Truly generative musical scores in games have been few and far between, and “music games” has traditionally meant arcade-style rhythm games in which you repeat phrases or whole songs as accurately as possible. Pugs Luv Beats breaks those molds. Part of a vanguard of new gaming creations that generate dynamic music on the fly, it marries grid-based sequencing and resource-gathering gaming, as music making and gameplay blur together. The interactively-produced music could itself become a new way of delivering a musical signature with sound packs.

And beneath it all lurks a free and open source library, libpd – the embeddable version of tried-and-true free graphical music environment Pure Data. (That library is now on GitHub, and vastly updated, by the way, and we’re expecting a book soon from the library’s principle author Peter Brinkmann.)

Oh, yeah, and don’t forget about some seriously addictive gameplay and adorable pugs. I’m suddenly not concerned about the 15 hours Europe-to-North-America travel I’m doing tomorrow.

Here’s what the gameplay looks like, since it’s much easier to see:

Pugs Luv Beats was just approved on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Co-creator Yann Seznec (The Amazing Rolo) is a terrific musician; I just caught up with him in Edinburgh and Berlin and watched him play a homebrewed pig gut instrument with Matthew Herbert for the performance piece “One Pig,” on tour at Berghain. Working with Pd allowed Yann to focus on those musical impulses and not just engineering, and to let him try things he otherwise would never have imagined on a mobile title. So I asked Yann to walk us through how the project was built. He responded with an exhaustively-detailed examination of the evolution of this title, right down to the Pd patches. (Click through for high-res versions.) If your New Year’s Resolution is doing something with patching, you might want to hang onto these answers. Here’s Yann:

The origins of Pugs Luv Beats date back about two years. After making [musical iPhone game] Mujik, Jon (Jonathan Brodsky, aka jonbro) and I were trying to think of other approaches to music mobile app design, and we started thinking more and more about games. Music games, as a whole, are an oddly passive and traditionalist experience – you play along with a premade track, and you are judged on your accuracy and flair (which is strangely reminiscent of music conservatory mindset…). Obviously there are exceptions (RjDj’s Dimensions, Elektroplankton, etc.), but there you go.

Particularly interesting to me was the idea that game mechanics are often very similar to compositional techniques. So for example, when Sonic runs at a normal speed he collects rings at one rate. However when he powers up and goes super fast, he collects rings at a much higher rate. This could be compared to introducing a melody and then speeding it up – and when there are two players, doing this with two melodies. Instant fugue!

We started looking at how we could make a music game where the music and the game elements were fully intertwined and augmented by each other. So Jon prototyped a space shooter drum machine. It was awesome.

To make a (very very very long and boring) story short, our idea and prototype landed us some funding from Channel 4 and Creative Scotland to work on games that focus on musical creativity and composition.

For various reasons, we decided to put aside the space shooter drum machine for a while, and start from scratch. After going through several full prototyping iterations we eventually settled on a core game mechanic that turned out to be in many ways similar to a Tenori-on [Yamaha grid instrument]/Boiingg-style [monome hardware patch] music generation system – in our final prototype, you controlled a series of little dots that moved around the screen, creating loops. This is super fun from a musical perspective because it’s easy and rewarding within a few seconds, and when you have several loops going it can gain some pretty serious rhythmic and melodic depth.

The key from there for us was turning this into a game. We had been using free Internet graphics packs up until then (we hadn’t hired our artist Sean yet) which featured a ladybug, so we had been referring to the main characters as ‘bugs’. During some discussion one of us accidentally said ‘pugs’, and the game idea was born. We constructed a story about pugs and their love for beets (like the vegetables) which create beats (ha!), and how their love turned into greed and got out of control, destroying their world. The game, therefore, is about helping the pugs rebuild their lost civilization by guiding them to create beats. You grow your galaxy by collecting beats, which you do most efficiently when you dress your pugs up in costumes. What’s not to like?

To get to the part that I imagine CDM readers are most interested in, the app development was done by Jon using openFrameworks, [lightweight language] Lua, our own game engine called Blud, and the audio is all done in Pure Data using libpd (through ofxPd). In hindsight we started using libpd really late in the game, just at the very end of the prototyping stage, which was rather silly. Our adoption of libpd basically made our dev cycle about a million times more efficient. My background is as a musician and sound designer, and I have very little coding knowledge. I do, however, have lots of knowledge of Max/MSP, so picking up Pure Data was pretty easy. This allowed Jon to completely pass off all the audio processing (not to mention aesthetic sound design choices) to me, saving him loads of time, giving me direct control over the sound, and letting me test and prototype different approaches to audio within an environment that I knew would be recreated in the game. Also, as Jon mentioned to me recently, by using PD we are able to take advantage of 20 years of audio DSP research and development. Pretty amazing.

How it all works:

The entire audio engine is contained within this patch. Pardon the messiness.

The simplest part of the patch is the “sounds” section, which is used to playback simple sound effects, for the most part linked with interface actions in the game. I did this by creating a very simple patch which plays a sound when it receives a bang. Which sound it plays is dictated by the argument (in this case, the sound of discovering a new capsule). The process for adding a new sound, then, is as simple as adding the sound file to the /assets/sounds/ folder, and making a new instance of “sounds.pd” and naming it the same as the new sound. Jon, in the project code, created a list called “sounds” which is sent into Pure Data. When that list contains “capsule”, a bang is sent into that subpatch, and the sound is played.

A more complex version of what could be done with this type of data is seen in the voice of Mr Puggles, who helps you learn how to play the game. Mr Puggles pops on and off the screen to guide you through the first few worlds, and when he does he send Pure Data a “puggleShow” and “puggleHide” signal. I wanted to give Puggles a funny synthesizer voice that was different every time – dead simple in PD. To do that, I take the puggleShow bang and use it to trigger five more bangs, spaced out over a second. Each of these bangs triggers a random number which is translated into a MIDI note. This note controls the pitch of two oscillators (a sine and a sawtooth), one of which is slightly modified to make them slightly different pitches. These are played through a short volume envelope and a filter which is also controlled by a random number generator. Result? Hilarious beeping boopy Mr Puggles voice, all coming from one bang.

Every time a player buys or selects a planet, a short list is sent to Pure Data comprised of the planet BPM and a random number seed. The BPM is used to calculate delay times and such, and the random number seed is used to create a sort of musical identity for the planet. This is done by choosing a “beat library” and a musical mode.

The mode is created by building a lookup table that chooses the notes from a chromatic scale that would be used in a particular mode. For example, a major scale (ionian mode) uses notes 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Each melodic sound library I used is comprised of a full chromatic octave, and the notes that are played on any given planet are controlled by this table. This ensures not only that all of the different sound libraries being played on a planet will be in the same key, but also that a planet will have a strong melodic identity.

The sound libraries in the game are all controlled by the pugs on the planets. As they run around, each time they land they will trigger a sound. The type of sound is dependent on what terrain they are on – thus, if they run through the snow they play a toy piano, if they run through lava a distorted guitar, etc. There are two states of playing the sound, one if the player deliberately tells the pug to go to that tile, and the second if the pug is traveling over that tile to get somewhere else. It’s super easy to do that kind of thing in Pd; just set up two different ‘play sound’ envelopes, maybe a little extra delay or reverb, and you’re done!

The final piece of the puzzle for making the pugs running around into music is to make each tile be a different note. The terrain of each planet is created by making a sort of height map, where different heights correspond with different terrain types (grass, water, snow, etc). This also means that each tile has a unique number between 0 and 1. When the player buys or selects a planet, a giant random number table is generated in Pure Data which creates a number between 1 and 13 for each possible value between 0 and 1. That value is what is used to pick the note of the mode. This somewhat convoluted approach again lets us make sure that each planet will have a unique, but fully reproducible, musical character.

The actual playing of the sounds is probably the messiest part of the patch structure. Purists look away now.

I wanted to make sure this part of the patch was as flexible as possible, so I ended up using the soundfiler and tabread~ objects, rather than tabplay~, which is great in practice though does look rather uncouth. Additionally, I had some limitations imposed upon the structure of the patch – namely, I had to keep the number of tables down as much as possible, to save on memory. So each sound bank has two voice polyphony – there are many sound banks, and the beats and sound effects aren’t counted in this, so that limitation is not really heard in the final product at all. It did mean I had to work out a decent voice allocation system though!

I think my memory issues were probably my only problem with using PD in this project – though only indirectly. As I mentioned, they were hardly a problem artistically, however it took me a while to get used to the idea that not everything I patched on a computer would work on an iPhone. Similarly, I had to be very careful about things like relative volumes. In a generative music game like Pugs Luv Beats, the player could quite easily send 15 pugs running around making sound, which mounts up pretty quickly. It means that all of the patches and sound need to be designed to withstand lots of triggering without distorting. None of these things are problems, really, all they require is regular testing on devices and simulators – something that every mobile developer is already used to.

That’s the Pure Data audio engine in a nutshell. The end result is a flexible and powerful audio engine that sounds really great and is fully integrated into Pugs Luv Beats. The game is a great combination of music, silliness, and strategy – there’s a bit of something in there for everyone. You can definitely just play with the game to make beats, or you can try and collect all of the costumes, or you can try and make the most efficient planet ever. You can also explore the galaxies being made by your Game Center friends, to hear what they’re up to.

The background story:

And, just for fun, a silly promo featuring real pugs. Anyone traumatized by the sight of Pd patches, these should relax you.

