Music by situation: calm themes, alarms and silence between tracks
The old Impressions city builders had a habit we always loved: a calm track would end, and for a while you heard only the city. Then the next one began. When a fire broke out, the music changed with it. The music of Glyph Dynasty now works the same way: it follows what is happening in your city instead of looping one playlist.
What plays when
- Main menu: Guzheng Morning, every time you open the game
- Day: the calm themes in random order, never the same one twice in a row, with 8 to 20 seconds of silence between them
- Night: quieter, and only the two most hushed themes
- Trouble: a fire, a raid, a rising river, locusts or an angry ancestor bring in the alarm drums at once; they stay at least 30 seconds, so the music does not flicker back and forth
- Festivals: the festive theme, and the same for two and a half minutes after a victory
- Defeat: a slow, heavy theme
Moods change with a three-second crossfade, and the calm themes change only where one track ends, never in the middle of a phrase. A new epoch, a victory or a defeat is marked by a bell or a deep stroke over the music, which goes quiet for a moment to let it through.
What we fixed on the way
Before this, the calm themes went round in a strict circle with no pauses: an eleven-minute loop, each track two or three times in the same order every half hour. A victory switched on the festive theme for good, so it played twelve times in thirty minutes. A treasury in the red brought in the drums for as long as the debt lasted, and in a long game that could be a very long time.
Now a peaceful half hour has seven or eight tracks in random order with quiet between them, the victory celebration lasts two and a half minutes, and debt no longer changes the music at all. The loudness of the tracks is also evened out as they play: the alarm drums had come out 5 dB quieter than everything else.
The tracks
The music is published under Creative Commons licences and credited in the game: Guzheng Morning by Antti Luode; Ripples, Shenyang and Asian Drums by Kevin MacLeod; and Misty Mountains by HitCtrl. That is three calm themes for five epochs, and we are looking for more, above all for night, for alarms and for festivals.
If you prefer it simple
Settings → Sound → Situational music. Turn it off and only the calm themes play, whatever happens in the city.
The disasters that call the drums are shown in floods, fires and locusts, the festivals in rain, snow and the Spring Festival, and the rest of the Impressions heritage in what Glyph Dynasty shares with Pharaoh and Caesar III. The home page has clips of the city in motion.
Glyph Dynasty is coming to Steam for Windows, macOS and Linux. Watch the clips, read about this in the development history and see this part of the game; for journalists there is a press kit.