The Path to Interactive Music
Hi, my name is Juan Reyes (@MiniBeatBoy) and I’m a game programmer, industrial designer and musician and I’ve been running a game development studio Cocodrilo Dog since 2011 along with my partner Marge Torres (@marge_torres), a lawyer, game designer and tech lover.
I have believed for a long time that music can be an interactive experience and specially I think that it can be enjoyed inside video games. I grew up when the people used to purchase physical CDs in physical stores with physical money and then you could spend all your afternoon listening to it in a non-interrupted session accompanied with beautiful artwork and lyrics from the album’s books. Now I feel that part of that has been lost. I wouldn’t know what part of it exactly, but I think it is something between the immersive experience, the visual aspect and the capacity of the listener to focus a 100% in the experience.
In Cocodrilo Dog we have been working in music games since the beginning and every new project we create my belief becomes stronger. As game designers, we want to create a game format where you can connect deeply with the music. A game that is a result of the music and not the music as something that is secondary. But at the same time we don’t want a game explicitly themed for musicians, like the games that have plastic instruments and are about being rockstars. We want to create characters, stories and action, and mix them with music mechanics like rhythm, tone, composition, etc.
When you watch music videos, look to the albums artwork or read the lyrics, most of the times they will contain stories. They talk about love, dead, friendship, fear, fame, loneliness, wealth, poverty, happiness, sadness, being drunk, being sober and any other feeling or anecdote that is relevant to somebody and the music is there to reinforce the message from an emotional and aesthetic standpoint. That is what we believe that can be achieved through music video games and what we are aiming for. Of course I don’t think that it can replace the CD experience, but it surely can give back to the music a main role in the experience.
When I started the company, I researched about game design, played a lot of games and sketched some game ideas. After a month of creative work all connected into an idea that would become Cocodrilo Dog’s first game: Audio Ninja. It is like a fighting runner blended with Guitar Hero. A game where you are a ninja and will run and defeat hordes of enemies that appear according to the drum beats of the songs that play along with the game.
But the idea didn’t come out of the nothing. It really started to have shape in my imagination back in the nineties, when I was 13 year old. Specifically when Mortal Kombat 3 was released for the consoles of the time, in my case, for the Sega Genesis. While I was playing, I observed a musical behaviour that caught my attention.
When you are fighting, the game changes between different “states” of the fight. It starts with the “fight” state and when one of the players is defeated, it changes to an “ending” state and the music contains its corresponding sections for fighting and ending, so it reacts in real time to what is happening in the game. Maybe that technique had been used in different games of the same era, but this was the first time I observed it.
This is a musical phenomenon that won’t blow your mind, but what I found fascinating is that the songs were dynamic and could be mixed in real time reacting to the players input. Then I started to observe all the game and noticed that the same structure of variable songs was applied throughout the game. That blew my mind.
I burried this concept in my mind, but ten years later, when I was in college studying industrial design, I worked on a multimedia project specifically designed to explore interactive music and I came up with a game where you play as an intergalactic mouse that can get on a car and drive it. Then you can click on the different characters and also you can get off the car. That is all the game, but if you listen to the music, it reacts in real time to the different moments of the game and it plays seamlessly:
Fast forward ten more years and today Cocodrilo Dog has produced Audio Ninja: Our first game, Beat Boy: Another game in development and Moana: Rhythm Run: a co-production with Disney Interactive. This has been an amazing experience and big steps forward into creating music games with a special flavor. Our next goal is to showcase a new game in development called Boom Fighters in Game Connection America 2017 and use this awesome electronic drum kit as a game controller to show this concept in a radical way:
For everyone that will go to the event, I look forward to meeting you!
In the mean time, here I leave a capture of Boom Fighters in a very early phase!
Note: I removed the comments feature because I started receiving a lot of spam. Once I solve this, I will re-enable commenting!