More information at the developer site:
http://luckyframe.co.uk/pugsluvbeats/game.html

Think back to playing a simply childhood game like Musical Chairs. The actual gameplay depends only on auditory clues – something you take for granted as a kid, but something apparently lost on game engineers who insist exclusively on advanced 3D rendering engines for visuals. And because you get your body involved, the game becomes dynamic. That musical cue isn’t just off in the background: in the dizzying run around the chairs, the soundtrack can become the singular focus of your brain, an urgent score to the — DIVE, got the chair!

As the scene around game experimentation grows richer, there’s a rekindled interest in how game mechanics can play to different senses. In some cases, it can be a source of whimsy; in others, it’s the only way to design games for people who are absent one of those senses. And an ongoing exploration of music and sound as gameplay mechanic – not just gameplay accompaniment – ought to interest composers and sound designers. When you look at a conventional arcade game, tuning your reflexes to the graphics is key, even if sounds provide reward and ambience. In these games, the sound is where the play is.

Johann Sebastian Joust has a lot in common with Musical Chairs. The game input is the lovely Sony PlayStation Move motion controller, which – yep, you guessed it, is where the jousting comes in. (An earlier version used the Wiimote.) But in place of graphics, listening to the music itself tells you when to act, just as in the childhood game:

When the music plays in slow-motion, the controllers are extremely sensitive to changes in acceleration. When the music speeds up for, this threshold becomes less strict, giving the players a small window to dash at their opponents. If the player’s controller is ever moved beyond the allowable threshold, that player loses.

Little wonder that the game resembles some of those kids’ games: the designers reveal that they got the idea after improvising “folk” games with friends. Now, there is some concession to adding additional feedback – the controllers use the light-up ball on the end and rumble feedback just to make absolutely clear what’s going on; some “sound games” are more pure in their all-sonic interface. But the idea remains the same.

The game is the work of the Copenhagen Game Collective. They describe themselves as “multi-gender, multi-national, non-profit”; I would add to that “blazing hot stuff.” CGC’s games have earned some serious accolades; for one, B.U.T.T.O.N., a group party game, was the runaway hit of the Kokoromi GAMMA party in 2010, and also showed up wowing crowds again at the same Kill Screen / Museum of Modern Art Show at which we saw Pxl Pusher, covered yesterday. (CDM and myself were also involved in that Gamma party, and co-organized a one-button art show at San Francisco’s GAFFTA art space.) But the group has in no small sense put Copenhagen on the map.

The team for this title:
Douglas Wilson: concept, programming, and video
Nils Deneken: graphics and announcer voice
Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren: music and sound

Composer Nicklas Nygren is a triple threat: game designer, coder, and composer. Check out some of his music on SoundCloud:

Latest tracks by Nifflas

There’s plenty more to say about sound games and music games and interactive music for games. I gave a presentation at the Indie Gaming Showcase in Berlin on the topic at an event hosted by arts network Platoon – see their write-up. I’ll pull those notes together; if you have any nominees of game work you’d like to see covered, let us know in comments.

But for now, I’ll leave you with the image of Johann Sebastian Joust and Musical Chairs. After all, composition and ensemble playing themselves can be seen as games with musical mechanics. They certainly can even have “win” and “fail” mechanics – ask your local orchestra player.

http://www.copenhagengamecollective.org/johann-sebastian-joust/

What happens when you meld the most futuristic Microsoft technology with the most futuristic Apple technology with the most ColecoVision-esque graphics as built in Jitter? Or you create gameplay that couples physical human contortion with the step sequencing rhythms of music? A different take on music games, that’s what.

Developers Matt (“M@tt”) Boch and Ryan Challinor work, in their day jobs, on the music game as most people know it, at Harmonix. Harmonix’s roots remain in the rhythm game, so that music play, even at its most serious, is still about musical timing accuracy. Pxl Pusher is a very different mechanic: imagine a step sequencer grid on an iPad, presenting blocks that, true to the classic game Twister, require another player to balance and stretch their bodies to match.

I caught up with Matt and Ryan over the summer at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Before throngs of crowds swarmed the game – easily one of the most popular of the night – I managed to get some quick footage of the creators doing last-minute patching and trying out gameplay. (The quiet there is atypical; we got to shoot before the doors opened.) An insane travel schedule kept me from publishing sooner, but here, Matt and Ryan share their process.

Another interesting twist: Max/MSP and Jitter allowed extremely rapid prototyping with Kinect, something of interest to anyone doing this sort of work. (And dig those “3D” images … if they don’t blind you.)

CDM: How did you work together on this project?

Matt: Jamin from Kill Screen had asked me to make a project for the Pop Rally, and I was looking for someone to team up with to make it happen. Around the same time, Ryan was developing Synapse, and I got super excited about that tech. Having worked with him closely on Dance Central 2, I was positive we’d make a killer team, so I proposed we team up and make it happen. He got the ball rolling immediately.

Max/MSP is a pretty ideal environment for the both of us to work in, as it lets us evaluate ideas really quickly, and completely obliterate the lines between disciplines that we’re used to in traditional game development. Each of us designed, coded, sound designed, and made art for the game. It was awesome to be able to share in the creation of all parts of the game.

Ryan: We riffed on ideas with each other until it snowballed into the final product. Max allowed us both to work in the same space, as opposed to the traditional programmer/designer arrangement, where I would work in code and Matt would tweak values that I expose. This allowed us to work much faster and blurred the line between programmer and designer.

Any roadblocks, discoveries along the way?

Ryan: The whole project was driven by discovery: discover a fun interaction, then figure out how to leverage it. There were no real roadblocks, other than Matt being on painkillers for the entirety of the project!

Matt: I fell, knocked out four teeth, and fractured my jaw, so I was on heavy doses of painkillers for much of the development. I’m doing much better now, almost fully recovered.

The greatest discovery for me was more of a rediscovery. I remembered how freeing it is to design a game for a very specific context. Before working at Harmonix, I made arcade games in a contemporary art context. Getting back into that mindset was a blast.

Tell us a bit how you work with Max for rapid prototyping. How did you set it up? Any specific tools you made use of? Any tips, either related to Max or Kinect specifically?

Ryan: No real tips for Max, other than do a lot of commenting when you’re working on a file with someone else. As far as Kinect tips, my main advice would be to explore and discover what fun you can have with he input, other than starting with a specific goal. The only tools we used outside of Max were Synapse for the Kinect data, Adobe Premiere for the background movie, and some web app Matt used to generate some of the sound effects.

Matt: We ended up using Beanstalkapp & Versions for version control, which was huge for us in the late stages of development when we both needed to be working simultaneously. It was great that we structured our patch in such a way that we could easily turn elements of the patch into standalone patches, so simultaneous work could happen. You lose some flexibility, but it’s worth it to be able to work in tandem.

How did you conceive the idea for this game?

Matt: Largely through iteration and idea exchange. I VJ around Boston a fair amount and often used TouchOSC to VJ with my iPhone, so I’m not stuck behind my laptop for hours at a time, so when Ryan brought up the idea of using TouchOSC with MAX and Synapse, I was totally sold. We quickly arrived at the mashup between Twister and Step Sequencer, and every after that was polishing mechanics, arriving at a unified aesthetic, and then finding the best way to ramp difficulty.

Ryan: Matt approached me to work on a game for the PopRally right around when I just finished up Synapse, so I wanted to leverage that in the project. I had also just learned about TouchOSC, so I thought it could be fun to incorporate that. So, the initial concept was born out of experimenting with interactions that combined the Kinect and iPad.

How did things go at MOMA? Any surprises in terms of reception? It was effectively rapid playtesting — anything that you would now incorporate into the game? Or things that worked well, for that matter?

Matt: It was a phenomenal success. I never imagined we’d have a line of people waiting to play the game all night, never mind a line full of people cheering, laughing, and clapping as they watched others play. We’ve talked a bit about ways to modify the existing game to make it a bit deeper and more broadly compatible, but I’m also wary of upsetting the balance we arrived at.

Ryan: I was pleased with the reception at MoMA, it was very satisfying to work on a project and then immediately have people playing it, literally 10 minutes after it was finished (thanks to a last-minute feature request from Matt’s friend Christina)

What does it mean to you to have this game in this landmark art museum?

Ryan: I’m really grateful that we were able to show it off in such an amazing space. It feels a little unreal to me, my brain hasn’t really processed it yet.

Matt: It was hugely validating, especially because my Dad was in town and was able to make it to the event. He’s never seen crowds of people play the games I’ve worked on so to have him there, seeing how much fun everyone was having, was awesome in and of itself. That it was at the MoMA? Still haven’t totally processed it. It was the stuff of dreams when I was getting my art degree; it’s going to take a bit for me to internalize that that dream was realized. Not only was I able to show work at the MoMA, but it was shown in the context of so many great games: Bit.Trip Beat, Limbo, B.U.T.T.O.N., QWOP, the list goes on…

How about the connection to Kill Screen Magazine?

Matt: I think Kill Screen is far and away the best game writing happening right now. Both their daily updates on the web and their themed print issues are staples in my life. To be fair, I might be biased as I’m good friends with [editor-in-chief] Jamin, but nevertheless, I think what they’ve accomplished is undeniably phenomenal. What other publication could convince the MoMA to have a video game night?

Can you tell us a bit about your roles at Harmonix, and how you came to be there?

Ryan: I’m a programmer at Harmonix, I’ve worked on The Beatles: Rock Band and the Dance Central series. I was a CS major at the University of Texas, I got an internship at a game studio in Austin that turned into a job, then a few years later a coworker talked me up to someone he met from Harmonix, and I got recruited to work there.

