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Sindrel Song!

6 years ago6,060 words

Here's a post in which I describe my current project - Sindrel Song - including screenshots, a gameplay video, some music I composed for it, and some rambling about the story, how the main character is tied to MARDEK, in a roundabout way, and how this game will be set in the world of Alora Fane.

Well, it's 2019 now. Traditionally, I'd write a New Year's Resolutions post, reviewing last year's and coming up with new ones for this year... but it hardly seems worth bothering. This seems a less-than-ideal time to be updating something like this in general, I feel, since I'd bet that a lot of people are busy with the start of the new year, and the aftermath of the holiday season, including having fancy new games and things to devote their attention to. The view counts on these posts - which were never exactly high to begin with - have definitely dropped, so I'm just telling myself it's because of all that so as to calm the insecure worry about my writing being off-putting or there being no reason for people to care or... well, whatever!

Speaking of tradition, I've commented about radiotherapy in my recent posts, so... I think I had session 21 yesterday? 9 left. Two weeks. It's going the same as it was before. I'm very tired and losing my hair, but my cognitive faculties seem generally intact. It's all just a chore at this point, but the horror of it has largely worn off. That's good?? I'm sure it won't be when the symptoms worsen, but oh well.

I've been devoting most of my thoughts recently to a game called Sindrel Song, which I started nine days ago, and which is very near to completion already. There's a lot I'd like to say about it, but I feel that I've done a poor job of explaining what it even is so far. I feel that a short video of the gameplay would do a better job of making it clear than words ever could. Here you go:



(Feels weird uploading something so incomplete to YouTube... but it's not like I use that account for much else anyway. Also I wish I could remove the mouse cursor, but my screen recording program isn't exactly good! Also, I deliberately messed up here and got a 'Failed' rating at the end, which amuses me because I got 'perfect' on my actual attempt. I'll need to tweak those grade calculations! It would have been funnier if that was commented about by the other character, but it's too much effort to change it. ALSO also, everything looks quite stiff and incomplete at the moment; I don't want anyone to think this is as polished as it'll get!)

Essentially, you're a sindrel, and you mimic melodies using the notes available to you. You have two different scales - 'day' and 'night' - each with six notes. You can switch between them at will, but it'd be rare that you'd need to do so; most songs would be in one or the other. I've included an especially difficult melody here to demonstrate the concept; in the actual thing, you'd start off with MUCH simpler melodies (starting with just 'melodies' of a single note), before advancing to more complicated stuff the further you progressed. You play the notes by tapping the buttons if on a mobile device, or I've set it up so you can use the keyboard on a computer (or the mouse, though that's frustratingly awkward, I've found). You switch scales by using a button on the left (or shift).

There are six levels, and each one involves several 'chunks'. So you'd listen to a brief melody, repeat it, hear another, repeat that, and that might go on for around 20 times or something before the level ends. Each mimic attempt is assessed, and if you fail to match the melody, you have to repeat that chunk until you do. You have six 'lives', so if you fail six times in total, you have to restart the level. At the end, you get an overall score based on your performance, which takes failed attempts and rhythm into account. Passing each level would be one challenge, getting an A (or even A+) grade on them all would be another.

Once the six basic levels were complete, you'd probably be able to attempt more complicated versions of each of them, perhaps even to unlock some especially challenging final level. Maybe.

That's the gist of the gameplay, but the story and world is... idiosyncratic.

See, I could have manufactured something blandly relatable or hollowly expected, like calling it "Tweety Bird" and having the player be a backgroundless bird that sings at another bird simply for the sake of it. I could have done that. Except, I feel like I personally couldn't do that. I always try to make my projects interesting to me in terms of lore, and it bothers me how without that so many experiences seem to be. What's the lore of Candy Crush? Does it matter? Hardly.

In this, I'm drawing upon concepts I've described and explored previously, and I've put quite a bit of thought and passion into everything, so I'm quite interested in talking about that here. It's quite a journey though, so I'll conclude this bit of this post with some screenshots of what I've got so far, so then I can use one as the preview image:







I want to talk about the plot and setting, but first, some technicalities.

I'm currently using quickly-painted backgrounds here (like five-minute jobs, not refined at all), to give a general feel for what I want. They turned out better than expected! I don't really do backgrounds and didn't expect that I'd be able to capture what was in my mind, but it turned out very close to what I was imagining, to my pleasant surprise.

