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Looking Back at Memody: Sindrel Song

1 year ago5,214 words

I recently replayed this eccentric 'musical memory game' I actually finished and released in 2019. Despite some fears that I'd cringe over concerns about its content, I ended up feeling mostly impressed and in some cases surprisingly emotional! It's such a shame so few people got to experience the most moving moments though due to the gameplay barrier in the way...

I was in my Discord server recently, and people brought this game up, saying that it moved them to tears. I hadn't played it in probably years - though I'd been intending to replay it for a while - so this got me curious, and prompted me to go back to it.

I spent about five hours - split over as many days - playing through it again, to the end... though my completion percentage is 77%; I'd still like to get 200% on all the songs.

I wanted to write about it... but knew I'd already done that the last time I revisited it. I thought I'd actually posted what I wrote, but apparently not; looks like I felt the timing was poor due to ∞ some stuff in the news at the time ∞. After reading through it, though, my feelings here in late 2023 seem to be essentially the same as when I replayed it just six months or so after releasing it, so I'll just include what I wrote back then here with some slight edits, and an extra bit at the end with some stats relating to sales and player achievements.



(This is from May or June 2020, about 6 months after finishing development.)

I replayed [Memody: Sindrel Song] for the first time since finishing it six months ago, and overall I'm really pleased I made it, though I recognise that it's likely different to what most players would be familiar with (and they might perceive certain bits as racist!).

My feelings about Sindrel Song have been mixed over the past few months [since releasing it]. It was my way of creating light in a dark period of my life, coming to terms with my potential memory loss from brain cancer surgery (though thankfully that didn't end up affecting me), plus my general mental illness, including an episode of suicidal ideation that very nearly ended my life.

So... fairly dark topics to base a game around.

I'd been concerned that perhaps in my madness I'd written stuff into it that I'd cringe about looking back on it, plus it never sold well at all (only around 100 copies [I'll revisit the sales stats as of August 2023 at the end]), so overall I'd mostly just been avoiding coming back to it, or even really thinking about it.

So it was with some reluctance that I started it up again, bracing myself for embarrassment... but I was pleasantly surprised!




Overall, I'm really pleased with essentially every aspect of the game! I'll go through the key three individually.

Dialogue

I feel that the bits that shine the brightest are the dialogue, the characters, the setting, the lore, and the general atmosphere. The 'six days to live' thing is compelling, I feel. I feel like each one of the characters is distinct, each is explored in depth, each has their role and their different stories which resonate with real issues that people face. Some of the dialogue is clever, or touching, or funny (though it feels weird saying that about my own work)!

During every one of the game's six days and their nights, each of the characters you've already visited unlocks a new conversation. I spent most of my playtime exploring these optional bits of dialogue, and it always felt like something I got to do rather than something I had to do. A welcome opportunity, never a chore!

I vaguely recalled most of it - I did write it, after all - but some of it [or most of it, during my 2023 playthrough] felt somewhat new to me. When making the game, I had to read and reread every single line to the point where it wasn't really possible for me to see it from a distance, as a whole, as a player would; I was always looking for errors, redundancy, continuity issues, typos, things that weren't working or didn't fit, things to change, redundancy. It was nice actually playing the game, and being able to enjoy each conversation as a whole rather than picking each line apart.

Some of the exchanges sent chills down my spine, others made me tear up. Or made me laugh! There were times where I felt my attention wandering, but they were few; there were more times where a line lit up a spark of interest; "ah, that's an intriguing concept!", "ooh, that ties in with what they said before!"

Some of my favourite exchanges are with Remedy and Duhrge on the sixth night, Hammer in the epilogue, and Hearth towards the end, though I also like the exchanges between Memody and Duhrge in general, I like Course's dialogue as a whole, Hammer's other dialogue makes me laugh, I find Vivace entertaining... Actually, it's hard to pick favourites because I like essentially all the dialogue!

There are some long exchanges Memody has with her inner demon which likely go on in excess, or which might make people uncomfortable. This was the point; it's not a nice thing, having (metaphorical) demons in your head, who latch onto and obsess at length over little things that aren't objectively worthy of that kind of attention, or which warp everything into ridiculous self-loathing. I tried to add comedy to it to underline the absurdity of it all, though I feel it's the kind of thing that would garner mixed opinions; maybe it'd be seen as flippant, even mocking, or just annoying. I suppose mental illness is a volatile area to explore in general, because of how intensely it affects people's lives. This was just my attempt at trying to deal with my own. Better writers would surely have handled it differently. I did my best.