Matt: I am a Project Lead at Harmonix, though I’ve occupied many roles previously, most recently Senior Designer. I started at Harmonix as a Production Assistant while I was finishing my thesis at Harvard. My friend and VJ partner, Josh Randall, is the Creative Director of Harmonix. We’d been VJing together for a bit while I was in school. He gave me a call one day, suggesting I apply for a Production Assistant role. One of my jobs was to track all the prototype hardware, but I ended up spending most of my time repairing it, as my art practice of building arcades gave me a fair amount of experience about mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, and coding. That landed me a role as hardware designer, and, many Rock Band iterations and trips to China later, I was tasked with investigating tech for a potential dance game. That lead to me heading up the development of a game prototype that would become Dance Central, and I’ve been designing for the franchise ever since. A circuitous path for sure, but I’m really happy with where I ended up, and deeply grateful to Harmonix for allowing me to occupy such varied roles throughout my 4 years tenure.

Synapse is something other folks can use, too, correct? What does it do, and where might they begin?

Ryan: Yep, Synapse is a freely released toolset. The primary focus of the project was for controlling Ableton Live with Kinect, but it can be used with anything that receives OSC input. You can find more information at http://synapsekinect.tumblr.com/

Any future plans for this game, or other Synapse-powered stuff?

Ryan: In the immediate future, we’ll be showing off PXL PUSHR at Indiecade in LA on October 8th. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the future is. At the very least, we’re going to keep the ideas of the gameplay mechanic in mind to be incorporated into future projects. As far as Synapse, I’m currently exploring other ideas so I don’t have any Synapse stuff in the works at the moment, but I know of a few other people working on Synapse-powered projects currently.

Matt: As Ryan stated, we’re showing it at Indiecade, and are hoping we’ll get more opportunities to show the game publicly. I deeply enjoyed working on the game with Ryan and I hope that TeamPXL, the moniker we’ve adopted, will develop additional games with the same working methodology. For now, given that we both just wrapped development on Dance Central 2, we’re taking a much needed break to recharge. I know Ryan’s got some awesome audio manipulation patches in the works, and I’m excited to see what comes of those. In time, I’m sure an awesome idea for a game will cross one of our minds and we’ll have no choice but to dig in and make something new!

http://teampxl.tumblr.com/

Load up an Ableton set or mix samples, and you’re already in the domain of interactive music. With joysticks and arcade buttons and other controls, the blending of game and musical interface into generative compositional fusion is even clearer. It’s little wonder many electronic musicians take an interest in the nexus of gaming and music.

Any discussion of interactive music scores for games would be incomplete without Jonathan Mak. His self-produced title Everyday Shooter used classic top-down space combat as a musical experience: not only do sound effects in the game act as musical elements, but even the flow of the game itself fits into a generated song structure. Mak even imagined the title as an album. Playing through it, once you get into the groove of the action, the roles of gamer and listener merge into a single flow. (See video, at end.) Another nice feature – breaking from cliche, it’s a music game that employs guitar lacks in place of, say, a pounding trance soundtrack.

Now, Mak turns his attentions from space shooter to platformer, with SoundShapes, on the console Sony announced this week, the PlayStation Vita. It’s best to watch the video to see what’s going on. It’s just a taste; we’ll have to see the final title.

There’s more good news, too: on of our favorite artists, the inventive i am robot and proud, is the musical collaborator. And you can now look to Toronto as a hotbed of indie game action – take that, Montreal and New York – with i am robot and proud and the team behind iPad album-as-game-as-album Swords & Sworcery.

The effects of making ever game event musical can be cartoonish at times – though, perhaps in a game, that’s part of the pleasure and aesthetic. But in Mak’s best moments, it was as though he was composing with gameplay – canonical gameplay forms as a modern, digital parallel to musical forms like a sonata.

We’ll be watching. Thanks to Metehan Korkmazel for the tip!

Via GameSetWatch, who have some nice analysis. (One point of disagreement – they speculate this will be onstage “in the hands of at least one chiptunes performer.” I think that’s actually relatively unlikely; chip music artists continue to prefer dedicated music tools, not games. Laptop artists would occasionally feature an ElectroPlankton cameo. But I’ve been fiddling with some Processing sketches that try to make game interfaces for music. It’s fun, if really hard; I’ll keep trying. Seems a good airport layover project.)

Previously on CDM:
Portal 2′s Musical World, Available Free, in Non-Adaptive Form “For Testing” [ Also makes use of interactive musical accompaniment ]

Game Meets Album: Behind the Music and Design of the iPad Indie Blockbuster Swords & Sworcery

A music score is, in essence, a way of making space into time: traversing notation from left to right and top to bottom, you move through a series of events. So, why not make that spatial map an actual map, as in the familiar, isometric interactive cityscape popularized by Will Wright’s classic game Sim City?

Isle of Tune does just that: lay out trees, houses, and city streets, and you sequence musical patterns as virtual islands. It’s available right now on the Web, powered by Flash – Chrome users can even get a one-click install via the Chrome Web Store. If you prefer to use a phone or tablet, mobile versions are coming, too, beginning with an imminent iPad release, seen in a video below.

Isle of Tune must have hit a nerve in this surreal pairing of imaginary landscapes and simple sequenced songs, because the YouTube nation has responded en masse.

I spoke to developer Jim Hall, who gives CDM the latest update and some background on himself:

A little bit about me: I’ve worked as an animator, flash developer and art director over the last 10 years in London, UK – mainly for digital ad agencies (some previous work here: www.happylander.co.uk). Around about June last year I pretty much quit advertising work (before my soul was lost completely in the desolate mire of micro-sites and adver-games!) and took some time out to make stuff for myself – mainly based around music and playful interaction.

Isle of Tune came from a desire to make a different kind of music sequencer along the lines of http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix or the Reactable – but with less of an abstract feel and a little more game-like and social. Since it went live in December there has been over 60,000 islands made
with some properly creative tunes in there eg. http://isleoftune.com/?id=63320 or http://isleoftune.com/?id=48359

Over the last few months I’ve been making updates from user requests – mainly to the way you can browse, search and view rated islands, it seems a lot of visitors come by just to check out the islands other people have made!

I’m currently working with a talented chap – Stuart Middleton – a developer since the days of the Spectrum (and now runs a small app dev company at www.abstractalien.com) who is converting the Isle of Tune codefor various mobile platforms and also helping me take it beyond what I could online with the limitations of flash. My far-fetched dream with the app is to be able to fund further development and allow me to make more stuff like this in the future without having to go back to the world of advertising!

For those of you with iPads, Jim says you should be able to look forward to the iOS release some time around mid-May if all goes to plan.

But for anyone, you can use this right now with Flash:
http://isleoftune.com/

And yes, even Requiem for a Dream gets the Island of Tune treatment. Hmmmm… this island seems a bit too sunny and cheery, no? Maybe the title needs a dreary, overcast Coney Island mode.

Jim Guthrie was a rockstar long before the iPad was. Paired with pixel-intense artist Craig D. Adams (aka Superbrothers) and the co-design and coding effort of a crack team of video game “wizards” at the indie studio capy, he’s made a soundtrack that’s destined to be a gaming classic. But if you don’t want to play it, you can still listen to it. And if you’re playing it, you may find that it feels as though you’re listening to it, and gazing into its artwork.

From the moment you tap to launch it, Swords & Sworcery plunges you into a world that’s part game, part interactive album. Yes, there’s the obvious presence of a spinning vinyl record you can scratch and brake, right there on the title screen. And yes, there’s the conspicuous “EP” in the title, or the just-released LP (a real LP, on digital but also now sold out on vinyl).

But it’s once you navigate the expansive digital forests of the title, once Jim Guthrie’s moody soundtrack taps away at your brain, that you begin to get it. Sword & Sworcery will certainly get the dreaded (or is that coveted?) “arty” title, but it’s the way in which it spins out audiovisual entertainment that makes it special.

It’s pure aesthetic deliciousness, a brew that makes your head buzz.

And it’s finding that aesthetic sense – neither retro nor modern, neither low-fidelity nor slick – that makes this title relevant beyond even the world of gaming. Jim Guthrie’s songs and the lush pixel art graphics are the perfect fusion of old and new. It’s telling that Guthrie himself crafts his tracks in a combination of a PlayStation music game (MTV-branded, no less), GarageBand, and then high-end Universal Audio plug-ins. (See video above, and have fun gear-spotting familiar toys through the jump cuts.) It’s sort of studio garage, in the way digital music can be now. Its unabashedly synthetic instrumentation gives voice to a generation that grew up with computer-produced music. The musical score itself sometimes nods to Philip Glass, sometimes to punk rock, very often a mixed-up, intimate fantasy folk cinema, with sounds both shiny and flat.

But happily, this isn’t just a game with a clever soundtrack, or a release of game music. It’s a real fusion of album and game, music and visuals. And, lest we get to carried away with the Art label – capital a – music and game alike are good fun.

CDM managed to pry co-creators Craig D. Adams and Jim Guthrie from an adoring gaming press long enough to talk to us in depth about the making of the music and release, down to every last technical and artistic detail. They said so much – and crossed two media so completely – that I’ve broken up their ideas into two stories, across Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion. Their reasoning for committing to those two media has a lot in common, I think, with why we run these two sites and why a lot of you read and contribute to them.

Out now: both an LP music release on Bandcamp and iPad version. Coming this month: recent-gen iPod touch and iPhone versions of the game, too.

Jim Guthrie: Sword & Sworcery LP – The Ballad of the Space Babies @ Bandcamp
http://www.swordandsworcery.com/project/

Let’s begin with the notion of this as musical-visual collaboration. Obviously, some of our favorite game experiences have used music effectively. What’s different about this project?

