Case Study: Match Music

Capturing the spirit of Doctor Who

My first aim was to recreate Doctor Who’s distinctive character through music. This stage involved extensive listening as I explored a rich musical heritage stretching back to the 1960s - not just for television, but also radio plays, audio dramas and other games.

Research and discussion led me to approach from two directions, combining the grandeur and sweep (and - dare I say, camp!) of a Murray Gold score with the lo-fi classic electronics pioneered by the BBC’s Radiophonic workshop.

As a structural guide for the initial demo track, I studied the emerging gameplay flow of Doctor Who: Worlds Apart matches, plotting dramatic musical buildups and emotional peaks against equivalent moments of tension and release within a typical game.

Rather than adhering strictly to gameplay timings and engine limitations, I chose to focus on mood, texture and dramatic continuity, creating a self-contained, linear narrative. This reflected the prevailing design philosophy within Reality Plus in the early stages of development. We wanted players to feel as though they entered their own Doctor Who episode with each game.

Making every match its own story

Refining the demo track into a restrained background loop was a crucial step on the way to developing a truly dynamic music system. Melody creates drama through repetition and development, but can prove brittle and inflexible in a setting with an uncertain outcome.

Doctor Who: Worlds Apart was just such a setting, where periods of thoughtful planning gave way to exciting reveals. Detached strategy could transform into nail-biting action at any moment, calling for a music system to accommodate both extremes.

To meet this challenge, we split each turn into two distinct phases - Card Placement (CP), and Card Reveal (CR) - representing the main contrasts of mood and pace as players lay their cards, then watch the turn play out. CP and CR loops were constructed out of 7 unique layers (L) following an identical harmonic scheme, then triggered in parallel. When the game moves from Card Placement to Card Reveal, the CR loop fades in, adding energy and tension to the more static CP loop underneath.

Bringing it down to Earth

The initial demo provided the basic material for all the music I wrote for DWWA, laying the foundations of style, tone and sound world. However, in its original form it was not suitable as background music for match play. The next stage involved adapting the material to storage and engine limitations.

Additionally, the material had to support gameplay, rather than dominating the player’s attention and distracting from the visuals, sound effects and strategic decision-making.

This meant compressing the dramatic peaks and troughs of the demo into a more consistent whole, and reducing melodic directness. The effect of these changes is best heard in the string layer, which maintains energy without overpowering the listener.