Gameplay

The gameplay is based around memory and music, and it's... unique. You have to mimic note sequences at a fairly high tempo immediately after hearing them, and it's quite challenging as it's about sequence memory rather than reaction.

I do like it, but I can also understand why it's too unfamiliar to be easily appealing to most people. I'd summarise it (and the whole game, really) as "mentally engaging": you have to really pay attention, and if your mind wanders, you'll slip up. It can get taxing, and easily frustrating.

This also adds a palpable tension, though, like walking along the edge of a cliff; the threat of failure really gets the adrenaline pumping, and the thrill of success when you do get it right is well beyond what you'd ever get from something more forgiving!



Personally, I really enjoy this kind of gameplay, and the most disappointing thing about replaying the game for me is that I couldn't really replay it as a new player would. If you're playing on Challenge mode and you mess up a certain number of times, the song ends. The game expects this to happen a few times, and charts your progress on a graph at the end so you can watch as you improve with each attempt. I really enjoyed this, but I've now learned the songs so thoroughly that even after six months without attempting them, I was getting 180%-200% completion in my first try. I didn't have to replay the songs, nor did I get to see the graph grow. I had nothing to aim for, and, well, it was disappointing!

[Interestingly, this was mostly true in 2023 too, as I could still mostly remember the songs and completed them in my first try. Though in the postgame you unlock an Expert mode, where you fail from making a single mistake, so I've been able to experience the gradual progression again through that.]

But I suppose this permanent mastery is true of a lot of games. It's why people do obscure challenge runs, if the mechanics will allow them. This game doesn't really allow for that (unless you tried to do something like playing with your eyes shut!), but I suppose most people don't play games more than once anyway, and certainly not to the excessive degree a developer has to, so it wouldn't be an issue for the majority. It's like saying a story's less fun the second time because you already know all the twists. That doesn't mean it's not amazing the first time!

Overall, though, while I'm glad I made a game like this and do enjoy playing it, I consider the gameplay to have been a valuable experiment, but ultimately one which didn't exactly succeed. I'll likely stick to more traditional and familiar gameplay styles in future, using my own idiosyncrasies to define details rather than the entire shape.

Music

Composing for this was an interesting challenge, since the game handles (most of) the music differently to what I'd usually do.

For a start, I had to limit the number of notes available, so as to not be overwhelming. I'm really pleased with the system I came up with, where there are two modes (light and dark) with just six notes each. Rather than taking the obvious route and using the standard major and minor scales most popular music use for light or dark moods, I went with the more exotic Mixolydian and Phrygian modal scales, being careful to keep the notes that best contained the individual feel of each.




(These examples are C Mixolydian and C Phrygian for clarity; the game actually uses Bb Mixolydian and Ab Phrygian. The greyed out notes are the ones omitted from the 6-note scales in game.)

Personally I feel Mixolydian sounds brighter than the standard major, and has an eccentric, otherworldly colour to it that I absolutely love. A lot of my compositions end up in Mixolydian! I don't use Phrygian so much, but I feel it sounds darker than the standard minor.

For the interactive music, I couldn't just import a prepared wav file, as I typically would with any other game (and which I did for 'fixed' music like the area and world map tracks). Instead, the game generates the (interactive) music on the fly by assembling short clips. I probably should have used midi encoding for this, but instead it reads from a hand-written .txt file which looks like this:



Making those was... interesting, and I probably should have made myself an editor or something, in hindsight, rather than stupidly typing them out. Oh well, it works!

I had to keep each little melody simple enough to be immediately memorable, but not so simple as to be too boring. With so few notes to work with, I was pleased with the variety I was able to achieve.

I also reduced the backing instrumentation to just bongos (^v), a shaker (x), a timpani (O), and a synth pad, partly so then I could use this system, partly because I felt it was best to remove all distractions if the player was supposed to be focusing on just the notes that they needed to play.

[Though Remedy's song - and only hers - also has a brief appearance from a flute. I decided after adding it that it was from Vivace in the distance, but can't recall whether that's mentioned in the dialogue.]

Composing with all these limitations was a challenge, but I'm really pleased with the results. I find all the songs very appealing both to listen to and to play! Vivace's and Course's are my favourites.

The songs use 'lyrics' too, and apart from a couple of 'meh' lines, I'm mostly pleased with the stories these tell, and their melodic flow. I liked blending the meanings of the lyrics and the notes themselves, like for example by having words like 'light' or 'life' played on the light scale even when they appeared in otherwise dark melodies, or vice versa.