Craig:The iPhone & iPod Touch, and the iPad to some extent, don’t have an input style that lends itself to precise inputs. So, it seems to me that a lot of traditional video games seem to fall a bit flat on these platforms. The thing is, these machines are great music and video players, so we knew going in that we wanted to make something that was as open and as laid-back as a record-listening experience matched with a naturalistic visual presentation inspired by film, so that was really the starting point. We also felt that a more relaxed, more occasional, less punishing, more interesting experience would be a better fit, something that was closer in pace to browsing the Internet or whatever. Early on we were calling S:S&S EP “a brave experiment in Input Output Cinema.” I/O Cinema is kind of an intentionally absurd nonsense buzzword but I think it’s perfectly apt for this type of entertainment, it’s a heckuva lot more descriptive than ‘videogame’ anyways, in that it gets away from the idea of a program with rules and win/lose conditions and it puts the focus more on the conversation the audience has with the creators while the audience pokes, prods & problem-solves an authored audiovisual creation.

How did you work together, Superbrothers and Jim, to combine music and visually? What was that collaboration like?

Craig: When we looped Jim into the project in we told him the name, described the aesthetic, talked a bit about The Legend of Zelda & Castlevania, and then Jim dug around and found a few songs he thought might fit. I went ahead and tried to generate art & narrative concepts using Jim’s songs or else stand-ins to set the mood. As we started to mix things together we’d evaluate, iterate & improvise. Eventually we’d get into situations where me and Kris, Capy’s creative director and co-designer on S:S&S EP, would have a plan for an environment or a scene or a situation, and we’d get the art & the mechanics together and then pass along a rough build to Jim with some kind of suggestion like ‘go John Carpenter on this one’ or whatever, and then Jim’d work his magic, filter the concept through his music-making mind and barf up something totally beautiful & shockingly perfect. So yeah, it was a messy process, but towards the end we kind of got a feel for it, I think it all worked out super well.

Jim: It wasn’t always clear if the art needed to inspire more music or the other way around, but it was a very necessary process considering the relation the two elements share in the game.

Technically speaking, is there anything unique to the way the music integrates with game play? How did you approach the technical challenge there, in other words?

Craig: For the music integration aspect, we really just made things up as we went along. We tried some things; some of them worked, some of them didn’t. Then we’d iterate on them or revise them as necessary. We tried chopping things up into a million loops and then stringing them back together with logic, and it kind worked, but was kinda rough, so then we’d revise it or refine it. Eventually we started to figure out a bit of a groove – we learned what the limits were with the machines & the quirks of fMOD [the game sound engine]. We’re a whole lot wiser now, but I think it was a positive thing going into something like this a bit naive.

Jim: Technically, there’s nothing in this game that hasn’t been done before. We sort of ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ and made it our own. It’s more about the mood and atmosphere that the music and art create that is special. Like Craig said, we made things up as we went.

From the beginning, we knew it was very possible that this would be released digitally as an album, but it wasn’t until a little later on that the idea of vinyl struck us as a good idea. You would think it was all planned from the beginning considering how often the image of the record appears in the game but it sort of willed itself in that direction over time.

It’s always tough to describe the process of summoning one’s art. After we had sort of figured out what the first few tracks were going to be, I just let Craig’s art and ideas lead the way and I reacted. It also really comes down to knowing your craft and what tools you use to create with. Once you figure that out the tools don’t get in the way when you’re hot on the trail of a fleeting melody. There’s noting worse than loosing that spark because a technical issue. Computers have robbed me of so many musical sparks, but to be fair, they have given it back tenfold.

I will give into the temptation to ask one obvious question – what does it mean that it’s an EP? Obviously, it’s a reference to the notion of a game release as being akin in some way to an album, but anything beyond that you wish to say?

Craig:The EP concept goes back to the start of the project – we wanted to put the sound component right out front. We wanted the whole project to feel like a musical composition, and at first we wanted to make something small and acknowledge that this was a tentative first release by a new videogame ‘band.’ The project grew from ther,e and it goes well beyond the 37 minute running-time we had originally envisioned, but everything else fits.

We had always planned to prepare a record release to accompany the project and when the time came to commit to this we basically had to make a vinyl edition, and Jim basically just put that into gear on his own… so that became Jim Guthrie’s Sword & Sworcery LP – The Ballad of the Space Babies. While the record is a smaller component of the project in terms of man-hours, the music on its own is kind of larger than the art and the story we tried to create in the actual videogame, so I think it’s kind of perfect that it’s the LP.

Jim, the music really has a quirky personality all its own, and I think it’d be too easy to describe it aesthetically. How did you approach scoring the music, in finding a voice for this title?

Craig: Several of Jim’s songs pre-date the project, so they informed the aesthetic & concepts from the start. My role early on was to translate the music into artwork & narrative that would fit the general idea of the project. But yeah, beyond that I’ll let Jim fill in the blanks here!

What’s the production process like for the music itself?

Jim: I captured all of the music either on a PlayStation using MTV’s Music Generator and/or
[Apple] GarageBand. For example, on the song, ‘Lone Star,’ I drummed a beat onto a cassette four-track, burned that onto a CD, placed the CD into the PlayStation, sampled and looped in MTV Music Generator,
and then built a song around it using that software. THEN I brought it into GarageBand and added more layers and effects. I also used a [Casio] SK-1 peppered throughout. In terms of plug-ins and soft synths, I used a lot of the Arturia stuff, [Native Instruments] Kontakt, [XLN Audio] Addictive Drums, [Toontracks] Superior Drummer, and a [Universal Audio] UAD-2 card loaded with a bunch of their processing plug-ins.

Not all games are narrative, and I’ve never found conventional narrative to be a prerequisite to art (cough, Ebert). But there is a strong narrative aspect to this title, too. How do you go about telling a story and building a game mechanic at once? (And, for that matter, do you still scrawl things on index cards to get there?)

Craig: It’s funny, we are getting some positive responses to S:S&S EP’s narrative, but really, the narrative only exists to make sense of the player’s experience; it’s not exactly ‘the point.’ We started with the songs, then the art, then the mechanics that would bring it together. And while the broad narrative concepts were always there, it was only in the final stages that the script came together, and really it’s just a way for us to help communicate what’s supposed to be going on. I was on the line to write the script, and for a good long while, it kinda sucked while I was buried under art, sound & design tasks, but I kept iterating on it, editing it for brevity, clarity, and humor, with Jim and Kris and a few others kinda guiding the process.

So yeah, I guess we did some okay things with narrative, and I’m actually super-proud of the mind-fuck tear-jerker heart-breaker finale, but I think the only reason any of it comes across is because of Jim’s music wrapped up in paintings. And really, Jim’s songs are all the narrative I ever wanted.

Now that you’ve become gaming rockstars, what’s next?

Jim: A bottle of vodka?

Craig: Hahahaha… Jim’s already a rockstar, so this stuff is probably old news. I think we’re definitely enjoying our fifteen minutes of fame in this very specific niche, and I’ve been trying – maybe too hard – to keep that buzz going so the project stays visible as we gear up for the all-important iPhone & iPod Touch launch. Once all that’s out of the way, I’m really just looking forward to some quiet time: bike rides, swimming, hiking, and whatever else.

We’ll keep the Sword & Sworcery project rolling along in the background too. We have plans for a gala event here in Toronto in a few months and some other schemes related to the app itself that’ll last the year & maybe into next year. We’ve been given a real opportunity here & we want to continue to honor that.

What are you excited about in gaming – or, for that matter, audiovisual work – at the moment, beyond your own work? Anything you’re listening to, watching, playing (or all three) at the moment?

Jim: Honestly, I went into my iTunes to have a look at my ‘Recently Played’ list and for as far as the eye could see, it’s all stuff I’m working on. No time for art! Just work!

Craig: I’ve been too busy and too exhausted to be paying much attention to what’s happening out there in videogames, film or music. To be honest, what I’m most excited about right now is the prospect of getting some fresh air and some exercise, maybe getting away from electronic screens for a bit sometime, and then after a little break maybe starting on some new creative work.

I had the opportunity to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in theaters a few months ago. I’d seen it a few times before but only on VHS… so that was a real treat, it’s an entirely different film in the theaters, there’s so much more to enjoy. I’m also a huuuge fan of Kanye West’s “Runaway.” I think that’s a genuinely incredible piece of audiovisual work; Vanessa Beecroft’s art direction really shines. Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop and James Cameron’s Avatar blew me away too, for entirely different reasons. I’ve just recently seen my friend Firas Momani’s Fantasia Festival award-winning short film The Adder’s Bite & it gave me all those groovy Cronenberg + Lynch + Kubrick feelings, very inspiring.

On the video game side I’m still intermittently playing Motorstorm: Pacific Rift for PS3, a 2008 effort from Liverpool’s Evolution Studios that I think is basically perfect, plus I’m digging in to Monster Hunter Tri on Wii. I’m playing Monster Hunter co-operatively with a couple friends every Sunday morning… we’re still just scratching the surface but it’s easily the most intricate and deep video game I’ve ever played, which takes me way outside of my comfort zone in an interesting way. I’m also cautiously optimistic about L.A. Noire, Uncharted 3, and The Last Guardian… we’ll see how they work out in the end.

On the music side, I’ve been listening to Jim’s Sword & Sworcery LP… even though I’ve heard these tunes so much in the last two years that my ears hurt, the record itself still comes across as beautiful & fresh, the songs still evoke all kinds of imaginings. That record aside I’ve got a heckuva lot of catching up to do… but first I have to give my ears a bit of a break. That said, I’m amped for the Beastie Boys record that’s hitting in the next little while.

