Music as a tool for game design
I always look forward to the moment when it’s time to add sound to our games. Accompanied with music and sound design, even simple prototypes can suddenly become immersive, and the road to a finished product no longer seems so long.
Early on in the development of our latest iOS game, You Can’t Win But You Are A Good Person (referred henceforth by its nickname and hashtag, YouAreGood), I knew sound and music had to play a larger role than usual. What I didn’t realize initially is that they would influence the design of the game in subtle but important ways.
The concept was fairly basic: the screen is divided into four tiles. Each tile changes at different rates from black to white. Tapping a square resets it to black. If a square reaches 100% white, it’s game over.
To complement this mechanical simplicity, we decided to go with a minimal graphical style. Besides aesthetics, this choice had the benefit of limiting the scope of the project. With team members grappling with new jobs, new babies, and new cities, we needed to make the game as simple as possible if we wanted a chance of completing it.
The minimal graphical approach seemed to fit with the gameplay, and we hoped it would come across as a stylistic decision rather than an excuse to do less work (I’m of the mind that both things can be true at once). That said, the problem with a game that features four black and white tiles and nothing else is that it isn’t incredibly immersive. The basic mechanics were fun, for sure, but there was something missing.
Discovering what the game was all about
As I played our early prototype, I learned what made the game special. I found that I could play nearly indefinitely as long as I kept a relaxed but unwavering concentration on the gameplay. The moment I became slightly distracted, however, I lost. It’s almost as if my ultimate score reflected my current level of mental clarity. Maybe people could actually use this game to meditate. I decided to take this idea and underline it with an ambient soundtrack that would hopefully imbue the gameplay with a zen-like aura.
I’m a big Brian Eno fan and particularly enjoyed his (and Peter Chilvers’) early iOS app, Bloom. If you’re unfamiliar with Bloom, it’s essentially an interactive composition that lets you add notes by casually tapping here and there. It’s not a game so much as a sonic playground.
With YouAreGood, I wanted bring a similar level of interactivity to the soundtrack. In addition to the relaxing music, I thought each tap should contribute to the melody, a la Bloom. By virtue of playing the game, players would create beautiful melodies that never repeated. Each game would be its own unique composition.
This musical concept would provide the immersion the game needed, but it also influenced aspects of the game’s design.
We knew that we wanted YouAreGood to have a “press your luck” element with regards to the scoring system. In other words, we wanted to incentivize the player to score as close to 100 as possible, risking the game for a big reward.
In the first iteration of YouAreGood, the player scored the same amount of points as the current number on the tile. So, if the tile was at 78 when the player tapped, the player earned 78 points. If the tile was at 2, the player earned 2 points. This had the benefit of being simple, but also gave players an easy and risk-free way of earning a high score. Simply tapping continuously would be a slow but sure way to grind one’s way to the top of the leaderboard.
We went back to the drawing board, and created the following conditions:
Players don’t score anything if they press a tile under 50
Tiles from 50-70 give you 1x your score (i.e. 50 x 1 = 50 points)
Tiles from 70-90 give you 2x your score (i.e. 70 x 2 = 140 points)
Tiles from 90-100 give you 3x your score (i.e. 90 x 3 = 270 points)
The point system was basic, but it rewarded pressing your luck and discouraged mindless tapping. It wasn’t until I implemented the music that I felt that something was still off.
The interplay between music and game design
To complement YouAreGood’s gentle, synth-driven soundtrack, I decided to use a chime sound that I sculpted with my trusty Nord Lead 4 synthesizer. I wanted each tap to be harmonious, so I came up with a scale that worked well with the chords in the soundtrack. For the range of taps that scored points (50-99), I ended up recording 16 ascending chimes, with the highest point range triggering a chord with the high tonic note on top (the resolution note of the scale).
As soon as we played the game with the new chimes, we noticed an incongruity between the way the points were totaled and the way the chimes made you feel. For example, if I were to tap a tile at 71 and then at 89, my score multiplier would be the same for both scores (2x), but the chimes told a different story. The joyous chime at 89 made it sound like my score was a lot better than the score I earned at 71, even though this wasn’t actually the case.
To fix this mismatch between expectation and reality, we did away with the tiered point system and instead used an exponential growth function as the basis for the code that determined the amount of points earned.
Before the change (tiered point system):
Tapped at 71 = 142 points (2x)
Tapped at 89 = 178 points (2x)
After the change (using exponential growth function):
Tapped at 71 = 213 points (3x)
Tapped at 89 = 623 points (7x)
The player would now earn huge multipliers by waiting until the last moment. After making this change, tapping a tile at 99 was finally as triumphant as it sounded (15x, or 1,485 points, compared to just 297 before!).
Music and game design: better together
Music and sound design can be more than just window dressing on a game. They can help define and emphasize what makes a game worth playing. At times, like with YouAreGood, they can even help expose the inconsistencies and gaps in a game’s design.
Stephen Kemsley makes music for Scope Creep Studios. He also records mellow electronic tunes as Menevado.