Crafting music for games is hard. But creating that little yellow karaoke ball that bounces in tune, from word to word, as the characters sing … that can be even harder. In this fourth edition of our Bard's Tale diaries, John Alvardo, lead engineer on the project, details just how he made this happen.

While you read, click on over to FilePlanet and download the Beer, Beer, Beer song to get a taste of inXile's new game.



We have tackled several technical challenges in developing The Bard's Tale in order to make the game play and look as good as possible. One thing we pride ourselves on is putting in interesting moments that may or may not have anything to do with completing a quest but are entertaining for the player to experience. These aren't afterthoughts, and we [went] to great lengths to make these moments detailed and polished. For example, there are a several scenes in The Bard's Tale where NPC's break out into song. Some are just for laughs, while some also have helpful clues in the lyrics. In either case, the game design called for the classic, yellow karaoke ball to bounce across the text of the lyrics in time to the singing. While this is far from the bigger technical hurdles we have leapt in making the game, I was a bit concerned about this feature since it meant we would have to create the timing data for each of several songs across several languages. That is a lot of grunt work for some poor sucker and I had a feeling it would end up being me since I'm primarily responsible for our language localization system.

So I did what any good programmer would do in this situation. I put it off hoping the feature would be cut. Ha ha! Just kidding Brian! Lucky for me a decision came down a while later not to translate the songs for foreign markets. That cut the chore down to a less threatening size, but still the problem remained of how to create the karaoke data with the least amount of grunt work. I wasn't worried about making the ball bounce on the words. I figured that was the easy part. Little did I know...

Singing the 'Beer, Beer, Beer' song!
My initial thinking was that I would have to create time offset and text offset pairs for every word in the song. I started by defining a timing notation I could insert into the actual lyrics text for each word in the song. But it soon dawned on me that I could take advantage of the fact that songs have regular beats for the most part and the words tend to fall on beats or half-beats. So instead of having to time every word, I made the parser assume that words fall on half-beats. Then I only needed a couple initial time markers to establish the beat, plus some rests beat markers and occasional time corrections. I also needed a way to note exceptions to the word per half-beat rule. I made up notation for breaking a long word into syllables for multiple ball bounces and for merging multiple short words into a single bounce.

That worked out great and I was able to pretty quickly annotate the lyrics text for a pretty good match on the first pass. It then took a few additional time notations to really tighten up the timing. At this point I was just highlighting the words to check the synchronization. Now it was time to bring in Mr. Ball!