Game Design Overview: Ambience and Music

Part of setting the atmosphere of a cheerful town, desolate ruins, and fierce boss fights is nailing audio design. In older projects, we would often use free sounds online and a mixture of soundfonts for music without much attention to balancing or theming. None of us were experts on audio design and it showed in both the MMLEx and Random Ruins eras of the project.

That instantly changed when Easy93 joined the project. Suddenly we not only had someone who was an expert in sound design, but also was a Foley artist that could create new sounds for whatever scenario we wanted. This lets our sound effects and ambience work alongside our music, and instead of using generic sounds and trying to modify them into what we want, we can  have any sound we want made.

When traveling through the ruins in ASH, you'll hear the grinding of gears, the humming of electric motors, distant bangs, and layers of dynamic atmosphere. And when a deadly Reaverbot is just around the corner, an attentive digger might just be able to hear where they are before it is too late.

The Ruin Themes of Mega Man Legends 1 and 2

The Mega Man Legends series had two very different takes on music in the ruins. Mega Man Legends 1, outside of the Main Gate, had a more minimalistic take on the ruins. They were visceral, with the grinds of machinery looping in the background with occasional melodies of music intermixed. In reality, these were just looping tracks, but they really did add to the danger of the underground labyrinths.

Ruin Music: 0:00 - 0:14,
Ambience: 0:14 - 0:28

Mega Man Legends 2 went another direction. Every major ruin had a grandiose track alongside it. The music made each ruin more memorable, and within the first few seconds of going down the elevator, you really had an idea of where you were at. Calinca's articulate hums with bells and strings, circling an ominous melody creates a chilling atmosphere that really plays into the raised stakes of the final key ruin of Legends 2.

Manda Ruins, on the other hand, has a more upbeat groove to it with tribal sounding bongos/instruments and the descending chromatic melody it plays off of gives it an underground forest sort of vibe.

A Dynamic Audio Environment

Deciding between having the moody environments of Legends 1 and the strong themes of Legends 2 was not a decision we were willing to make.  For Project ASH, we were going to have our apricot pie and eat it too!  In order to do that, we've made it so the quiet moments of the game can give you the ambience of Legends 1, while each ruin will still have memorable themes like Legends 2.

This is accomplished through a system that dynamically handles music and ambience in order to match the atmosphere around the player. The ruin has a base music track, but what happens from there depends on what's going on around the player. In a room filled with Reaverbots, additional instruments are added to convey the stress. In combat, the music will amplify itself even further to fit the situation. And, if the player is exploring and inspecting a quiet area as if to solve a puzzle, ambience can take over and truly immerse the player in their surroundings. Some special rooms can also have their own music tracks and ambience, which is especially useful if players are expected to be there a while.

Base: 0:00 - 0:06,
Tense: 0:06 - 0:14,
Combat: 0:14 - 0:20,
Special Room: 0:20 - 0:31,
Ambience: 0:31 - 0:40

This isn't a new idea; games like Super Mario 64 and others did similar techniques all the way back in 1996. Depending on where you were in a level, it could change and add/subtract instruments. The most obvious area was in Dire Dire Docks, where the music would add percussion when on the land versus when you're swimming to really amp up the song along with the action.

Base: 0:00 - 0:15,
Additional Instrumentation: 0:15 - 0:30

But, by taking advantage of these techniques, we plan to create memorable ruin background music that matches the feel of Mega Man Legends 2, while still retaining the visceral feel of the ruins from Mega Man Legends 1.