I want to try to replace these images with 3D backgrounds eventually, though. I find 3D low-poly 'dioramas' quite charming; I looked at a few for inspiration on a site called Sketchfab, including ∞ this one ∞, ∞ this ∞, ∞ this ∞... There are loads of them. I felt intimidated by the idea of making all the graphics in 3D, but for whatever reason making each level's background as a diorama in this kind of way seems much more appealing to me. So I'm going to try that and see how it works out. If it doesn't work out well, I can just stick with drawings, like the above, but more refined.

But now for what it's actually about...



In Sindrel Song, you play as a female sindrel, whose first experience is a dark nightmare, in which she glimpses a flicker of light before it's engulfed by darkness. "Glimmer", she murmurs, as she wearily opens her eyes for the first time. She's on a strange beach, with a stranger looking over her.

This stranger is a sindrel too, a male, and his skin is white. Not that she knows the significance of this. She hasn't even seen her own lavender skin before now! She has no memory, as her life has just begun, and yet the 'symboliote' parasite in her head has flooded her mind with the ability to walk, to talk, to be consciously aware and to function as an adult would, without the need for a long and arduous childhood.

Because of this stability of mind when a sindrel first gains consciousness, they awaken into the world from a dream, always; the result of the mind calibrating itself, perhaps. They also always mutter their first word, an image from the dream they just had, and this word always becomes their name. Often, it's a symbolic thing relevant to the life they'll go on to live, though other times it's some irrelevant and mundane object they just happened to see. They're able to name it due to the knowledge the symboliote floods their mind with.

As such, this protagonist is called Glimmer, as that was the first word she said.

The white sindrel introduces himself as Hearth, and expresses confusion about why she's awoken on this beach. Female sindrels typically awaken in a pool of nectar in the 'house plants' with which they have a symbiotic relationship, so their 'birth' is a lot less harrowing than this.

Glimmer's symboliote - the 'flower' on her head, actually a parasite lodged deeply into her brain - begins to talk to her; a 'sound' only she can perceive. It doesn't say nice things. It says quite horrible things, actually; they've only just met, mind-to-mind, and it's already expressing worry and doubt and fear and criticism. It stings her.



Though he can't hear these words, Hearth notices her wincing. He wonders whether this is a 'defective' symboliote, a 'broken mind', which caused the house plant to reject its host into the ocean so as to purge the gene pool of poison. He's heard of this happening before - seen it happening - though normally the poor sindrels die before they're even 'born'. They're aborted before they can suffer. It's just blind chance that Glimmer washed up on this beach and survived.

Not that she'll be surviving for very long. Sindrels' lives are six days long; they end when their world is engulfed by a harsh winter that they cannot survive. Most sindrels live lives of hasty desperation, connecting as quickly as they can with the opposite sex so as to produce offspring that'll be born the next winter, even if they'll never see them.

Hearth, though... He was born hating this system. Perplexed by how his kin just accept it, accept their inevitable, impending end. How the winter comes and they just die. He didn't want to be a part of that. He didn't want to die before he had a chance to live.

So rather than devoting his flicker of time to attempting to breed, he went off the beaten path, and... long story short, he found a way of surviving the winter. But he was the only one who survived; everyone else died. He noticed that though his six days were up, his body wasn't; he didn't get old, or decrepit, or lose control of any of his faculties or anything. Sindrels' biological clocks long outlasted the lifetime they expected to live, it seemed. From his perspective, he'd transcended the cycle of birth and death; he seemed immortal.

He noticed however that the blue pigment in his skin - which had determined his sexual status in life - faded over time, leaving him pale, white. Considering his snowy skin and his victory over winter, he decided that he was no longer a mere sindrel, he was a 'wintrel', a winter sindrel.

Over time, loneliness got to him, so he sought out other sindrel settlements between the winters... though he noticed that most sindrels he met were uninterested in his promise of 'eternal life', because they were too concerned with wooing the opposite sex. Their time was too limited to entertain apparent madness. Their instincts were overpowering.

Well, most sindrels. He found five others who took him up on his offer, and over time their skin colour faded too, leaving them all white together. A group of wintrels.

It's on an island where these wintrels live that Glimmer awakens. Hearth suggests that she lives with them; that she become a wintrel too, transcending her impending death. If she'd even want to, that is. He's aware her symboliote is toxic, and it's not like that can ever be removed. Would she want to be tormented by her own mind for eternity? And even if she did live forever, would she want to be a part of this group?