Unfortunately, the text-based nature of the lyrics makes them easy to miss when you're focusing on memorising and playing notes. Voice acting would have really helped, but sadly that's not one of the few things I'm not capable of doing by myself!

[As of 2023, I still listen to the OST - made up of mostly minimalist ambient-but-still-melodic pieces - fairly often. I'm very proud of it! ∞ It's been on Bandcamp for ages. ∞]

Graphics

I'd only ever made games in 2D in the past; this was my first foray into the world of 3D. I was really happy about what I'd achieved at the time, and I still do feel that the overall atmosphere and colours are really enchantingly beautiful. Each area and character has its own feel and colour palette, and I like how differently they all look and feel during night and day.

I find the sindrel models cute, and I like their animations [interesting; during my 2023 playthrough, the amateurish animations stood out to me as something that don't really hold up anymore]. I particularly like what I did regarding emoting - it's a system I've refined over a few years, and which I'm continuing to use in Divine Dreams [which is what I was working on back when I wrote this in 2020] - where each line of dialogue contains an instruction to set the eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and ears position, and the neck and head rotations. It means I don't have to animate each emote individually, and it allows for a lot of subtle facial shifts which I feel communicate a whole lot. They add immensely to the written lines.

As it was my first 3D project, though, I can see now that the graphics are rather rough in a lot of places. I'm no longer fond of the flat faceted rocks, for example, though it's a look common to many indie games because it's easy to make. I've got it in Divine Dreams too, though I'm intending to experiment with different approaches soon.



I'm also annoyed by the choppiness of the outlines! Look at Vivace's (the one on the left) earrings here, or her hair, or the edge of her top. Compare it with the outlines on this Lucario from one of the Pokemon games (Sun and Moon probably):



I was using what I think, from all I've read, is the standard way of generating outlines in 3D, but whatever technique Pokemon uses looks way better, essentially flawless, and I don't know why that is. I've been wondering about it for ages! Maybe it's got something to do with how the models are made compared to how mine are made; mine are quite low poly, which is likely a big part of it. I don't know. [I'm still not entirely sure in 2023, but I've moved away from outlines in my most recent projects.]

Overall, though, while it obviously can't compare to the work of a trained team with a big budget, I like how the game looks, considering I made all the graphics myself while new to 3D (and while doing everything else myself too) [and while recovering from brain cancer]. It's certainly no worse than a lot of indie games out there!



So yes, I like Sindrel Song, and I'm glad I made it. I feel it's a worthwhile experience, though I'm aware it's idiosyncratic and isn't exactly built to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's more like ~art~, pretentious as it feels to say, in that its main purpose is to communicate a message, to move people, rather than just a toy that's meant for 'mindless' entertainment. I don't say that to disparage games which are more like that; rather, I understand that most games are like that because it's what people turn to games for, and maybe this isn't really a clean fit for the medium as a whole.

I've already mentioned a few flaws, things I could have done differently, but I've yet to touch on the most concerning that I noticed: the racist undertones! Obviously(?) not intentional, but I can see how people would perceive certain elements in that way.

The game was largely inspired by studying sexual selection as part of an evolutionary biology class at university. This is essentially the set of behaviours and physical traits which are used to attract or choose reproductive partners.

∞ Birds are often used as striking examples ∞ of sexual selection because their displays are visual and obvious. One example from the lectures which stuck with me was what that linked-to Wikipedia article describes like this:



The 'honest' there means that this is an accurate signal of 'hidden' traits; the only way to be vibrant is to be healthy. A dishonest signal would be if birds coated their feathers in external pigments - makeup, essentially - to enhance appearance beyond what genetics have naturally provided, as it's the genes - not the makeup - which will be passed to the offspring. Honest signals are more a case of 'what you see is what you get'.

That university course also heavily covered human attractiveness [for example, the exam literally had questions like 'which of these male faces is more likely to have more short-term sexual encounters?'], plus I'd been reading a lot about incels and such who were apparently unlucky in love due to being ugly, but this lack of luck was blamed on their personalities by those who'd rather judge than care, and who believed that attractiveness was entirely subjective (it's not) due to highly valuing human freedom, equal value, and potential for change. The thought that an aspect of our 'value' is determined for us when we're born seems to be appalling to people with certain (political? idealistic?) worldviews. While the incels were lost in exaggerated delusions, an honest look at the world - not one through a political lens - does reveal that the naturally attractive do succeed much more readily in the mating game, just as those with naturally higher intelligence fare better in intellectual domains, or those with greater stamina prevail in athletic domains. It's just nature.


