As time past by, little by little various creatures started to appear, we could see them move and interact, and so we were able to give them even more character by adding sounds to them. Meanwhile the programmers at Two Tribes made all the necessary tools to incorporate our audio in the game.

Music was a kind of different story. It was clear from the start that we wanted to move away from the upbeat and upfront tunes in Toki Tori 1, and that we were going to opt for a quite minimalistic approach. The music has to blend in with the total soundscape, sometimes more in the foreground if the situation in the game calls for it, sometimes it could even be completely absent.

The style and feel of the music to be composed became more clear as the story and thematics evolved along the the development process. Now we’re on a point where there are considerable pieces of levels that can be played, which makes it possible to test how music can work together with gameplay.

To achieve a tight connection between music and gameplay, the music has to adapt itself to the situation our hero is in at a given moment. Therefore, we don’t want the music to be as a static track that plays from start to end, but rather as flow of musical sound that accompanies Toki on its journey and that emphasizes the atmosphere of his surroundings and the situation he’s in.

All this asks for thinking about a clever ‘’music playing engine”  that decides which musical material has to be played in what situation.  With some ideas about that in mind, we made the following little audio mock up, actually a screen capture of a test level we composed some music for. It’s only a rough sketch, but it gives us something to talk about with the developers, and of course with you!