@Sedition: Unfortunately, I can't watch the trailer right now, but one thing I didn't like about the other two Jade Wolf games was some of the level design. Mainly the random 360 loops that felt like they were pretty much added in to show off the 360 slope detection.
Also, the idea of a musical director is really nice. One of the reasons videogame music never seems to work well is because the amount of different things a player could be doing at any one time is really massive.
In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, theres this section of the game, right before you get to the car, where your in a big pool of acid, with the occasional little molehill in it. You need to cross this acid pit by placing floating objects into the acid, all the while zombies are spawning out of the acid. This part of the game is super easy; Alyx almost instantly kills the zombie with the sniper rifle, and even if you're drunk the jumping puzzle is super easy. The entire thing does feel hectic at all. But this fast electronic track is played, and it feels super out of place.
The thing is, unless your game is like Canabalt (actually, in Canabalt, the only time the mood of the game changed was when the song became slower...), where the mood stays exactly the same throughout, then there is no track that will work throughout the game
This is where the musical director comes in. Bad Company 2 had one (to an extent), and so did Left 4 Dead 2. There was this flash game that I think it was called Colony, that had a similar premise. The music would change depending on the scenario. That game was an RTS, a genre where the mood changes all the time.
Sedition what I think you will need to do is make your if statement a fair bit more concrete. All the damage that is done to me, to make me low on health, could just be from a series of falls, or I could have escaped imminent danger, and be trying to heal myself, in which case a slower song would work better.
Also, the use of triggers, to mark what song to play throughout an entire are is a little bit silly. As I said before mood changes quickly, and although I might be exploring a haunted mansion, I could also be being attacked by heaps of enemies, in which case slow spooky mansion would be ill-fitting.
Perhaps you can create subsets of music for each level. Perhaps 'getting attacked' music for a spooky setting, or 'getting attacked' music for a mystical level, would be two completely different things.
For a while I've wanted to add this concept into my game, but I never really got around to doing it. And now, when I really want to I can't. What a shame life is...
I really should show you guys a recent build, because the engine is absolutely epic, but I can't access my Newgrounds dumping ground...
Also, @Sedition: The levels in Jade Wolf are pretty big from my memory, so I'm wondering how'd you reduce lag? Just bitmap caching or did you break them into tiles and load and unload them when the player is near, sort of like crude occlusion culling?
[EDIT] brb while I give china their wall back...
