Destiny 2: Linear Music in an Open World

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thanks you guys Thanks I'm sky Lewin music director and composer at Bungie it's my pleasure to introduce to my left Michael Sechrist our senior technical audio designer who's also doing some composing and to my right good friend 15-year Bungie veteran now an independent composer C Paul Johnson he's going to kick off our talk with a look back at what the ambient music system was in Destiny what we changed and enhanced for destiny too and why alright

thanks ok so why are we here well we had we had to modify our tools and our music implementation and our scoring process for destiny 2 in response to scope and scale and gameplay changes and we thought you might find our approach to solving the particular problems that we ran into interesting and helpful in your own music solutions why is this talk called linear music in an open-world because during the development of destiny 2 as we started to understand more and more about how much freedom the player would have and how the needs of the gameplay of off from destiny both in its destiny won both in explorable gameplay space and in the number of unique highly scripted linear activities that we were building we realized we needed to find a more efficient way to score our game that didn't compromise the musical experience we still wanted to retain so ok so before we look at

what we changed let's start by looking back at how our ambient music worked in the original destiny game destiny and destiny 2 for that matter consisted of several different explorable destinations here you can see a few the destinations in Destiny each destination was given its own collection of linear pieces that act as the locations ambient music and 2 vines in the feel for each environment so it's a typical open-world solution these pieces of music acted as a randomized playlist of music with stretches of silence after each piece each piece consisted of a meat layer that was played and then an action layer that would come and go based on engagement with enemies in destiny when we wanted to custom score a mission or a specific encounter we were required to custom implement script all the music for that mission as a one-off event ok

so what do we change for destiny - in destiny - we have a multi-tool multitude of activities in the destinations that feel very linear but could be kicked off by players in the world or not and that left us with a whole bunch of linear gameplay that it needed to be able to come out of the open of the destination content those were also pretty easy for designers to set up and it left us with a whole bunch way more linear content than we could reasonably support custom scoring everything so we needed to customs or we needed to support unscripted environmental gameplay more curated content and we needed to do both those things with high production values at the same time we didn't want to lose our tailored linear music experience given the fact that a lot of the gameplay was still linear we were discovering that the original method we had in destiny of scripting out the

ambient music bring it back in wouldn't wouldn't a scale so our approach to testing - how did we propose to move forward well we had a music playing based on which environment already and we had ways to turn it on/off when we want to score something so we wondered how much mileage we could get out of giving that ambient music more things that could do once we did that could we score whole story missions with this new system could we set things up so designers could easily experiment with timing and in head intensities and pacing without us getting involved could we build that designer tool in a way that would let us go back and fix what they did in a way that what I haven't touched the game scripts which is really important for us in the late stages of development creatively wanted to have the ambient music when the player was wandering around activated by AI like before custom music tailored or linear flagships content and this middle layer of music that felt linear to score the rest of the gameplay

and we were asking ourselves could we make that into one cohesive system I don't know can we make it all easy to use those were our goals and now sky and Michael are going to talk about where we landed cool so this part of our music system we're really literally just focusing in on is what we play in the destinations when you're exploring in the game so our flagship content really retains the same aesthetic as it always has and we're still scoring that the same way so this part of the talk is really focused on one piece of our puzzle if you will so for destiny 2 we retained the same randomization the same ambient playlist functionality that was established in destiny with the same vertical ambient and action layers that see Paul already mentioned but we actually expanded it by composing additional linear horizontal sections of music for each of these ambient pieces that play in a destination and these intensities such as action or high

action actually expand what that music can do so that they can cover more gameplay activities that traditionally would have needed custom score and we call each of these a music system and what a music system is is a single expanded piece of music or a collection that contains all of the necessary different intensities to play it the same key or related keys and tempos and we build these different intensities out with transitions so that they can transition nicely from each piece to any other piece and in in this system it actually has to be able to go from anywhere to anywhere or end at any time and this by itself is not necessarily unique what what makes this unique is the way we combine it with other aspects so each system is effectively a queue in the destinations music the the music that

defines the feel of the destination as see Paul mentioned earlier and so the suite of systems that goes into that destination includes several of these these music systems so our music system contains a bunch of music systems if that's not confusing enough that's how we call it but again like I said none of these by themselves are unique but when we combine them together that gives us this solid linear score in the destination game experience which is exactly what we were trying to do with this basically taking that linear feel of our flagship content that blueprint and imposing it upon the feel of the activities in the destinations in our game and basically one of the big benefits of this is that because this suite of music systems contains music at a variety of different keys and tempos we are able to keep ourselves from being limited to one or two keys and related

