Hyperstars Lisa’s Theme Dynamic Music
In this blog, I’m going to show how I implemented dynamic music for Hyperstars. The Video below shows the finished implementation!
First, before even composing the music for the game, I had to plan how I wanted to implement the music in the game. I took a lot of inspiration from the dynamic music set in the fighting game Killer Instinct, since Hyperstars is also a fighting game, I wanted to try implementing that type of system myself. In order to get that style of dynamic music, I need to let the player have control on the pacing of the song. That means I create the verse, chorus, bridge of the song, but the player controls when those sections play with their own actions.
With that in mind, I went to compose a song that could loop seamlessly between just the verse, and also go to the Chorus at any time. This is what I came up with!
With the finished track I exported all the stems and brought them over to Wwise.
Verse
For the verse, I knew that I wanted the ability to put in and take out stems depending on the intensity of the match. So I created an RTPC called “Intensity”, with 1 as the starting value and 3 as the most intense value. I then sliced the Verse into three sections, intro, Verse A, and Verse B. The plan with separating the sections was so that once the song finally left the chorus, it would go to the next available section of the verse instead of restarting at the intro of the song!
Afterward I then went into each, section and adjusted which tracks would be playing depending on the intensity RTPC.
Chorus
For the chorus, I wanted the team to ONLY play the chorus during events that they found impressive. Whether its the player landing a large combo, a crazy parry, or quickly gaining a comeback, It should be as simple as them telling the music to play the Chorus. With that I went with creating two States, Verse and Chorus.
Whenever the MusicState was turned to the chorus, the song would Immediately transition to the chorus and play its contents. However, if the next player doesn’t do anything the game finds impressive afterward, then the switch can be set back to Verse and the chorus would go back to the next verse section after it finishes that section of the chorus.