All images courtesy Superbrothers and Jim Guthrie. Used with permission.

Do let us know what you think of the game, folks – or whatever audiovisual creations, in the form of games or otherwise, inspire you.

More on the art, the design, the coding – and why Superbrothers went iOS-only.

On our sister site:
Inside Handheld Game Art: The Art Style and Making of Swords & Sworcery, Superbrothers Pixel Cinema [Create Digital Motion]

And, oh yeah, don’t forget to get the game:
http://www.swordandsworcery.com/

What Harmonix has achieved with Rock Band, and their original Guitar Hero, is remarkable. At their core, these games are descended from arcade rhythm games, reducing music to simple coordination of a few buttons. Yet numerous studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that, in an age in which recording has made musical experience passive for many, the fantasy of holding a plastic instrument is enough to convince people to explore music making again. Rock Band’s collaborative gameplay has people singing and playing again, karaoke style, and more than a few gamers have decided to graduate to real instruments and lessons. Don’t be surprised to walk into a Best Buy and see instruments and pro audio tech in the aisle next to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The genius of Harmonix is that music is again entertainment, not specialization.

What people may not realize is that designing these games is hard. The illusion of simplicity, the experience of fun – these are some of the most daunting challenges in design, period.

So what happens when Rock Band evolves beyond mere rhythm game?

John Drake of Harmonix colorfully sums up the spirit of the new, real-transcription Pro game: “Good luck on that solo, asshole.”

Ramping up the difficulty of a game to real music was a transformative design challenge. We go behind the scenes to hear how Harmonix approached it, what it means for how music works, and what it can mean for your music — or the next time you want to use a game with friends to hone your musical chops.

A New Game

Rock Band 3, released today, introduces new instruments and new play modes that blur the line between rhythm game and musical exercise. The hardware inputs are now actual MIDI controllers. A new guitar, the US$150 Fender Mustang Pro, uses around 100 buttons to allow real chord fingering positions – minus the callouses. A new keyboard features two octaves, velocity sensitivity, and touch controls. The guitar and keyboard each have standard MIDI DIN output feature extensive mappings of even the Xbox buttons onboard to MIDI control changes and custom MIDI assignments. A MIDI adapter lets you use your own MIDI hardware. (Ironically, this puts the Mad Catz-built hardware ahead of many supposedly “pro” sub-$100 devices, which now have only USB connections. CDM will have a detailed hands-on with information on how to make use of that MIDI controller in a separate article.)

Accordingly, “Pro Mode” songs feature more extensive transcriptions; learning them is tantamount to simply learning the music. Chords are real chords, and, while reduced to an octave or so, the keyboard parts really are what’s in the song. Needless to say, the presence of a keyboard also opens the floodgates to properly providing keyboard music in the game, from Elton John to John Lennon.

To understand how these changes came about, we have an epic interview with some of the folks at Harmonix. Even if you’re not a music gamer, there’s plenty of reason to pay attention: what they have to say could be relevant to getting your music to a wider audience, and many of the design considerations reveal insights into how people process musical information visually.

And if you are a musician and gamer, you may finally have found a music game you can share with non-musicians without dumbing down your playing.

Speaking to CDM: Daniel Sussman, Rock Band 3 project leader, John Drake, program manager of the Rock Band Network, and Matt “Nord” Nordhaus, senior producer for Rock Band Network. (RBN allows musicians to author their own content for the game and distribute it to players.)

Beyond Rhythm Games

CDM: We know already that your games have turned people on to music, and now it seems Rock Band 3 bridges some of the gulf between game and music. What does that mean for the evolution of Rock Band?

John: From my perspective, it’s certainly opened up a whole new angle to approach people who aren’t rhythm gamers. And as rhythm gamers, people who laugh at Expert guitar charts and say, I can five-star this on a five-button guitar, no problem, like Harmonix are wusses. And I’m like, okay, now you have [Ozzy Osborne's] Crazy Train on expert, so, good luck on that solo, asshole.

Daniel: Rock Band 3 is welcoming and doesn’t take into consideration any kind of musical background or education. As it relates to a feature set, we really look at making our game musical, but also fun and crazy interactive. What’s unique about the Rock Band Network aspect is that the RBN experience is not really so much a game – it’s more of a pipeline that musicians can use to get their content, their songs into the Rock Band world. If you think about the musical community out there, the ecosystem is really a way into that musical community. You have a game that appeals to a non-musician, they play the game, they have fun, maybe they take a greater interest in music. They use the game to learn how to play guitar or drums, to appreciate music. They start writing their own music, and then put that into the game world for other people to play and interact with.

It’s a kind of funny thing. I don’t think it was totally intentional – the idea that Rock Band would get to the point where you’re able to play the game on controllers that then you can plug into your laptop to make music and then use that same laptop to do all the game authoring and then put that back into Rock Band. That was sort of where we ended up, and it’s great because it all works really well together, but it speaks to the ambition of the studio.

Do you have a sense of what will happen as these new hardware inputs make their way into gamers hands? I guess you have to wait and see.

Daniel: We’re very excited to see what happens. If you read a lot of the statements we’ve made about the ambition for Rock Band Pro, part of it was to draw a deeper connection to the music. Another part of it, really, was to provide a new gameplay experience to an audience of gamers that had been playing the same game for five years on the guitar, or three years on the drums. Really the problem we had to solve was, how can we reinvigorate the category? How can we give these gamers something new to play? And how can we continue to challenge the music gamer in a way that doesn’t just involve the content? Can we build gameplay around something new and unique, and then use that to drive the progression of the franchise?

What’s been interesting is that we get these hardcore gamers who are the cream of the crop in the Rock Band world, they can beat every song on Expert the day it comes out. And then we sit them down with the Pro guitar, and we say, alright hotshot, you probably want to start on easy. I know that’s a novel concept to you know, but try it. And they do, and what happens is, they’re getting like three stars and 60-65% of the notes. And it’s kind of the same experience they had when they first played Guitar Hero 1, or they first tried the drums in Rock Band 1. And that’s really the phenomenal thing here, is that we’ve found a way to reconnect people to all of this great music through the gameplay. And almost as a bonus, the gameplay is totally steeped in actual musical ability, so by playing the game you develop skill that can be applied to things outside the game. But really, that’s secondary, from our standpoint.

What does that mean for play testing and authoring, then, to have these new tiers of difficulty? I know in the past, the first step in authoring was to just do a full transcription of a song, and then try to reduce it to what’s playable on the game controls at different difficulty levels.

Daniel: Well, I think we still start at the Expert authoring level, which is the basic note-for-note transcription of the song. And then as you pare down from there to get to hard, medium, and easy, consider that it’s more like the “campfire” version of the song. On Easy, it’s really root notes of chords on downbeats. It’s more like you’re playing along with the song; you’re not playing exactly what the song is. And then on Medium, we introduce power chords, so you’re playing that root-fifth combination on downbeats. And then on hard, you start playing the full chords, major-minor chords, open chords, and riffs. Expert is everything. We use a lot of the same design strategy as we pare down from expert to easy that we do in the core game, in the core five-lane game.

Rock Band’s Place in the Music World

It seems like there’s a strong awareness of what RB3 is doing in the game community, that it is at this new level of musicianship, but maybe not in the music community yet.

Daniel: Our focus really has been on the gamer out there, because we want to make sure the experience is accessible and not intimidating. But we see a lot of potential for an intermediate- to pro-level guitar player or keyboard player who wants to use Rock Band 3 as a way to learn new music, to learn new songs. And I suspect that we’ll get there as the game gets out and people realize what’s going on, the guitars get out and people put it together.

I spoke at a panel earlier this week; it was a panel that was sponsored by NARAS. [That's the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences - yes, the folks who give out the Grammy.] We were talking about digital distribution in this day and age, and how musicians can take advantage of some of the tools. And I was stunned at how few people were aware of RBN, and Rock Band 3. And I still think that in the musical community, music games have this stigma as a game, as a toy. And I don’t think enough musicians out there are as aware of the powerful distribution that’s offered through the Rock Band franchise, and then the actual musical benefits that our game has afforded all the way back. I’m looking for the tide to change within the musical community. I’m in two bands, a lot of people here are very musical people, and deeply, we feel that we want to use the Rock Band platform to promote music and to promote musical experiences, and to encourage people to be musicians. We want to be a part of the musical community, not competing with the musical community in any way.

Have you gotten feedback from musicians as you worked on Rock Band 3, apart from, obviously, the numerous musicians who work for Harmonix?

Daniel: Some. We worked pretty closely with a couple of folks at Berklee College of Music. We’re building this game, we want to make sure that we don’t want to teach people any horrible habits, and all of our chord language is correct, and our fingering is correct, and our ramp is from easy to medium and medium to hard, following loosely with stable, academic doctrine. And so we had a couple of people come in on a weekly basis to play the game. And people were very excited. I think a lot of people have seen the potential of this within the music community. So there are certainly people that are very impressed with what we’ve done and are looking forward to applying it as a tool in the music community.

Do you have hard numbers on the relationship of the game and this game genre to people going out and learning instruments? It seems Rock Band 3 has the potential to make that happen even more.

Daniel: Obviously, it’s too soon to tell what the impact of RB3 will be on, you know, the society that we live in. [laughs] There have been studies, vendors have done studies, Cornell did a study, just on the attach rate between music gamer and how many people play Guitar Hero and then go buy a guitar, how many people play Rock Band and take musical instrument lessons. I know that it’s an interesting topic in the musical academic world. And I think RB3 definitely changes the game. The connection between the game and the actual musical ability is way less tenuous than it has been in previous games. It’s pretty real. I think you’ll see a higher attach rate, but you know, we’ll see.