Female sindrels sing; it's just something that they all do, as part of their biological path through life. They sing to the 'sprouts' that they must nurture, or perhaps to male sindrels to woo them, or with other females for pleasure. The female wintrels' singing voices degraded with their skin tone, but Glimmer is fresh, newborn, so she still has her angel voice, even if she's never actually heard it herself.

One of the female wintrels was distraught about her inability to sing, and she used the long winters to craft innovative instruments that allowed her to create music in another form. This ability could be shared with the males, too, who'd previously only ever listened to songs rather than making their own, and as a group the wintrels learned to embrace music as a form of passing the time, of expressing themselves, of bonding.

Hearth suggests that Glimmer explore the island she's on, and that she share songs with the other wintrels. If she can hear their expressions and show that she truly understands them, by mimicking them, then she'll have a connection with them which will make both her and them more open to the idea of being a part of this group 'immortally'.

It's not a challenge, or a threat, or a 'you must'. Hearth just wants her to make her own decision, about whether she wants to live as she is, with them, and he knows that there's pleasure and connection in song that might help everyone.

Glimmer has six days before the winter comes, but by bonding through music with these wintrels, she can transcend that certain death...



That's a fairly unusual setting and story, I think!! But if you've been following me for a while, reading my ramblings, it should be extremely obvious how it ties into everything else I ever think or try to make. The difference between all that stuff and this is that before, it was just castles in the clouds, ideas I rarely got beyond the concept stage, but this thing is working already, 'done' in a sense; I just need to add 'polish' in the form of visuals, writing, etc. It's nice to have something that's not a long adventure, that I can finish from beginning to end very quickly.

I have mixed feelings about it though. I like it, a lot. I'd love to play a game that went into this kind of detail about its world. It's intriguing, I think, and I'd be really curious to learn more about the universe it presented. It's like how people get really into worlds like Middle Earth, because it has depths to it that you can explore through lore. But then I'm the sort of person who read all the books I found in the Elder Scrolls games, appreciating the effort put into the details of the world even if I didn't exactly remember them all. I used to check the wiki for things like Steven Universe and Adventure Time to see how all the bits were interconnected. Such things tend to find a lasting place in my mind.

Such lore immersion seems to be typically regarded as nerdy though, because the mainstream masses are less concerned with such things. So what might be very appealing to the right people might just be off-putting to the housewives and grandmas who'd rather just mindlessly play a game of Tweety Bird instead, which they'd forget about later the same day, most likely.

I suspect, based on what I've read, that there's a connection between this lore immersion and the Big Five trait Openness to Experience (or Openness to Ideas, as I'd call it if I could rename it)... I've probably talked about that before, because I'm high in that particular stat but the general world tends not to be. I wouldn't want to be another way, but it makes me feel like an alien, like most people aren't on the same wavelength about how they even perceive the world in a general sense. So when I make things that appeal to me, to my Openness, then the majority for whom that's not relevant wouldn't share that appeal. But things that appeal to low Openness people tend not to appeal to me. So I'd struggle to make something for them.

Whatever it's related to, though, I know the lore would be a bit much, so I'll structure it in such a way that you can use conversation options to ask about it if you're interested, or to skip it and get straight to the gameplay if that's what you'd prefer. I'll try to set it up so then it's a fulfilling enough experience either way.

It'll be particularly challenging at the beginning, because people will want to get to the gameplay as soon as possible, and won't absorb a huge lore dump even if they're interested in such things. So I'll try to minimise the information in the intro dialogue, relegating most of it to optional dialogue which you could have with characters by visiting their node on the map (you could visit them just to talk without playing any music).



Maybe you'd spend a lot of time talking to the other characters if you wanted to - that could be half the game for people who wanted to absorb lore and writing - and I'd try to make what each of them say be interesting, even worthwhile.

I'm basing each character on the six 'runes' that I've talked about a bunch of times. A/R, F/T, G/J.

Hearth would be Abstract (A) for example, because he tried to transcend tradition by finding another way.

The first other character you'd encounter would be a female sindrel called Remedy (the one in the video), who's Feeling (F), and has a nurturing, supportive vibe about her, which I feel would be a good note to start the game on. She'd be encouraging rather than critical if you messed up, for example. I've used a heart motif for her for this reason, but I wonder if the effect looks really girly, especially with the female characters and general pinkness of the surroundings... Perhaps hyper macho guys, insecure in their masculinity, wouldn't want to be seen playing such a thing. I wonder.

