[Bontz-team] music

[Owen Swerkstrom]

>[Marcus] :
> Okay. So I'm just trying to get a feel for the first
> mission. Is he feeling
> heroic (Indiana Jones theme), warlike (Mars from
> "the Planets"/Gustav Holst,
> Imperial March/ John Williams) or is there some
> other kind of feeling you'd
> like to build up?

Hmm, you ask good questions :^)
The game isn't really broken down into missions a la
"level 1, level 2" etc, though for the sake of writing
what will be a branched storyline I've segmented it
into (long, game-wise) chapters.  As we see it right
now, the game will never tell the player "chapter 2",
or "your mission: do such-and-such", but through text
dialogue, interacting with non-playing characters and
such, the direction of the game and the
what-to-do-next stuff will be revealed.
For more about the story, open up
"story" in
http://www.nongnu.org/bontz/docs/freemindbrowser.html
it's a little out-of-date, savannah's cron job will
have my updated one live within a couple hours.  But
chapter 1 is pretty complete on that old version.  In
terms of game time, I imagine chapter 1 to be
somewhere around 1.5~2 hours long and chapter 2 to be
2~3 hours.  If the game gets over 10 play-hours long
I'll be very happy. :^)  With various story branches
and it being open and hackable, hopefully people will
play with it one way or another beyond their first
play-through.

That said, there are a couple themes I think we're
"missing" at the moment.  One would be something we
might want several variations on, an "overworld"
theme.    This might be something like a heroic
Indiana Jones sound, but might have a more general
"there's a big world to explore here" feel to it.  As
I think about it, the main Indiana Jones theme is
actually very similar in feel to what we'd want here. 
As the player is out "in the wild" between towns or
looking for that secret cave or just wandering around
looking for monsters to fight for gaining experience,
there should be a sort of big-feeling theme going on. 
Perhaps there would be a more mellow or mysterious
version for the deep forest areas, or a sparser,
harsher version during mountain exploration, or things
like that.

The other main "feeling" I'm not finding in any of the
bits we've got so far is an andrenaline-filled battle
theme.  Battles will rely more on picking the proper
things on text menus and having a good strategy than
having superb hand-eye coordination, so it's the
music's task to make battles feel like intense duels
between Furgason's party and a group of baddies. 
Something warlike there may be appropriate.  We'll
probably want two main battle themes, one for
"regular" enemies and one extra-scary one for the
extra-tough boss enemies.  If you've ever played a
Final Fantasy game, I'm thinking along those lines.

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