The game has found itself

I knew this was going to be a ton of work. What I never imagined was how much of that work would be the friction of throwing out massive chunks of the game and starting over.

SYNTHERION has been genre shifting ever since the last dev log. It was exclusively a vertical scroller for a while, then it switched to twin-stick wave defense, and it even had about five dark days where it was a rhythm game.

Yes, I honestly expected players to pilot a ship, aim, and also pull the trigger within +/- 200 milliseconds of accuracy. It took about 30 minutes of playtesting for me to remember: I don't play any rhythm games, because I don't enjoy them.

So, pitfall avoided. But that was still five days of concentrated dev time out the window, not to mention the dead code that's been hanging around like the bag of clean laundry on the floor that I'm refusing to put away.

But, praise the gods, I think I'm finally on track. As it turns out, the game was missing a soul, and the soul was real musicians.

What the stems couldn't do

If you look back, you'll notice a previous post called Splice saved the game, where I thought the website's looping stems were the key to musical bliss. I had every intention of peppering in artist work, but I couldn't rely on it, because I needed each individual instrument to be universally compatible with the rest of the game. So artists were going to get their own special corners of the universe, but for technical reasons I needed to stick to stems that I rigidly set to 120 BPM, key of D# minor.

Lo, and behold: suck. The music had no sense of progression, and no matter how much variety in stem-driven weapons I offered, players would still get stuck shooting the same two or three favorite guns, listening to instruments just loop over and over again.

Then this crazy idea hit me: what if this musical game prioritized the work of actual musicians?

The game was missing a soul, and the soul was real musicians.

A friend put me in touch with Memory Design, who has helped attract the interest of over 30 synth musicians. He's become a more valuable ally than Claude and Godot, because I highly doubt the game ever would have found itself without a soul.

So, what's the game?

A 2D, musical version of Elite Dangerous. There's a galaxy to explore, mission boards to choose from, upgrades to purchase, and most importantly: songs are finite resources that the player equips to their ship. These provide powerful alternatives to conventional weapons: Harmonic Weapons.

It's pretty sick. Or at least I think so.

-Tim