You know when you find that one song you like, so you loop it all day, night, and everything in between for a week straight?

Then, undoubtedly, you get sick of it.

The song that got you super excited every time it came on your playlist, you now skip after 5 seconds once you hear the familiar intro.

The same thing will happen to the music you design for your games. It doesn't matter how epic, theatrical, high tempo, or loop-friendly it is: if you're commonly repeating the same track endlessly in areas of your game, players WILL get sick of it.

Even worse, they may even mute your game entirely. Of course, this entire process happens even faster if your project has a shorter song, as many Roblox titles do.

Music is one of the single best ways to engage players and get them to remember your title. If someone likes your tracks, they'll recognize it in a heartbeat. They'll use it in their videos, hum it in the car, and maybe even work to it. All of these things keep them (and others!) thinking about your title long after they've signed off for the day.

So: The goal is clear - you want players enjoying your music for as long as possible. How do you make that happen?

There are many solutions, but we designed a system we call our Variably Ordered Track (VOT) system. VOT allows us to queue up an assortment of tracks for a given area of our games and play them randomly. It's a fancy way of saying "developer-friendly Spotify playlist on shuffle"!

The magic of VOT comes from how we compose the music for our original titles, however. The tracks we make for our games, like Jump Kingdoms, aren't one track at all. Instead, these tracks are 4 - 6 similar segments designed to sound great no matter the order they come in. Our VOT system then randomly selects these variants per player depending on the area you're in - and bam. So the track you hear, even though it's looped, may never sound the same, no matter how many times you play the area. 

VOT allows us to establish the brand identity and music style consistent for each area of our game while still making it unique and fresh, even for players with hours and hours of playtime. Creating a musical identity is one of the many pillars to make players love and care for your games. The ears of your users will thank you for putting so much time into your sound design.

- Devon