I wanted to explore this, and the sindrels were originally designed for a game where you played as either a male or female sindrel with a randomly-generated genetic vibrancy to their skin, which determined how other characters interacted with you; that is, they'd be nicer to you the 'better-looking' you were. Skin colour was a really obvious way of showing 'attractiveness' even from the back, and unlike some simulation of facial attractiveness, it only required a single variable. The point of that planned game was to show that we're not all playing life with the same rules, and factors out of our control make a massive difference in regards to the challenges we face and the degree to which others try to help or harm us. I hoped it'd encourage sympathy - rather than judgement - towards those with different experiences (the opposite sex, the ugly).

[I just took the time to reread ∞ the monstrously long post I wrote about the original sindrel mating-based game way back in 2018 ∞ (with broken formatting I'm reluctant to fix in case I mess things up further). It begins with with a lengthy rant about stuff that makes me embarrassed now, but also glad I'm past that lowest point in my life (that was just a few weeks before the major brain surgery I'd spent years dreading). A lot of what I wrote comes across as naive to slightly-older me. Both I and the world have changed since then. Oh well; interesting to see some stuff about how these sindrels were first imagined, at least.]

Sindrel Song is quite different to that original sindrel game, but I kept the same idea and played with the concept, incorporated ideas from it into sindrels' lore, again hoping to encourage sympathy for those who nature hadn't blessed.

The game also has overarching themes of light and darkness, which are universal and have strong connotations. Light is bright and good and life and desirable, dark is dull and pain and death and dreadful.

Unfortunately, however, all this leads to some uncomfortable racist implications! Characters are treated worse for having darker skin, while having brighter skin is more desirable. It's uncomfortable.

In hindsight, I wish I'd used something like height instead - which does correspond to an obvious attractiveness variable in humans - to avoid these implications, but, well, it's done now [that wouldn't have worked for both sexes anyway, so... ehh]. I just hope that people will understand the purpose behind it rather than reacting based on their views about race in humans. It's not meant to be making any points about that; sindrel society is not human society, and I think that judging humans based on their skin colour is ridiculous to the point where it baffles me that people do it. Human skin colour isn't a fitness indicator, though; unlike in the aforementioned parrots - and sindrels - there's no connection between humans' skin colour and their physical or mental abilities.

[Reviewing this in 2023, I wonder whether people would be just as bothered by the sindrels having clear, biologically-determined 'gender' roles, considering the stuff related to all that in the Zeitgeist. I recall one negative review said something like that.]



(Seems I last replayed it in October 2021, and added this extra bit to the end of this post, with the intention of finishing it... Can't remember why I didn't.)

I return to this again after several months without touching it. It was only last year that I released it, but it feels like a lifetime ago in terms of mental change and development. I've learned so much more about indie games since then, and the way that I approached and released this feels so naive to me now!

Replaying it has brought a lot of insecurities to the surface. My first half-an-hour was coloured by imagined judgements from others, thoughts that this thing is basically my weird mind on naked display and that there are are probably a lot of things that don't resonate with people, or which they'd mock, because they stray from what people are used to seeing and expressing. I get the feeling from the many, many indie games I've looked at these past few weeks that most play it safe, so to speak, just presenting basic action gameplay without straying into emotion, or if they have plots it's stuff like "we must slay the sorcerer to save the king!" or "I feel a moment of doubt about my prowess as a warrior, but my resolve is quickly restored when I realise my strength". Or something. This has a lot more wallowing in mental illness and heartfelt expressions of emotional support right from the start.

I've been playing Undertale recently, which seems to be renowned for its friendliness, but to me it seems like 90% humour with some hints at caring that come out much later, the soft belly exposed for a moment. Maybe that's what people are more receptive to.

Or so I wondered while looking at this game again. I was also concerned that maybe the dialogue was too much; too long, too deeply going into lore stuff that won't make any sense to the player. It'd be better to dive into gameplay and introduce that more gradually. The graphics also look quite primitive to me now in a way they didn't just last year. I suppose I have more to compare to now.

But after playing through the first song, I felt I was already becoming immersed in and familiar with the world again, and those concerns largely evaporated. I wanted to write this before continuing on though. I'll continue playing...

[Disappointingly, I didn't write anything else about that playthrough, as the old post ends here? I wonder if I even finished it!]



(This marks the end of the post I wrote ages ago. The following bits are an addition written in August 2023.)

