Exploratorium

Day and Night Music

The Day/Night cycle, controlled in the lighting manager script, takes 6 minutes. In Wwise, the Day music is a set of 7 short tracks ranging from 5 secs to 30 seconds all in a playlist object. At the start of the game, the main motif plays and then the playlist alternates between 30-45 seconds of silence and of the 7 day tracks. The night music is a 3 minute long track that corresponds directly to the night cycle.

Both Day and Night playlists are in a switch container controlled by the music state group. The state is set to day at the beginning of the game, and using the event system in the lighting manager, the state is set to night a bit before the sun sets. When this day to night change happens, a transition segment is triggered and plays at the same tempo as the day rhythm. I cross-fade between whatever day track is playing and the transition segment and it connects seamlessly into the night music. This transition segment also allowed me to cleanly transition from the day tempo (80bpm) to the night tempo (72bpm). Since the night music is exactly 3 minutes long, I change the state from in the music track within Wwise, this transitions to the silent part of the day track playlist.

Star Shard Music

In the game there are 5 pieces of a star that you must obtain the complete the game. You can obtain a map that hints at their locations, but I wanted to support that discovery with spatialized sound and music. Each shard emits the shard theme using the AkAmbient script with an attenuation curve that increases the volume and and low pass filter the closer the player gets to the shard. Additionally, the ambient shard track is side chained against with the main track so that the ambient track smoothly overrides it.

Each of the 5 shards share the bass and a sampled kalimba pad, but swap between 5 different instruments respectively (cello, kalimba 1, kalimba 2, piano, and guitar). For organizational purposes (and slight over-optimizing), I placed all the variations in one music track in Wwise and placed the unique instruments in a switch track. This allowed me to call the same event on each shard and then associate each shard object with AkSwitch in Unity.

When the star shards are collected, a short stinger is played with the instruments from the already collected shards and the bass speeds up as more shards are collected. To achieve this, I made individual switch groups in Wwise for each shard so that the instruments can unmute in any order of collection. Additionally, the game manager has a counter for the collected stairs, so I set and RTPC/Switch combo to increase the bass speed not only on the stinger, but also on the ambient music for each star. The stinger is triggered using Wwise's Stinger system which allows it to be played at the next bar of the main ambient track.

Endgame Music

When the second to last star shard is collected, I wanted to have a modified version of the star shard track play and the synth bass to speed up the closer a player got to the final shard. I had a few problems that I had to solve to accomplish this: I needed to know that the player had collected the second to last shard, where it was, when to play the cue, and how to speed up the bass as the player got closer.

On the ambient star shard music, I utilized Wwise’s callback system to call a method every measure checking to see if a player tried to collect the object, that way the destruction of the game object syncs up with the music. The method also checks the star collection count from the game manager and extends the number of method calls it takes to destroy the object after the player collects the 4th star. Once the 4th star is destroyed, a timer is triggered in the game manager.

StarIncrementTotal.cs

GameManager.cs

In the game manager, once the timer finishes (which is manually synced to the star pickup stinger) the endGame() method is called and uses GameObject.FindWithTag to obtain the last star shard. This is crucial to the bass speeding up since I used Wwise’s built-in distance parameter that calculates the distance between the game object the event is called on and the listener (the player). I associated that parameter with a switch group and that switch group with the bass switch tracks in the end game music track.

GameManager.cs

private void endGame(){
	lastStar = GameObject.FindWithTag("star");
	stopMusic.Post(this.gameObject);
	endgameMusic.Post(lastStar);
	Debug.Log("We're in the endgame now");
}