is vital for him to have as much information as possible about what’s going on at any one time in the game to be able to contribute the right music for that. To help out with that we met on Friday and went through some 30 something different themes and sorted them, discussed them and… cajoled Brian. :) Guido Henkel Project Director

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