Designing Awesome Videogame Audio

Step 7 Ditching Pitch Shifting

So, the obvious ways to solve the problems we were having with pitch shifting were to either remove pitch shifting, or remove the melodic parts.

On one hand, the pitch shifting worked really well with just a rhythm. It was nicely interactive, and "felt" really good. On the other hand, when all you had was a rhythm, even with pitch shifting, the soundtrack got boring quickly, and without any melodic parts at all, got irritating for a non-player to listen to in short order.

While I think we could have found a way to keep the interactive pitch in the soundtrack, the issue really at some point becomes one of expediency. Almost any problem is solvable with sufficient time - but what does that time actually cost you? This is, almost by itself, the most important lesson that you can learn in game development. Probably in almost any development process. It's not about whether you can do something or not. It's about whether you can do it in a reasonable time, in a reasonable budget.

It's not ideal - everyone wants to do everything the best way - but instead, you have to do them the best way *you can*. Learning that distinction, and being able to remain flexible, will be the difference between finishing a project and being crushed under a mountain of problems. What you have to do is figure out what is truly important to the core of the game, spend your time on that, and cut away things that don't serve that goal. For us, the interactivity was what was important. Not specifically pitch-shifting. It was a fun effect, but not the only one.

I really enjoy drum & bass music. I also really enjoy more traditional rock music. That may not seem relevant, on its face, but it set off a chain of thoughts that went something like this:

"Drum & bass always sounds really fast. It probably *is* really fast. But if you just take the underlying beat, don't change its speed, but add more notes, what kind of effect do you get?"

Well, it's easy enough to try in something like Garageband. Just take a standard rock beat, and add a bunch of looped drums, cymbals and hi-hats.

Here's the "rock" track:

Here's the "drum & bass" layer:

Here you can hear how the two change as you add one layer to the other:

By creating multiple layers, and having their relative volumes change depending on the speed at which the player was rolling around, we were able to keep that really interactive feel to the audio but still keep it locked to the same beat and pitch. This meant we could actually make a catchy melody that didn't shift all over the place, yet we still got that musical reinforcement when your speed increased! By letting go of the initial idea, but remembering why the idea was attractive, we were able to come up with a fast solution that we could spend time polishing - working out the kinks and making it function really well - and not sacrifice a huge amount of development time.

Now the only problem was when you dropped off or picked up a fare - the newly "steady" bassline cutting out of the mix was now really noticeable, and sounded really bad.