In a year of indie wonders, PS3 and Vita musical platform puzzler Sound Shapes is a marvel. Crafted by Queasy Games' Jonathan Mak and Shaw-Han Liem, it’s a darling synthesis of a beautifully simple world and hugely likeable music.
Through the central character, a spinning 'fried egg', players navigate gorgeous worlds, gathering musical notes and creating songs along the way.
Platforming and puzzle-solving are wedded together in levels that somehow manage to glue visual minimalism with environmental complexity. This is a game in which thoughtful progression, rather than twitch, pays dividends, especially for those of us who measure our dull two-dimensional acuity with a pendulum. It’s a stop-and-start adventure swinging through the arc of the screen in search of strange, new aural experiences.
Interesting that the tutorial for the game’s level editor comes very early in the experience, a testament to creativity’s central role. It is already yielding genuinely interesting user-generated offerings. Sound Shapes is an artistic adventure both from the creators and for the players.
IGN caught up with Jonathan Mak and Shaw-Han Liem to talk about the game’s genesis and the decisions that went into its design. Here are the seven creative steps that culminated in one of the year’s best small-team games.
The team had previously created Everyday Shooter, which synthesized a classic game genre with musical exploration. Mak says, “The challenge for us was, ‘how do we give the player more ownership over the music’? Allowing players to actually create music within the game. So when we exhausted the Everyday Shooter style. We kept trying different things, different genres.
“The reason we chose a platformer was, we wanted to find some super-ubiquitous form of video game. A top-down shooter is kind of abstract. It has some weird rules. Certain things you can touch, certain things you can't. If you've never played a video game, you might not really understand that.
“But a platformer already has some real-world things built in. There's gravity. There's a character that walks around. Although I f***ed that up and made the character a fried egg [chuckles]. And the whole going from left-to-right. Classically, the platformer goes the same way. It's similar to how you read music and so it makes sense in that way.”
Each of the ‘albums’ that make up the game carry a different musical style and visual story, but they all adhere to a distinctive look, a felt-board collection of shapes and colors that never fails to delight and surprise.
‘Whoa, what is this crazy sound?’ That sense of discovery. You want the player to feel that.”
Mak says the simple aesthetic was designed to give the player as much access to its music as possible. “You need some way to show the player the gameplay features, the checkpoints, in such a way that it doesn't draw attention away from the stuff that's actually making music. But I think Shaw-Han and I share the same liking of the idea of a clean aesthetic. Luckily, we found [designer] Cory Schmitz. It just feels more modern. You look at the iPhone. Simple is the way to go.”
The elegance of the game’s design is underpinned by its relatively forgiving nature. This is no pixel-Nazi platformer. Once the rules of the world are understood, progression is less a matter of hand-eye-perfection as of timing. Music’s own playbook being the obvious inspiration.
Mak says, “Is about enjoying the music, getting players engaged in music, and inspiring them to write their own music as well. Our worst fear was making some sort of musical toy. I really wanted to get to the point where the game was, for real, a video game. Not just this musical gimmicky thing with some half-assed video game slapped over it. Part of the magic of Sound Shapes was how Shaw-Han was insistent that the game itself be a music instrument.”
One of the great commercial and cultural successes of the last decade has been selling the illusion of creativity as entertainment. This idea that, with the right tools, we are all towering mountains of artistic genius just waiting to be mined.
Because, let’s face it, there are few things in entertainment more rewarding than the sensation of creativity. The genius of Sound Shapes is in turning a two-dimensional left-to-right progression into an act of musical composition. Of course, the music is really just being ‘read’ by your movements, but it feels like the songs are being untethered by player-choices.
Mak says, “The game is a gateway to the music. It’s showing people that writing music is easy. We let the players discover that for themselves, and that discovery is what's fun. It's like if you're tweaking a patch on a synth and you discover this crazy thing by turning a knob. ‘Whoa, what is this crazy sound?’ That sense of discovery. You want the player to feel that.”
That great human invention, musical notation, allows us to visualize and record pitch, tone, duration, and has been with us for centuries (arguably, millennia). Although Sound Shapes moves the player in every direction on-screen, it works much like a musical score, left-to-right with high notes high, and low notes low.
Shaw-Han Liem explains, “Obviously there's a connection. The music and visuals have things in common. You can map relationships, like tones to colors and volumes to sizes. The timing of animations to the curves of volume.
Of course, this synthesis sounds pretty straightforward in principle, but in practice, a platform game and a musical score are not the same things, and they both demand absolute perfect placement within the rules of their own domains. A lava pit that cannot be traversed is no use. Likewise, a duff note will ruin an entire composition.
So, the note floating above the lava pit, assailed by shooting bubbles of magma, must be in harmony with its surroundings.
“In the editor for players, it's kind of a whimsical experience, and obviously that's what we intended. But when we're crafting our levels, we have this mindset of perfection. It's hard to be perfect when you have all these variables floating around.”
Sound Shapes’ greatest puzzle is its level editor, which invites you to not only create platform worlds, but to work-in a musical theme. This offers limitless creative possibilities.
Liem says, “After about a week from when we launched in North America, there were already thousands of levels, and tons of really cool ones. We've been watching people starting their own communities on different message boards and sharing different tips and levels.
“I got a message from a guy who said he was at his job secretly sketching out what his level was going to be at his desk, and he was sending out the images and the drawings of what he was planning on doing once he got home and was able to put it together. Obviously we hoped that people would be excited by it, but to be able to see that happening first-hand with some people is really exciting.”
Colin Campbell is a British-born, Santa-Cruz based games journalist, working for IGN. I really think you'll like Sound Shapes. You can contact me via Twitter or IGN to discuss this game.
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