I noticed some bugs when playing through the game this time around, most notably some of the note button circle things staying brightened when they shouldn't, or - far more annoyingly - sometimes the progress recording would be skipped when failing a song and the graph wouldn't be updated. I also saw some notifications from Discord that seemed to be mentions of known bugs, though I haven't checked what was mentioned because honestly the thought of digging up the dusty old files of a flop of a game to figure out some likely-sloppily-written old code isn't exactly one that appeals to me.



I made a few screenshots from this recent playthrough, and just looking at some of them make my heart tingle and my eyes start to well up. I've been lacking motivation and conviction about the writing of my most recent project, Dreamons, thinking maybe I don't have it in me to write characters even I would care about, so seeing this old work and feeling so pleased with and moved by it is perhaps the most worthwhile thing I've got out of revisiting this. I've been thinking a lot about how I should approach that in a similar direction to this, narratively at least.

One of the biggest things that I learned from this - but which I haven't mentioned in the bits I wrote years ago, apparently - was that people prefer games that are familiar, which this isn't. I always used to think that novelty and innovation were desirable and impressive things to be aimed for, though it seems that what people actually want is an experience that's maybe 90+% similar to things they've experienced in the past, with only a relatively small amount of variation.

This isn't that. A lot of people assumed it was a rhythm game, since apparently they're the only genre which focuses entirely on music? Which I find strange. Since this isn't a rhythm game though, people got frustrated when it didn't have the features or gameplay expected of those.

I was told that it was similar to a game called ∞ Space Channel 5 ∞, which I'd never played (and still haven't). I checked the (linked-to) Wikipedia page for that the other day, and saw that it took a whole team of people a long time to come up with the basic gameplay concepts, and it was well-received, with one publication (that I've never heard of, so maybe this is worth nothing) giving it a perfect score, and GameSpy calling it "a work of art in every sense of the word". Others praised it and recommended it for its uniqueness and charm.

Makes me wonder whether this game might ever have got such a reaction, had I had the right connections, and whether it dealing with darker themes than that thing did would have worked in its favour or against it when assessing its artistic merits and accessibility as a fun experience.

There must be so many hidden gems out there that could potentially make a significant impact in people's lives, but they're not able to because there's no way for those people to ever find them, or because the lack of apparent interest from others discourages them from spending the necessary time to reach their most moving moments. Such a shame.



I've been thinking that maybe I'll post about this game on Reddit, probably as a postmortem. From what I've seen in the past, people who read those care most about the money-making data, so I checked those for this. Currently the sales stats look like this:

276 sales of the main game
+ 96 sales of the soundtrack
= US$2,635 gross revenue

Subtracting Steam's 30% cut of the revenue and converting to my currency, that's about £1450.

Every time I look up typical income figures for ordinary jobs I find different values, but I think that amount would be an unimpressive income for a month's work in a mediocre career.

So clearly this game was a flop, though that's not news to me. I never even tried to promote it.



Something that I find more sad is the stats for the achievements. There are three for each song - completion on casual mode, 100% completion on challenge mode, and 200% completion - so it's fairly easy to gauge the progress of everyone who gave the game a go. ∞ You can view this game's global achievements list here. ∞

Of those fewer than 300 players, only 67.2% made it through the easy version of the first song; the tutorial, essentially. Only 2.6% of people finished the game, and only 1% achieved full 200% completion for all songs, though I wonder whether that number's some kind of minimum and maybe I'm the only one who's got it.

It's such a shame, because the game's strongest, most potentially moving scenes happen during the later sections, but it looks like only a handful of people ever got to experience them.

The playtime data is quite depressing:



About half of the people who tried it quit in the first hour. I wonder how similar this is to other games, though, especially unfamiliar indies. The only direct comparison I have is to MARDEK's data, which look like this:



Though that's a much longer game, and I suspect most people who bought it already had fond memories of it. I've probably spent more time with MSS than anyone, and my playtime across multiple full playthroughs is still only 24.5 hours; it only takes a handful of hours to finish.


Hmm, it hadn't even occurred to me until right as I was finalising this post that I haven't checked the reviews on the game in years. So I have no idea if they're positive, negative, or a mix, or how many there are. Honestly, I don't even know if I can stomach the assumed disappointment, so I'll leave that to someone else to check, if you're so inclined.


Next, I suppose I'll write a postmortem for Reddit. Maybe I'll post about my intentions and insecurities in one of the mental health subs first to hopefully soften the inevitable hostility.

If nothing else, replaying this game inspired some ideas for how I could approach some newer projects, like Dreamons, which I'll write more about in another post once I've thought them through a bit more.