Some of those hard number… Harmonix provided us with a study, announced in January of 2009, by Fender and non-profit music education organization Little Kids Rock, looking at schools around the United States. The results: educators widely attribute a renewed interest in music education to the games. The study looked at teachers with students in the 8-13-year-old age group.

Results:
67% said guitar enrollment increased as a result of Rock Band and Guitar Hero; 46% bass, and 52% drums. A tiny fraction thought it decreased.

78% said they felt these games had a positive effect.

88% said it had increased interest in classic, guitar-based rock, and a whopping 95% said the two games would help attract new students.

Rock Band Network, Meet Pro Mode, Keys

How are the tools being received in the Rock Band Network community?

Matt: We’re working on the toolset now to add keyboards and harmony to Rock Band Network. The creative community has been incredibly excited about it. I know a lot of them are both holding songs back that have keyboard parts in it, and sort of going after artists who they know might be interested in it. We’ve already had interest from a few major-label artists who have already gotten in touch with us to try to get their stuff in. So I think it’s going to certainly expand the RBN stuff into the keyboard-centric area.

What made the difference for them — is it, okay, now I have an engine that can represent my music, is it that now it’s something that I can take more seriously, or a combination?

Matt: I think it’s more the former. I think these are people who are very keyboard-centric. Billy Joel’s a great example of someone who was added. We’ve had people who said, oh, cool, you have keyboards? I really want to get my songs in there, people who are known for playing keyboards.

John: I think it’s people who make music on that instrument want to see even the representational gameplay. Even if you’re playing keys mode, you don’t have to play the two octaves, we still have that five-button-style gameplay even on the keyboard, I think we’ve always felt a little weird about it when it’s been like, play the organ solo to Smokin’ by Boston on a guitar controller. We did it because it’s an amazing song and we didn’t want to hold it back, but it makes so much more sense, and it’s so much more fun for them to see their music expressed on an instrument, even in a simulation format that’s that much closer to reality. I think it opens the door for them to get excited about it. And then once they’re excited about it, it’s kind of a no-brainer to get their music in.

Of course, as a keyboardist, I’m pleased to see the addition of keyboards; what does that change mean for Harmonix, especially coming from only the guitar and drums?

John: The exciting thing for us is, keyboard is so fundamental in terms of the way that people process and understand music. It’s probably the most linear layout of notes that you can have. It makes a lot of sense to be able to look at a keyboard and be able to understand what that harmonic structure is, versus a guitar. When you see people trying to learn theory from a guitar, they’re able to do it, but it’s a very disconnected and disjointed thing in their minds a lot of the time, if they’re not musicians.

I come from a jazz background. You have great pianists and great piano solos in the context of jazz, but at laest half the time you’re comping. That’s always part of it. It’s such a versatile instrument that can do all those things. I think with Rock Band Network and with Rock Band DLC, what we’re seeing a lot of is the ability to highlight those songs. We’ve got music like Billy Joel, like Imagine by John Lennon, like Bohemian Rhapsody, where the piano has those stand-out moments, where we’re really looking at the keyboardist as featured player. But also we have have songs like Roundabout by Yes, or Freebird by Leonard Skynard, where the keyboard has a standout section or there’s a crazy keyboard solo or sort of insane part, but really it does work as an instrument that’s part of a collaborative effort, which is what Rock Band’s all about. Rock Band’s not about Guitar Heroes, and it’s not about drum solos. It’s about your band playing together. So the keyboard will have its stand-out moments, it’ll cast more light on an instrument that’s often overshadowed.

Matt: The thing about RBN is that you typically see the more the fringe-y, niche-y stuff. It seems likely to be that we’re going to get some of those, like maybe we’ll get a jazz tune where the keyboard comps the whole time. And that would be cool. It’s the sort of thing that we probably wouldn’t release as DLC, because we have more high-profile bands in front of it. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that people put into RBN because they’re passionate about the bands they love and the kind of music they like.

What will the impact of these new levels be on the authoring process? I know you’re working on releasing new tools to work with the new implementations for Rock Band Network; what are you changing?

Matt: We’ve improved a whole bunch of the audition tools to make auditioning much, much quicker and easier — like adding rewind and skip forward, vocal guide pitches and keyboard guide pitches. We actually brought a group of people in, some of the more advanced authors, to check out the MIDI spec, and one of the things they reacted to is that the keyboards are really, really complicated. The difference between five lanes and two octaves doesn’t seem that big, but when you figure out that you’ve got chords and it’s real stuff in real time, it’s a very significant increase in difficulty.

John: Both to author and to play test.

Matt: — and to play. So we’re trying to add some tools to allow them to make sure what they’ve done is correct according to what’s actually in the song.

John: The thing now is that it’s pitch-accurate. So it’s not just charting what feels right; it’s charting what is right.

There’s still compression going on. It’s not the same compression that we do to take all the sonic stuff that you’re hearing down to five colors, but we’re still talking about, if you have a full keyboard part, taking it down to about an octave and a half — you have to think about both the theoretical, what is the best way to do that to make it feel right from a gameplay standpoint, but also how to communicate information so that it’s still pitch-accurate, and it still plays well, with jumping around. When do you leave the bass note in, when do you take the bass note out? It’s a lot of thinking.

It’s not like when we launched originally, when we had four years of guitar authoring under our belts.

So it’s like doing a transcription, in other words — it’s like doing an orchestral transcription for piano, or in this case a piano transcription for toy piano.

John: Yeah, exactly. That’s sort of a funny way to refer to it, but it’s pretty accurate. It’s more an art than a craft.

Learning Music with Rock Band

Last week we got to see GarageBand ’11, with additional lessons, and metrics behind those lessons. In a way, the games and the music tools are converging. It seems like what the games are doing can help with learning music.

John: You know, I grew up playing piano. I’m a classically-trained percussionist, and learned piano when I was six years old, and all that good stuff. And the thing that sucks about learning an instrument in isolation is that you play scales, and you play Mary Had a Little Lamb, and you play your A harmonic minor scale. And when you mess up, it sounds bad. And when you do it right, it doesn’t sound that great either. It sounds like a scale.

The fun thing with Rock Band 3 is that the stories we have, we back you with a full band of music all the time. Even when you’re playing your C major scale, or your C major triad, you’re playing it on top of a bluegrass band, or a metal riff. And you feel like you’re accomplishing something. And it makes you want to get over that hump and get over that musical boredom and inertia that holds people down, where they’re not getting engaged on a real instrument. I’m hopeful we get people to feel like they’re learning, to feel like they’re engaging with a game and playing something, and they actually develop some chops and maybe some habits that can get them thinking about musical theory and maybe taking a piano lesson, or reading Keyboard Magazine, or downloading some GarageBand lessons. That’s all good.

It’s like the Jamey Aebersold tapes, where you have a backing track.

John: Exactly. Oh, God, those tapes… I was trained on those tapes. I was trained on… oh, God. They’re good. They’re torture.

So, now we have these full guitars and real two-octave keyboards — was there some iteration to arrive at that solution? I got to poke a little fun at the process when the announcement was made, mocking up a whole staff coming at you in the interface. Maybe at one point there was even something a little like that.

John: God, there was tons of iteration on that. I think this is sort of the genius of Harmonix games. To be very clear. I’m not a UI designer, that’s not my job or my baby, but having seen the iteration process it went through, when you see the end result, when you see the polish, you think, “oh, it must have been a really natural process to come up with this.” But what you’re looking at is hundreds of hours of painstaking thought and work that went into it.

With keyboards specifically, I think the biggest challenge was really getting people who are not used to reading piano roll, and not used to understanding the difference between a fourth and a fifth onscreen, being able to identify that quickly through a seamless UI and jump right in. And I think that our team did a killer job of what’s coming down the display on the screen. I think it’s pretty much the only way you can do it. The idea of having one octave of gameplay at a time, because we tried it with more than one octave.

Matt: And you know, adding the colors. I sat in on all those meetings. I go to all the design meetings. It was fascinating to watch us work through it. We tried not having black and white notes and coloring all the notes, and eventually we ended up on black and white because people are used to that. We struggled with, like, do you light up the lanes when you press them? How thick are the dividers between the lanes? We were tweaking stuff literally until the last day. And it was a nonstop process of iteration through the whole cycle to get it right. It’s very, very hard.

John: And it’s because people are so deep into music here, and want so badly to give people that experience and make it accessible. We can get my mom to play keyboards, and then get a great keyboard player, both being able to sightread something on easy and having a good time, not feeling like they’re reading music and suffering through a rehearsal process.

Matt I think it was a huge debate whether we had a key signature list at the beginning of each song. The keyboard people wanted it, and the design and UI people didn’t want it because they felt it was clutter. We went back and forth on that a bunch of times.

John: At the end of the day, that’s what designing games really is for something like this. If we’re translating a real-world experience, making decisions to give the most amount of information to people without overwhelming them. I think Rock Band Pro really walks that line of filling that screen with all the notes in the keyboard solo in Roundabout, without making you feel like you’re going to have an aneurysm from trying to play them.

My favorite thing is what people said about the pro guitar — that’s been in development as long, if not longer, than keyboards. We’ve been futzing around with that for two-plus years. And playtesting it, people were saying, oh, sure, you can play on it, and it makes sense to you, but you’re a guitar player. And to bring people in who never played guitar before, and give them our tutorial system, to see them like an hour later playing power chords? Playing I Love Rock and Roll? I mean, they’re not mastering it and no one’s playing crazy guitar solos, but to be able to fret three or four chords based on learning it through the game in an hour or two hours. Having them have to stop because their hands hurt — they were grinning from ear to ear, and they were doing it and loving it.

