Music themes in a game: how many?

[Najdorf]

THe question is: how many music themes should I put in a game? I have no problem listening to the same track for hours, when I get used to it I like it even more.
Now, I have say 5 good tracks for my game, but I like one particularly:
Personally, if I could choose, I' d listen to that one always.
Do you think the average user is ok with "always the same tracck" or prefers many tracks? I think, if you get bored by one cycling theme, you will get bored also by 5 cycling themes. But if it' s a good one, it' s ok forever. Hey, the game should keep your attention, not the music!

What do you think?

[macboy]

The user would of course prefer more tracks, but the downside of implementing that would be a bigger download size. :(

[ERaZer]

Really depends on the game, and what you try to do with the music.

[Damian]

It depends how long a game takes. In Taxpayers' Millions, a campaign goes about half an hour, so I included 4 themes of varying lengths. If your game has discrete sections, you might want to try a theme for each. In House Divided, a game goes only about 5 mins, so I just used one theme. If your game download is already going to be big because of other assets, then more music is ok, but there's no point blowing out a 2.5mb download to 15megs!

[Najdorf]

The cool thing is that my tunes, from the legendary Estrayk, occupy only 70k! They are chip-tunes, that is amiga-like tunes, but are so terribly cool :cool: ! Boy, you don' t need cool sound if you are a gorgeous musician...
Another so cool thing is that this mod music does not steal me not one FPS!!
The game is a very monotonous (but fun) shoot' em up; I think I 'll keep just one tune in the first release (today or tomorrow).

GET READY;)

[Bachus]

It depends on the game. For an RPG you would obviously need many different pieces of music (battle, boss, overworld, town, etc). With an arcade-style game like Pac-Man, you can obviously get away with just one piece of music, but more is almost always better. The old Mac shooter Battle Girl had multiple songs that changed every ten levels.

Oh, and you should always let the player turn off the music in case he/she wants to listen to iTunes or whatever while they play.

[Najdorf]

Well, you' re gonna see the game in notime, so you can tell me if it' s ok; Yeah, It' s quite a pac man like arcade. The track is so cool I think it will do fine by itself.

[Dr. Light]

I REALLY wish METAL supported MOD!

[macboy]

Originally posted by Dr. Light
I REALLY wish METAL supported MOD! Somebody could probably write a function for it. (it's open-standard, right? :blink: )

[Dr. Light]

he he he. I thinks its a bit more complicated than that.

[macboy]

Originally posted by Dr. Light
he he he. I thinks its a bit more complicated than that. Never said it'd be easy. I just said somebody could probably do it. :p

[Joseph Duchesne]

Reeeeel hard, you'd need to (A) be named Marin Saric and have the MataL source or;)
(B)Know Metal STRYONY and Assembly for mac :D

[macboy]

Originally posted by Joseph Duchesne
Reeeeel hard, you'd need to (A) be named Marin Saric and have the MataL source or;)
(B)Know Metal STRYONY and Assembly for mac :D Maybe. I wrote a JPEG loader/saver prototype using MetaL. :p