(soft, percussive music)
- Alright, here are a couple examples;
In this example, we start with stealth.
You'll hear a bunch of stealth kills.
So, you'll hear, and it's subtle,
and that's the point; but you'll
hear the percussion responding
to things the player does.
And then, at some point,
he's gonna trigger,
the player's gonna trigger the
switch to Investigate Mode,
which is a slightly different intensity,
because they're gonna find a dead body.
And then, we switch over
to another part of the game
where there's a lot more stealth.
It's a different piece of music.
So you can just hear this working
under a variety of sort
of compositional systems.
- [Guard 1] Oi! Oi! You got a target?
- [Guard 2] Saw something maybe;
movement along the tree line.
- [Guard 1] Well, that's
thick jungle over there, eh?
It's all moving.
I don't see anything.
(two percussive hits)
- [Nate] Dammit!
- [Guard 2] Alright everyone, false alarm.
But keep an eye out.
- [Nate] And the gang's all here.
(slow, undulating, suspenseful music)
- [Guard 1] So, which one
of them did they spot?
- [Guard 2] The older brother.
He shot a couple of our men and ran off.
- [Guard 1] The other one's alive?
- [Guard 2] We need to find
his body, then we'll know.
- [Guard 1] Yeah.
(very soft, sparse, suspenseful music)
We'll see.
(very soft, sparse, suspenseful music)
- [Guard 3] Find what took him out!
- [Instructor] So now they're
gonna switch to Investigate.
- [Guard 3] He's here somewhere.
(very soft, sparse, suspenseful music)
- [Guard 4] What the...
(soft, eerie music with
rhythmic percussion)
(music continues softly swelling)
- [Instructor] And they'll jump the place
- [Guard 5] He's here!
(rapid gunfire)
(music swells amidst gunfire)
(waterfall roaring over soft music)
(soft percussive music)
(man yells painfully)
(high, sustained flute note)
(soft percussion)
- [Instructor] So that
flute shift was something
when Anthony went back
an reedited the cues,
he moved from the proper
chunk part of the cue
down to the responsive percussion stuff.
'Cause he thought, "Hey, it'd be cool if
this played when I choked a guy, yeah."
(soft, percussive, suspenseful music)
(quiet percussion)
(quiet percussion)
(flute trilling)
- [Instructor] The drums
stop there just naturally,
and I think that adds some tension too.
(soft drums and percussion)
(soft drums and percussion)
- [Guard] Wait!
(soft drums and percussion)
- [Instructor] So I'm gonna trigger combat
here in a second when he
walks around the corner.
So listen for that.
(soft drums and percussion)
- [Guard] What the? What's that?
- [Second Guard] What the...
(guns fire)
(building string music)
- [Sully] Shit! There's more of 'em.
(driving percussion and strings)
(driving drums)
- [Nate] Ah crap!
(gunfire)
- [Instructor] And then you'll hear
a transition back down here.
(music thins out and quiets down)
- [Sully] We're hidden, for now.
(driving percussive music)
(gunfire)
- [Instructor] Now
you'll hear how it ends.
- [Sully] Got this son of a bitch!
(gunfire)
Great shot!
(music comes to a climax and cuts out)
Hey Nate, let's go before
more shorelacks show up
- [Nate] Alright, (sigh)
let's get that bridge down.
- So I think the coolest thing that
came out of all these meetings
with the AI guys is
that more folks started
coming to these meetings,
because we started
to discover that when this worked right,
other weird things happened.
Like the dialogue that
triggers at the end of a fight
and the change in animation posture
from, you know, stressed out in combat
to just walkin' through the jungle.
All those things were happening
on the same game frame:
fight ended, music end tag was triggered,
dialogue line was triggered,
animation was triggered.
We started complaining about that
in the meetings and the AI
guys pulled in more people;
and, actually, those exit points
that I told you about in the musical file
became the guide to trigger the dialogue
which then, in turn, triggered
the animation change.
So we actually had control over all that,
which was amazing.
And we went mad with power.
(crowd laughs)
No; but, it's the right way to do it.
I mean, if you watch a film or, you know,
a TV show or something
where this is done right.
Next time you're playing a game;
I think this is something that
people aren't doing enough.
You know, there are a lot of games
where you finish a fight and the audio,
the barrage of audio things
that happen, is overwhelming.
You know, there's dialogue and a stinger
and all this stuff, and it just
goes (makes a splat sound).
Because a bunch of
disparate groups of people
who weren't talking to each other,
did their work and got, you know,
the last frame totally nailed.
