Feature: Sound Shapes Devs On The Tension Between Music And Gameplay

Author: by Staff

In Gamasutra's latest feature interview, indie game developer Jon Mak (Everyday Shooter) and indie electronic artist Shaw-Han Liem talk about how they "spend a lot of time trying to find that overlap" between gameplay and sound in their synesthetic PlayStation Vita game. "I don't think there's a literal one-to-one shape to sound, but we try to match, I think, behaviors to sounds, and the sort of overall visual element with what's happening sound-wise," says Liem. So when we're designing entities, me and Jon basically had to sit there and argue for a whole day about like, 'I need this entity to do this,' so that in the music editor you're going to be able to do cool music with it, and Jon's thing is, 'I need the entity to do this other thing,' because in the game it's going to make it really cool gameplay-wise if it has this behavior," he explains. "And so we have to spend a lot of time trying to find that overlap. What's the coolest part about both of those things -- where the music thing will be cool and the gameplay thing will be cool. And so when we find that overlap, that's how we know we've got something." The full interview, in which Liem and Mak further discuss the creative decisions behind Sound Shapes, is live now on Gamasutra.