tempos and that gives us a lot of mileage with this music so how did this change our scoring process of course the big thing here is that none of this will work without good content so we still try and focus on writing the music the same as we always have that part really hasn't changed we're just developing new ways to put it into the game and to play it back when we're playing the game so in destiny we would spot an activity with the designer we'd start composing or in some cases use that information to alter what we were already composing if something was already in flight and then we would go in and temp the activities as they were being built with temp music so for those of you who are familiar with that you know what that means if you don't it's just temporary music that's not going to stay it's some placeholder to show what the functionality is going to be like excuse me and then a designer or Michael would script in the music into the activity we

would orchestrate and record and produce the music mix it and get it all ready and then finalize it put that real music into the game in place of the temp music and polish review make tweaks as necessary and that was basically our process and that same process we carry forward for flagship content that more or less doesn't change with a few tweaks but there's some benefits to this new process that actually streamline that and that's what I wanted to show you here is it in destiny 2 we actually start off with letting the designer script the activity and they're actually building the activities score as they build an activity whether it's a mission or a strike or a raid or something that might play in a destination and so we are actually kind of skipping the temp step because they're able to temp while they script and hear that music immediately as they're building the activity and then our spotting session really becomes more of a review and tweak and change or update then you know

that initial step that kicks the whole process off for these activities and then of course we record orchestrate or orchestrate record in that order makes get the music ready put in the game in review and the rest of the process is more or less the same so once our music systems are ready to go into the game there are three main steps we need to take to get it implemented first we build the music systems and wise and then second we assign the music to the various destinations and last the designers can then use that music to score their content esque I mentioned earlier each of our music systems is composed as several different sections of music for the various intensities that we have the way that looks and wise as each music system becomes a switch with all the various sections composed for the system as the different values or if you're familiar

the Y is a playlist within that switch once all of our music systems are built as switches in wise they're ready to be assigned to the various destinations the way we do that is by grouping them into something we call music sets these are custom files we've created to act as collections of music which we then assign to destinations or parts of destinations to provide their music each of our destinations in our game have at least one ambient music set while some may have more it all depends on what the environment calls for for example our destination Titan has - a music sets one for the exterior space and another for the interior once we've assigned an ambien music set to a location of the game we've achieved the same ambient playlist behavior we had in destiny and that's that's done by randomly cycling through the various music systems in the set and playing their ambient sections but thanks to all the additional sections we've composed

into each music system that music can now be used by designers to score their content and the way they do that is by using another one of our customs our custom files called a music score now these files are comprised of a series of sections that are added by the designer to determine the flow of the music through their content each section has a name which is what the designer calls in script to trigger that section to play and an intensity value which is literally get drop-down selection of all the different switch values we use to build the music and why's so action high action tension all the different intensities that we have now let's pretend I'm a designer and I'm building an adventure for destiny - which is a essentially a side mission my music score might look something like this here I've created three sections of music starting with light action going to action and then ending with end which will play the appropriate ending for whatever music is currently playing that's all determined in the transition

as we've built and wise now that I have my score I just need to do a little bit of scripting in my adventure script to make it all function and that could look a little like this this is totally real right here the first thing I do is I define my sections at the top using their names then I simply call or activate those wherever it is I want them to play and that's the whole process for implementing our music systems before I hand it back to sky let's go over a quick graphical representation of this entire process so you guys can have a little bit better understanding here's another one of our destinations IO the first thing we do is we build iOS music systems and wise as switches we then assign those switches to in ambient music set which is then assigned to IO at this point if a player lands on IO the engine will randomly pick one of the music systems in the set and start playing its ambient section here you can

see it's choosing the second system in the cassette now let's say the player comes across the adventure we just created here you can see our adventures music score and the script the player kicks off that adventure that first music call for light action will be made by referencing the first sections name at that point the first sections intensity is sent to the engine and the piece of music that was playing its ambient section transitions to the new intensity in this case light action and one of the great in most powerful things about this system is if we decide that that call for light action is not what we want it's super easy for us to go in there open up the music score click on that it's literally just a drop-down selection of the different intensities we're gonna make it changed here we don't have the touch wise and most importantly we don't have to touch the script so therefore we can make these changes as late in the game as we need to so let's take a look at what this actually sounds like in the game I'm gonna play you a couple examples here