That’s the power of someone learning an instrument and getting excited about it. That’s what we had hoped would happen. The idea that anyone could pick up a guitar and spend two or three hours in our game and walk away knowing two or three chords and how open notes work and how they can move their way around a fretboard — that’s pretty crazy.

That’s the biggest surprise to me — that it fucking works.

It’s why people have been playing music for thousands of years.

All photos: Kyle Mercury. Images courtesy Harmonix.

For a truly unique and very much last-minute gift for anyone you know, look to CDM’s favorite game of year, the gorgeous, blood pressure-lowering title for Windows and – at long last – Mac. I may personally identify a little too much with the abstract protagonist of this game, as my holiday activities could well be described as floating around the universe, sucking particles into my gravity well as I grow in size. But whether or not I feel literally like an expanding bubble of matter, one of my favorite experiences this year was entering this ingenious physics-based game. It fuses visuals with a sparkling minimal electronic soundtrack by some favorite artists, from Gas to Loscil, and could be a perfect surprise hard drive stuffer for a Mac or Windows user – even if they’d be puzzled by, say, a sophisticated virtual analog instrument.

$10, Mac and Windows, instant download.

Osmos @ Hemisphere Games

I’m not doing this as an advertisement, either – I’m buying it and placing it on the hard drive of someone dear to me, who I’m fairly certain isn’t reading this blog and to whose laptop I have easy access.

Lastly, to help celebrate the holidays, we’ll have treats in the form of free downloads and tips leading from this weekend into the New Year. Among them, I’m pleased to offer the exclusive official Osmos soundtrack as a free CDM Sounds podcast. (I hoped to have that edited in time for today, but expect it by Monday. And yes, it’s the rare soundtrack that you’ll still want to hear after the game is over.)

Best gift I could have received: http://createdigitalmotion.com is back after a screw-up with our domain. It won’t happen again, and we’ll make it up to our visualist readers with extra content starting next week.

Thanks, everyone, and enjoy the season. Winter is, after all, a great time to bunker in and make music.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. We get to enjoy the sounds and sights made by chips, independent games, and Novation Launchpad-controlled Sega Mega Drives. Blip Fest hits NYC this week in a celebration of vintage and lo-fi chips and the wonderful, blippy music they produce. To get things started right on Wednesday night, we have a special edition of Handmade Music, the DIY music party/science fair/noisy racket series, in a special location — the opening of Babycastles, a new, permanent home for independent games. (Think “indie arcade,” an idea I hope spreads worldwide.)

If you’re in the area, come check out some terrific independent games, meet artists, see in person the inventions of Australia’s Little Scale, and more. OPEN CALL FOR STUFF: Visiting Blip artists and NYC-area hackers, if you’ve got a visual or musical creation related to gaming or chip music, we’d love to have you show-and-tell and make some noise with it; this is, as always, an open potluck for the things you make. (Bring cables and, if you can, portable amplification/headphones.) Everyone, if you can make it out a little early, we’ll have a “secret” workshop with Loud Objects to solder a chip music toy, even if you’re a beginner. (Sign up below; we’ll need a very small fee for parts.)

Wherever you are, Sebastian Tomczak from South Australia, aka Little Scale, is a sound artist you really don’t want to miss. For a long list of awesome, look no further than his blog, for Game Boys tuned like Japanese kotos, Max patch sequencers to download, and Game Boy Advance albums. He’s promised to bring his performance-ready Sega MegaDrive and Atari 2600 jr, a 2600 MIDI interface, and the Sega sounds controlled by new tech, the Novation Launchpad, as pictured in the video at top.

http://little-scale.blogspot.com/

Sign up for the “secret” chip music toy soldering workshop with Loud Objects:

Signup for semi-secret workshop

Facebook event RSVP

More on the event / map:

The location is in the Bushwick neighborhood. For those of you in from out of town, Google Maps can give you transit directions and time estimates; it’s a pretty easy trip from Manhattan, and we’ll head back there afterward to catch Blip’s open mic night. Official event info:

Babycastles Arcade Kickoff Party feat. Handmade Chiptunes Night

Free, Wednesday, December 16th, 6:00PM – 8:30PM

Babycastles teams up with Handmade Music Night for the inaugural opening of a permanent indie games arcade in Brooklyn.

915 Wyckoff Street, L to Halsey or M to Myrtle / Wyckoff. (map below)

This opening celebrates Adam Atomic’s Canabalt (NYC), Ivan Safrin’s Owl Country (NYC), Tristan Perich’s KillJet (NYC), and Kyle Purver’s Jottobots (NY), which will be playable all night and throughout December. Cardboard lectures by the game developers! High Score Chalkboard Dress by Lara Grant! Chiptunes performance and workshop by little-scale (AU)! Show up extra early for a secret chipmusic toy soldering workshop by the Loud Objects.

Part of an official Blip Festival Pre-Party – 10% discount on Blip Festival tickets available, and a group hug ride to the Tank afterwards!

View Larger Map

Babycastles

Babycastles, New York’s first independent games arcade, is named after bite-size portugese cakes in Japan. As a new function of a legendary all-ages venue for Brooklyn music and other local diy-culture, Babycastles is a wall of six lovingly decorated arcade cabinets that offers a physical place to play games made by amateur and independent game developers. The arcade is open four or five nights a week, during every show at the Silent Barn. The venue throws an opening party every few weeks for a new collection of arcade games, with the game developers present, music, drinks, and plenty of opportunity to get together and love games.

Handmade Music Night

Part party, part mixer, part Science Fair, and part performance, this is an informal chance for geeksters and the geek-curious to come together, relax, and discover new sounds. The evening is a gathering of inventors of new instruments & music technology. Featuring circuit-bent toys, custom software and patches, interactive digital & visual instruments, custom electronics, electricity-powered noisemakers, DIY robots and new acoustic instruments. And it’s open to everyone from hard-core hackers & newcomers to music lovers who want to learn about the DIY music scene.

Musicians and artists now have the power to fuse visuals, sound, and interaction, to make a spectacle, an album, and a game all at once. But with the blank canvas of three different media before you, what form should that fusion take?

Space shooters with pounding electronic beats behind them have cleared some of the way. Now it’s ambient music’s turn. In the game Osmos, you become a mysterious particle, floating amongst gravity wells in various fields of material. By carefully navigating, applying just the right vector force to move through the shifting landscape, you merge with other particles and escape to safety.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

The move from “shoot stuff” to “move” or “eat” seems to be rising in popularity, with games like fl0w and Spore’s initial “cell stage” encouraging nonviolent navigation. To me, there’s something happening to the zeitgeist, perhaps a renewed awareness of cosmic (micro- or macroscopic) being, and of movement that draws on free-floating physics.

Even amongst a wave of games in this mode,when you actually play Osmos, you realize that it is something different and special. The design makes ingenious use of different kinds of movement and pacing through its different modes, at one point calling upon you to hurtle around a black hole, then move at nearly imperceptible speeds through a seemingly impossible-to-traverse petri dish of massive particles. No less than a shooter, it connects to the id and survival instinct. Pac-Man, the most successful arcarde game of all time, and one of the few that sucked in men and women in equal measure, was noted for its emphasis on eating as the mechanic. Consuming stuff appeals to everyone.

Of course, this is on a music site, and with good reason: what makes Osmos work is that Osmos is musical. It’s immediately beautiful and delicate, a perfect aesthetic union of the texture of the music and the on-screen arrangements of particles. More importantly, the music is woven directly into game play, providing subtle cues for dangers, and underscoring the pace of gameplay. You can only solve a level by managing speed and motion, and the music helps provide both the literal indications of speed and help your head get into the right zone to lose yourself in the world. If blips in early arcade games helped create a zone of play trance, now we have spectacular ambient soundtrack of music by Loscil, Gas/High Skies [Microscopics], Julien Neto, and Biosphere.

The music isn’t simply a beautiful soundtrack to the game. The game really feels like an extension of the world of the music. Put it all together, and something magical happens in this $10 game: you hear the music in a new way.

I spoke to the lead designer behind the game, programmer/animator Eddy Boxerman, along with musical-sonic collaborator Mat Jarvis aka Gas aka High Skies.

Peter: I found it amusing that some of the game press have stumbled around looking for a name for a new genre here, the "eat other stuff" category. To me, the basic game controls could be traced back to early titles like Asteroids. What are the games that have inspired you, either specifically or generally?

Eddy: Some people are dubbing the gameplay type as "eat ‘em up", as opposed to the classic "shoot ‘em up". But it’s true, the physics/controls have more in common with classic games such as Asteroids and Gravitar. The only "modern" game that otherwise influenced me was Katamari Damacy. It’s funny: when I sent out the first prototype to friends, I was concerned they would think the game was too similar to Katamari. That’s when I heard about flOw, which I’ve tried to steer stylistically clear of ever since. I guess it’s an archetype though, and the comparisons have been inevitable. As for Spore, Osmos was about one year into development when I saw the first preview footage of its "cell stage". On top of that, I learned that Will Wright had hired Brian Eno to do the music! I definitely had a "why should I bother?" moment at that point. But here we are, a couple years later, and I think we’ve managed to put out a unique game with a great mix of gameplay, sound, and visuals.

Peter: Ha – well, I’m glad you “bothered”! One thing that I think is really unique about Osmos is the gravitational mechanic. How did this come about?