Other character concepts include a Tough (T) sindrel who's boastful about being 'one of the immortals', and how that power could be used; a Grave (G) one who feels that they've overstayed their welcome in life and it's all pointless now that it's dragging on unending; a Jolly (J) one who made the instruments and believes meaning and positivity are made, not just given to us; and a Realistic (R) female sindrel who had her gem charged enough to 'give birth', but decided against it to do this, so she's denying her children a life by choosing to extend hers, and how that's playing on her conscience.

There are a lot of interesting ideas I can explore with this setting, anyway! More interesting than just "I am a green bird and I am singing with you because you already beat the red bird".



Finally, I want to talk about something you might have noticed if you've been reading my stuff for a while, which is that the main character is called Glimmer, and that's not the first time I've used that name. To make sense of that, I'll go way back into the distant past...



It's Solaar! From MARDEK 3! You know!!

(That's the best screenshot I have of him/her/it/whatever... and I bet I could find one online, but I don't want to jump down that potentially harrowing rabbit hole right now.)

Solaar is a character that I've probably written about extensively in the past, so I don't know if any of what I'll say is new at all, but it's relevant.

It has a stupid name because it's based on something I made a while before MARDEK; an odd thing made in PowerPoint (because I had a creative drive but no good programs to direct it towards), where a clipart knight called 'Mardek' and an also clipart wolf - tinted yellow - called 'Solaar' explored the 'Sun Temple', fighting lizardmen along the way, so as to eventually stop some evil dark sorcerer whose name I can't remember and isn't important because I never reused him. It was... strange, puerile, and sadly I don't have it anymore, but it's where this character, Solaar, originated, at least. "Solaar" because it was the Sun Temple and he was the guardian of it, or something. Creative.

I used wolf characters in some of my other work like Deliverance, before eventually reusing this old idea for reasons I can't remember, including Solaar as a character in MARDEK 3. (Interestingly, the original MARDEK prototype, before chapter 1, is set in the Sun Temple and uses the armoured Mardek with the M-shaped visor from chapter 3. So I knew that'd happen before I started, I suppose.)

I quite liked Solaar myself, largely because I was fond of non-human characters in other RPGs, most notably Red XIII, who's one of the very few characters I ever drew fan art of. Definitely my favourite character as a child, just because I suppose I felt disconnected from people, and liked things that were unusual.

When I 'rebooted' MARDEK as Taming Dreams back in... whenever that was, a few years ago, I planned its story in excessive detail, and I planned what characters the original MARDEK cast had become. A lot of planning went into Solaar's rebooted version, which was a white female varnyn with purple eyes called Glimmer.

Oh, before I elaborate, I'll mention that this was after I'd planned the Alora Fane world in some detail, including its six races: Bold, Meek, Mhandisi, Elarna, Varnyn, and Sindrels. The Varnyn were wolf-like, so it seemed reasonable for Glimmer to be one of these. I made her an albino because varnyn are normally dark grey, which didn't seem fitting for Solaar.



(Ha, I was looking for a different image of that race from years ago, but I'll just use that!)

Unlike in MARDEK, where Solaar was the supposed guardian of the Dark Temple but wasn't actually, Glimmer's story was more detailed and intriguing (to me, at least) in a way that I won't describe because I still might end up using it if I get around to making the animated Taming Dreams thing. Essentially, though, she had nightmares a whole lot, which caused her constant pain, but she coped with this by adopting an overtly 'positive' attitude. It was a comment on the way this world often seems to be, with so many people suffering and so many telling us all to 'just be happy!'.



It seemed like an intriguing character to write... but sadly I never got far enough into Taming Dreams to get there.

However, in the less-distant past, I tried to make that thing called Divine Dreams, which had a selection of six characters who just talked among one another. One of these characters was Glimmer, this time human (wearing wolf ears), and I gave her ∞ a silly voice inspired by Solaar's ∞. Her attitude was - or at least was intended to be - this excessively positive New Agey kind of thing as well, despite her inner turmoil.



I gave her the motto "Smiles are brighterous beacons that wake us up from daymares", which encapsulates her general philosophy, and which was used as the basis/melody for her musical theme, which was also based on Solaar's. It's one of my favourite pieces that I've composed. (I also like that motto, because I packed a whole lot of who she is into it.)