but before I do let me give you a couple heads up as to what we're gonna see so first of all as we mentioned you can actually hear this transition occur from either the silence between pieces of music in a destination or from a piece that's playing so one of the videos the first one we're gonna show is gonna actually demonstrate a transition from music that's already playing the second one is going to start from the silence in between the pieces so we're going to look at that and the examples we're also gonna I want to point out that this because the system is actually randomly cycling through different pieces of music and a destinations playlist or we're actually randomly picking a queue and the activities then can be scored by different pieces of music but we can actually choose to limb that to a specific piece if we want so if we say this activity needs this piece of music every time then we just make a bucket with that piece in it and it has its core but we can also let it randomize and pick and the great thing about it is you can scale what it can pick from so it can be the whole destinations playlist or a sub playlist

from that destination or just a single piece another thing to point out here is that the the videos we're going to watch are drastically shortened just for digestibility so you're going to see the burn ends on the screen that's a time cut that's where we cut a lot of time out and in between those you're gonna see script calls on the screen you're not gonna hear the music transition right on the script call you're going to hear it afterwards because obviously the transitions have to be musical and if you're familiar with wise that may in some cases be next beat next bar or whatever the next grid setting is or may be a custom cue but the transitions will follow as the music dictates and so on the first one we're gonna watch it's just gonna be music only I'll kind of talk through a couple of them and we can watch that and in the second one we'll take a look at it in context let's take a look [Music]

so there's the script call for action when you hear the transmission starting and now we're actually in action there's a time cut transition to light action and now we're actually in light action [Music] [Music]

[Music] so in the next video we're gonna see the exact same activity but a different playthrough a different piece of music this one's gonna actually have the full game mix sound design everything in there but I'll point out that the music mix is a little hot just so you can hear it a little more clearly in context

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break the picture like this will ensure a respite for us as well excellent so some of the challenges that we had in actually making this work and building it out is that it does require a large amount of music now there's a sweet spot at which the amount of music that doing this requires is actually less than doing it the way we did in destiny which is basically custom scoring every single activity in the game and the reason that it was beneficial for us is because we were over that sweet spot so if your team is gonna attempt something like this you may want to find where that is for your project because it could be that doing this actually requires more content than you need to put in so depending on the needs of the game that's something to be aware of another big one that we found is that the designers need some education on this you can't just put the tool they're always getting the result that you

expect because sometimes a designer is going to maybe do transitions a little too closely together or there's often a misunderstanding of oh I called it it didn't transition right away I want to hear it right there and then and so making the making the understanding of how this thing works really clear was important and there's also just the basic need of making sure that the script itself actually supports what the mission is going to be doing and so that's what the spotting session is incredibly important for is making sure that what the designers script is calling and the music flow following the mission is actually scoring the mission the way it needs to and then of course there's the need for handcrafted moments and the ability to handcraft is still incredibly necessary so we occasionally need to combine using the system with custom scoring on the advantages side there's there's quite a lot of great things that we discovered with this and the big one for us was that we were able

to use this to score action in the familiar dramatic and linear fashion that we set out to do it did what we wanted it to do as I pointed out earlier the designers can easily tempt their own activities and being able to immediately hear the activity and the chain in their music in their activities as they're building them is really huge and it cuts down on iteration time for them and it it takes us out of that step in the process almost entirely because they can now use music from an older destination or another destination to temp an activity as they're building and it may not be the right piece of music but 10 music rarely is so that it really worked in our favor there another big one is that because the randomization aspect of this happens to be something we can control we can use the randomization to enhance the replayability of some of these missions when we want to and a really big one is that the implementation work is a lot less redundant so let's say we had a

piece of music that we wanted to use in three different activities and maybe part of it was going to be used here and another part there and this part overlaps if we did this by hand if the way we used to do it we would have to basically implement each piece three times but with the system we just implement at once and the script points to which part we're gonna play and so it's a lot less work to set it up I mean it's still a lot of work but it's a lot less than doing it the other way yeah it's of course it still work but it's it's like it's it's a much more efficient means of making that that music available to the game another big one is that the more activities that are added in a destination the more value we actually gain from using this system approach since the randomization can stretch and cover more activities and the scalability ratio of music to activities is a huge asset for us but the biggest one I think hands down is that late changes to music have less risk associated with them because the content is already hooked up and

functional and literally all we're doing is we're changing the music intensity values in a drop-down menu like Michael mentioned we can do this completely on our own as as late as the last check-in in a mix and the script does not need to change so there's no risk to the project and on that note we are going to be moving to one of the wrap-up areas if you guys have any questions I just want to remind you please fill out your surveys and I have to say that GDC has been awesome is my first time here the game audio can unity is awesome you guys are all great please keep it up thank you