Star Control
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May 2016 Update

Published on Tuesday, May 31, 2016 By Awkbird In Founders Starbase

Starting to tinker with the dialog tool and will be playing more when I get home tonight! Very neat.

I really like the style of the dialogue theme and the fact that there are two themes has me revisiting a question I posed several months ago: is it reasonable to expect that there will be multiple race-specific styles of music for common situations?

Different themes based on which species you are dealing with would be excellent. SC2 only had one common theme for space exploration and combat. It would be spectacular to have different tracks playing dependent on which species' system you are in, or speaking to, or fighting with. Instead of just one "space exploration" theme and one "ship combat" theme, each race could get its own unique combat theme, just as they each get their own dialog theme.

Some games these days are employing procedurally generated music that actually fades between different motifs depending on the situation you're in. Not sure if that's in the cards, but the idea is that the music changes to suit the mood or specific situation you're encountering so that it doesn't always feel like the same music over and over. I can see this being applied to several aspects of the game. For example, an alien doesn't like the way your conversation is going and the music shifts to a lower register with minor chords to give a darker tone. If you go below a certain health threshold in combat, perhaps the music shifts to an even faster tempo or more aggressive percussion to make the combat even more frantic.