Glimmer's Theme

So I obviously had enough of an attachment to this character to want to use her in something. It's a shame I never did much with her in Divine Dreams, though.

Recently, while planning a project I've yet to write about - the one with the consciousness scientist - I reused this character again as one of the major roles in the story, but I haven't got around to that one either, unfortunately!

When I started planning this story, Sindrel Song, I had absolutely no intention of reusing any characters from old work. The player was going to be a unique sindrel, a female necessarily since the males don't sing, so I tried coming up with concepts for her...

I thought about what sindrels are, though. How they're the same in name as one of the races from Alora Fane. How I've used the Alora Fane 'aster' (six-petal'd flower) symbol excessively in the design of this game and their world.

It makes sense to adjust the Alora Fane world such that the Sindrels are no longer these boring blue lizard things, as originally intended...



...but rather, they're these sindrels, and their 'petal' world - a 'subdimension' of the whole Alora Fane arrangement - is, well, this! So no separate 'Sindrelverse', like I thought about in a previous post. This would just be an extension of a wider Alora Fane world, which I could use as a consistent setting for everything I make.

See, when I was planning the other sindrel game, the one I talked about in ∞ this post ∞ and others, this thing:



That's not this game, to be clear. That's where these sindrels originated, and I might return to it soon, but it's not what I'm working on currently.

But when I was planning that, I wanted to make a small, contained world, so as to make the focus on bonding rather than roaming, but I was unsure how to do it. Individual sindrels would be born in the individual 'house plants', in a village, I knew that, and these plants would surround an 'obelisk' that the sindrels gave 'offerings' to in order to receive 'blessings' such as clothes or food. Males would go out of the village and fight... something, but it was all hazy, uncertain. I planned for the game to have several villages, each surrounded by a tall round wall, which would all connect to some larger field area which you could explore.

Recently, though, I revised some of those ideas to make the lives of males and females more distinct, and I suppose more heavy-handedly a metaphor for the different lives of human men and women. Now, sindrels' lives are restricted to a single island, which has a single village high atop a crystal mesa/pillar. The house plants would grow atop this mesa, and females would grow/be born in the pools of nectar within them (a kind of plant sap + genetic soup). Males, however, would be detected by the plant as they developed in the nectar, and would be taken by long roots/pipes and spat out onto the island below. These males would then need to fight monsters to gather large petals, which they needed six of to form wings, which they'd use to fly up to the top of the mesa where the females were so then they could mate. So the males had to work hard before they were worthy, while the females were the prize - were worthy - just by existing. It's a caricature of real humans, but it's not based on nothing.



The original Alora Fane sindrels lived in a place called the 'Crystal Spires', and I imagined it as a large body of water with large towers of crystal. This is surprisingly like that original idea, but deeper and more interesting, I think.

It makes me think of the stuff they do a lot in reboots these days, where they take some childishly stupid old idea and transform it into something modern and relatively more logical. You probably know what I mean. Superhero films are full of that.

Anyway, if I do return to Taming Dreams, I'd want to include Glimmer again, but I've been entertaining the idea for a while that she could be a sindrel rather than a varnyn. One of these new sindrels, in particular... largely because I liked what I'd come up with and wanted to include them in some form. I can't remember the exact reasoning for making her one specifically; maybe it's because I couldn't just ram one in somewhere or transform another character into one without it making far less sense.

If Glimmer were to be a sindrel, though, I'd want to make her white, like the original varnyn design, and like Solaar (who was yellow, not white, but whatever)... but why would she be white? Or, more importantly, why would she be alive when sindrels only live for six days?

This Sindrel Song story being a sort-of origin story for why she is the way she is, with the eventual intention to reuse her in Taming Dreams, feels like good fortune rather than planned intention as such. But it feels so organic and elegant that I'm quite interested to go down this path!



It means I'd probably end up reusing the voice I used for her in Divine Dreams... which I like, but other people might be put off by that. Or maybe they'd be particularly charmed by it! I don't know. I'm unsure how it'd work with choosable options; maybe people wouldn't like a playable character that talked so unlike them? But I'm used to surly, tough protagonists who are nothing like me, so whatever. (It'd also make sense for her to sound eccentric, if the symboliote that gave her the ability to speak was atypical.)

It's also annoying that I'd like to use Glimmer's musical theme in this in some way... but I'm trying to limit myself to the few notes available so as to make playing melodies not too challenging.