Eddy: I was (and probably still am) a sci-fi kid. And when I read about real phenomena like colliding galaxies, retrograde planets, and the like, my mind goes to stange and wonderful places. That said, the Spacecraft Dynamics course I took during my engineering degree definitely played a large part in putting those mechanics and levels together. Thanks, Professor Misra!

Peter: How are the physical mechanics of the game constructed? This is essentially two-dimensional vector math, yes? Were there refinements you needed to make in order to keep performance up, or to keep the levels playable?

Eddy: That’s a big question! But yes, essentially it’s 2D vector math, though we make use of some 3D math (including quaternions) on the particle systems. The majority of the physics is quite simple though — first year bachelor’s stuff: F = ma, conservation of mass and momentum, gravitational laws, basic time integration, etc. We follow the spirit of the laws, but not always the letter. For instance, if you look at the Earth’s solar system in its entirety, you wouldn’t even see most of the planets; that doesn’t make for a very playable game though. As such, we took many liberties when it comes to scale, constants and exponents in the equations. The majority of the work was in the tweaking of those values to make the game /feel /good.

Peter: How did you prototype the game? What was the process of evolution like? Were there any failed attempts along the way?

Eddy: I put together the first prototype starting from a NeHe OpenGL tutorial. I added some basic physics, mouse controls, some highly unoptimised collision detection code, and voila, I had something to play with. After that, I immediately integrated [cross-platform 3D audio API] OpenAL, as the game was just begging for sound and music. I then hunted for some good sounds (discovering freesound.org in the process), put together a simple looping song (my first rough and humbling attempt to create digital music), and sent it out to a few friends. I’ll make that version available for free someday… when I’m feeling brave.

As for failed attempts, there were tons of shelved experiments and features that were cut. One interesting problem was the difficulty curve of the gravitational levels. In fact, the first gravity levels looked a great deal like the "Warped Chaos" levels do today: several free-floating Attractors in a sea of regular motes. I found it incredibly difficult, however, to make a "beginner" version of those levels. If the gravity was too weak, the Attractors had little apparent effect; too strong, and the level became incredibly difficult. I stuggled with this for a long time, until I hit on the idea of putting one, immobile Attractor in the center, with everything else orbiting around it. This allowed for the creation of systems with strong gravity effects, but long-term stability. It seems so obvious now, especially given the example of our solar system, but it wasn’t back then. In the end, these are some of the coolest levels in Osmos — practically its "signature" level type. Moral of the story: necessity really is the mother of invention.

Peter: What is the visual engine like? The sound engine?

Eddy: As I mentioned, I bootstrapped from a NeHe tutorial, but that’s all been replaced at this point. It’s now a homegrown engine using OpenGL. It doesn’t make any use of pixel/vertex shaders, so it runs on a wide variety of hardware. The majority of our texture work is done in Photoshop.

[The sound engine is] a wrapper we’ve built around OpenAL. At a basic level, all we ever do is mix and adjust the gain and pitch of our sounds and music. This allows us to run on generic sound hardware. But we do make extensive use of those "effects", and it’s possible to get a great deal of variety and feedback with them. In the end, it’s all about the quality of our sound sources, and the algorithms that adjust and smooth the gain and pitch of each.

Peter: For pitch shifting, were you able to do that natively in OpenAL?

Eddy: Yes, OpenAL supports pitch shifting at the software level. I ported our sound engine to use DirectSound at one point, and found that it’s pitch shift range is rather limited. We reverted back to OpenAL.

Peter: One thing that really strikes me about the game that is its use of pacing. Even without the obvious technique of allowing the user to control speed, there’s this extraordinary contrast between levels that require you to move quickly, that require you to anticipate the rate of movement along a vector of other objects, or that require you to move almost imperceptibly slowly. Was this an early goal, or something that evolved out of developing the game concepts?

Eddy: It evolved from the game concepts themselves. We tried to fully explore the fundamental controls and game space of Osmos, and converged on a number of interesting regions and structures that were fun to play with/in. Some people actually "complain" that the pacing of the game isn’t consistent across levels — some are fast, some slow — but that wasn’t our goal. In a sense, we’re merely presenting the results of a great deal of research and exploration into the space, with our sole requirement being that the levels are fun and interesting. We wanted it to be a game of concepts and understanding, not speed. The addition of time-warping allowed us to break free from that, expand our scope, and include a much larger variety of levels, as some have both fast and slow moments in them; we wanted the player to be able to control the pace and difficulty to their level of comfort.

Peter: Connecting the action to music, how important is the use of music in conveying time?

Eddy: I think pitch-shifting the music and sound effects helps players track time-warping in an inutitive way. Without these aural cues, the mental connection would be incomplete. That said, I sometimes test the game without sound, and it’s totally playable — just much less immersive.

Peter: At what stage did you involve the musical element? How was that relationship established?

Mat: Eddy first contacted me two or three years ago about using one of my tracks on Osmos (“Gas – Discovery”). He sent me a basic alpha version where the game was literally flat circles on a plain background, but even back then with the simple graphics and no sound it was compelling. I think it was at this early stage that I sent him a copy of another High Skies track, “The Shape of Things to Come,” which he also used a section from. It wasn’t too long later that he sent me a version of Osmos with most of the music that made it to the release version and it all just complimented each other beautifully.

Eddy has done a great job choosing music that compliments the game and graphics, and they also compliment the music. I think he’s done a great job overall as well, keeping his vision consistent for the look and feel of the Osmos world. Even though some of the levels are quite varied; some are quite chilled, others fast paced, nothing seems out of place. He has created a new world that’s both microscopic and macroscopic.

Peter: The musical and sound effect elements really do blend effortlessly. Mat, I know you made substitute sounds – how did this help blend the aesthetic?

Mat: I made the rebound noise when you bounce off the walls/ boundary. The original sound was quite hard and metallic with a lot of reverb, and I suggested a softer echoey sound. There was nothing wrong with the original, but it made the boundary feel quite hard and cold like being in a metal tank. I sent Eddy some analogue samples, using a [vintage Roland keyboard] Jupiter 6 with varying delays/ echoes. Because the tones are so pure and tuned, Eddy pitched them slightly to fit with the various keys of the different music.

Eddy: In general, it was a matter of searching and experimentation for the "right" set of sounds that fit well together — which can be a lengthy but rewarding process. Once integrated, minor gain and pitch adjustments helped fit it all together.

Mat provided the bounce sound, as well as the continuous absorb/being-absorbed sounds. The other sounds were created/shared on freesound by the users Elektrocell, fran_ky and Jovica. (Check out the Osmos credits in the readme.html for details.)

Peter: I recently spoke to Crystal Method, and while they’ve done some notable game scores, they actually said they wouldn’t want their music to be placed in a game context at which the speed changed, that it’d lose something. This seems like the opposite of that. Now, maybe it’s easy to take for granted with ambient music as opposed to something beat-driven like Crystal Method, but do you think there’s something special that allows this music to be adaptive in that way?

Mat: I think that in the right circumstances music with drums could work well and may even highlight the time-shifting more. Of course with the wrong game and wrong music it could sound terrible too.

Eddy: It’s a delicate issue. Out of the context of the game, I think it would seem wrong. There were also some pieces of music I tried which didn’t lend themselves well to this kind of manipulation, and which didn’t get included as a result. But with these songs, and everything working together in-game, I feel the whole experience is stronger as a result. I’m just glad Mat and the other artists agreed — or at least… didn’t object.

Peter: Hey, I think if you can write music that sounds good played at a different speed, that’s nice.

Osmos seems to me a musical experience, in that the sense of the music is transformed by the visuals and the interaction with them. Do you think it’s possible that audiovisual interfaces could go even further in terms of their impact on the music?

Mat: Yes, it almost seems as though Osmos creates a world for the music to exist.

I’ve always liked music visualisers like the Processing and Cymatics stuff, they’re quite compelling to watch how they react to the music, so it would be interesting to go the other way; by manipulating/ sculpting abstract shapes which then modify or even create sounds and music, especially using the new controllers like the Wii, [Microsoft’s] Project Natal and Sony’s Motion Controller instead of the mouse.

Eddy: I totally agree with Mat. Yes, please! More feedback between music, visuals and interactivity — in all directions. I’d love to experiment more on all of these fronts. In general, I think games such as Audiosurf and Auditorium, while great, have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. Interactive musical "toys" such as [Nintendo/Toshio Iwai’s ]ElectroPlankton or Dub Selector are another great direction; and Rock Band Network is about to expand the market in a huge way. It’s exciting!

Peter: Along those lines, this is obviously a new take on music distribution in a way that goes well beyond what titles like Rock Band have done. Are there other cases in game history that to you have done that? Is there potential in these new outlets, outlets that are more accessible to independent developers (Steam, Direct2Drive, Xbox Live Arcade, iTunes App Store), to really change game development?

Eddy: Wow, that’s another big question. Really, I just felt the music was such an important part of the experience in Osmos that we should show the artist and track names during the game. But now that you mention it, I can’t think of another game that has done this, besides games like Rock Band where the song /is/ the game/level. That said, one way I’d love to push this evolution is to "augment" music videos with interactivity: ie. into music video-games. (The term "game" could be used rather loosely here.) Everyday Shooter does this, though Jon Mak actually created the music /for/ the game in that case — which rocks — but collaborations could lead to some really amazing things in this direction.

Peter: Eddy, Mat, thank you. Whether it’s in the form of a game or an audiovisual performance, we’ll certainly continue to explore these areas. And – hint, hint – Osmos 2, with multiplayer? Just a thought.

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.