Time-Gated Music Loops!

Lots of new content in the current build, which I'll do my best to recount in a later post, but for now I wanted to share some music loops I've created for my first batch of levels and explain how they work and how I went about making them.

I struggle with writing music for my game, as all of my experience with music has largely been in the realm of "weirdo-noise-punk", which is fun, but doesn't translate very well into ambient, cinematic, or otherwise *understated* pieces. After some trial and error* I've stumbled into a method** which I'm very happy with and I can see generating a good amount of ideas. Here are two pieces in particular:

https://soundcloud.com/alexhntk/rfyl-lab-warm

https://soundcloud.com/alexhntk/lab-hot

As evident by the titles, these are both for the Lab levels. What is warm / hot? I worked out a system to play 3 seperate loops of music, depending on the time elapsed in the level. I did this by telling the "cool" track (not listed, its just very ambient) to loop forever. A time-check gets crossed on my existing Timer script, at which point "loop" becomes false. The SoundManager then checks "if Music Is Not Playing", play *Warm Track / Hot Track*, and Loop is set to true again. This happens immediately after the previous loop finishes a cycle, making for a smooth transition between Cool, Warm, and Hot loops. Each time the time-gate is checked, Loop goes off, and when the audio has finished it's current cycle, Loop goes back on and the process repeats. There may be more elegant ways to achieve this, I'm an incredibly green hobby-level programmer still, but it works quite well and I'm very happy with the result!

**As for making the music: this may be helpful for anyone who is also having a hard time "getting into it". I came across this technique by accident / luck. I started out by making simple ambient loops, with only a bare suggestion of musical  / melodic / rhythmic information present. By using that bare suggestion as a framework, I can build up more apparent musical ideas, and keep layering up in that manner. Then it just comes down to chunking the piece into a few loops, and tweaking each loop to have the intended amount of "energy" or detail to them. For the transition from the Warm to the Hot track as listed above, I doubled the time on the drums and increased the main melody's arpeggiation . This gives it a nice "running" kind of bounce feel, I think. Some background elements also had their octave raised to make them feel a bit more urgent. This is a very simple method to building up musical urgency, to support the intended game-feel, and I'm looking forward to what else comes from this approach. My only concern is to keep it from all feeling "samey", which I think I can mitigate with different tempos and time signatures, as well as instrumentation used. If every track relies on swelling bass chords, I'm making a boring set of songs. Variation and variety are going to be key.

Also, obviously - not an expert. Hopefully, if you've read this far, you get something out of my rambley nonsense. Cheers!

* one example of the trial and error is a track which I think is far too noisy, despite being relatively reserved for my usual affinity 

https://soundcloud.com/alexhntk/its-coming

who knows, maybe I can use it with my noise-rock band :P