Oh, speaking of which, I composed this piece of music for Sindrel Song before radiotherapy on Wednesday:

Sindrel Song

It's not on Soundcloud because I don't know if it's finished yet, and it's a pain to reupload things on there. I wasn't so much trying to make a piece of music to use in the game (though I might anyway? Like on the title screen or something), but I was trying to see whether I could come up with an interesting Main Theme using just the singable notes/scales. I think it turned out okay, but like all my stuff, it's idiosyncratic.



I've never played a game like Sindrel Song before, though I'd be surprised if they didn't already exist. At least in terms of melody mimicking. I know that rhythm games are a thing, but typically - in my experience at least - they're more of a visual and reaction times challenge than a musical one. You see the notes coming, and have to press buttons corresponding to the track that they're on. Such games would still function even if the notes all made the same fart noise when you successfully pressed the button; you could play them on mute. This, by contrast, falls apart without sound... and I can see people disliking that ("It's too hard!", "I don't play games with sound!", etc), but perhaps some people would really like it too. I don't know. I like it!

The music bits in Zelda games were always a great joy to me, perhaps my favourite part. Especially in Ocarina of Time (so disappointing that Breath of the Wild lacked such a thing!). Those were visual too, though; you were shown the keys to press, and rhythm didn't matter in the slightest.

Did I include music for Elwyen in MARDEK 3, or did I just intend to? I don't remember if that was removed after the beta or kept in, where you had to manually input musical notes for her to play her songs... Either way, it's an appealing idea to me that keeps coming up again and again.

I wanted to mention a game which has been one of my favourite mobile apps for a while, which is musical. I don't know how well-known it is - maybe very, maybe not at all - so maybe you've seen it before, maybe not. I think it's quite old? It's about Frederic Chopin, being reborn in the modern age for reasons I forget, and he has 'music battles' with a bunch of musicians, which take the form of a rhythm game with a 7-note piano input.



The first game has all the songs based on Chopin's music, but the sequel uses popular music genres and musicians' specific work as a basis for its songs (I don't recognise all of them myself). I like both of them, and I return to them despite having completed them multiple times just because I like being a part of the music. The piano notes don't correspond to the notes being played at all though; those audible notes span a wide range, but you only have seven notes to play. So the sound and visuals aren't directly related. There are also some features I find irritating like having to move away from the keys to tap special score-boosting notes that appear when you get a good run, or having to shake the device for special attacks.

Notably, both games include cutscenes, which seem to be such an odd combination of 'they poured their heart into it' and 'what the hell is going on?', the likes of which I've never seen anywhere else. They use this well-drawn, distinctly stylised art (with a focus on comically accentuating grotesqueness), and they flow well... but what they're talking about seems like absolute nonsense to me. It feels like listening to someone else's conversation full of 'hilarious' in-jokes I missed out on. I keep wondering whether it made sense and was indeed hilarious to the development team and to other people and there's just something I personally don't get (maybe it's European humour or something?), but it just seems so weirdly incoherent to me! Plus it seems like they changed their mind about what the story (such as it is) was in the second one, because in the first cutscene he's beset by some villain, then in the others he's asking everyone where his heart is, despite no prior mention of that... Makes me think a lot about the disconnect between the creators' perception of their work, due to familiarity and it coming from their own mind, and the audience's, who don't necessarily think like the designer.

But anyway. Not especially relevant, but something I wanted to ramble a bit about anyway! Though I suppose that disconnect between developer and player makes me wonder how Sindrel Song would be perceived... Hmm.

I've played a bunch of other rhythm games, but none of them ever really stuck with me. Largely because they tend to have a lot of modern UNZ UNZ UNZ style techno or rap or that kind of thing, or harsh stuff, or they appeal to the narcissism of being a pop/rock star... There was a VR one that I really liked in terms of gameplay (Beat Sabre), but the music just felt like an ear-bleeding cacophony to me, an aggressive assault of noise, so even though I returned to it a few times because I liked the gameplay, I always felt dirty and uncomfortable afterwards.

So even if other music games exist, I'm enjoying making this one because it feels like I'm able to give it my own voice.

I also wonder if it appeals to me because I listen to music as a composer, whereas other people like the familiarity factor much, much more than the actual notes, such that music they don't know already isn't worth bothering with... but I suppose there's nothing I can do about that.



Anyway, I've rambled about this way more than I needed to, but hopefully there's some value in reading about the creative process! I'd much rather indulge myself with all this than make something mindless to manipulate people into giving me their money...