Introducing a new musical project - Feedback needed!

Hi there! These past few months I've been working on a new musical game, and I'm very excited to present it to you. Here comes Symphonies Garden : an interactive song in which you plant sounds and harvest them to reach new sections, and even discover some secrets.

Today I'm releasing an alpha version of the game. It is still very early in development, but it has enough to give you an idea of the main loop. I actually need some testers to fine-tune some aspects of the game and improve it. You can play it right here, and once you are done, please share your feedback here. This would help quite a lot!

Now if you're curious about how the development started and what decisions I've made to lead the game here, let me tell you all about it.

Motivations

Early this year, I released a small update for my web library Orchestre-JS. It is a tool for managing dynamic music in a web page. It's very modular, made with game in mind, but actually pretty efficient for a lot of other use cases! Sadly I'm not using it as much as I would like, because I make most of my games in Godot. So in order to promote it, I decided to work on a web game that could be a technical demo for Orchestre-JS. It would also be another occasion to create some interactive music!

Early on I wanted it to be minimalist. It should be presented as a web page, accessible and responsive, with clicking as a main interaction. I drafted some ideas for card games, narrative experience, puzzles… All of them with instruments getting activated or deactivated through interactions. Eventually I was drawn to the idea of a rhythm box's grid, kind of like a DJ console. Each tile could represent an instrument, and have an "enabled" or "disabled" state. Different sections of the song could lead to different grid with their own instruments.

However as I iterated on this idea, I realized that game mechanics were often in the way of the music. Too much "gameplay" would encourage the player to click on tiles as fast as possible, and not listening to them. Because they would want to solve a puzzle, or explore, or beat a level… So eventually I decided that this should be a purely contemplative experience, that place music as its core.

Game Design

I could have made a free DJ console and just let the player interact with the song as they want. But I still wanted to gamify the experience and add some playfulness to it. It would also allow me to have a bit of control on the pacing of the song and its progression. I was a bit inspired by ODDADA, an incredible game that is all about creating music, but present it as a series of toys that you discover and mess around with.

In order to make Symphonies Garden a chill experience, I designed it like a clicker. No actual challenge, you can only progress forward. The sense of progression is made through the collect of different resources, that you can then use to activate new instruments. You can already see where the game got its title: these resources work kinda like seeds, that you plant in order to harvest more later!

And so the main mechanic of the game is actually waiting. I want the player to listen to the music, remember? So the "plants" should take time to grow before you can harvest them. But I went even further and added an action gauge, that limits your actions to 4 and refill automatically with time. The reason is that, once again, I don't want the player to activate or deactivate a ton of instruments too fast. They should take the time to listen to how they impact the song. In a way, this mimics actual music writing. When you make a song, you rarely change all the instrument tracks all at once, you add them or remove them one by one to create satisfying progressions. Also once again, this fits with the "gardening" theme. This is a game that ask you to be patient, and enjoy the present.

One main challenge is to correctly balance these slow mechanics to not make them too frustrating. When expressed like that, it sounds like I'm blocking the player from playing by forcing them to wait for loading screens to complete! But the goal of the game is to make them enjoy the waiting. I'm focusing on two pillars: Expression and Exploration. The first is about letting the player create their own music and enjoy it. They should have "play time" where they are entirely focused on what instruments they want playing to obtain a song that they like, and just listen to it! The second one is done by making the player slowly discover the different loops and parts of the song. Some are more expensive than others, and the song itself is divided into several "zones" that require a certain amount of seeds to be accessed. The player is thus also driven by curiosity. Since every tile has a different instrument and sound, they will always discover something new when activating one for the first time.

But then… I couldn't resist to add more game-design. I had several ideas for another appeal for the game: secrets. Gardening is after all a bit mysterious sometimes, and quite often unpredictable. So I decided to hide some mechanics, never explain them, just let the player stumble upon them by accident. And I even went further by designing secrets ending, that you can find by making some specific action and even solve some hidden puzzles! I took inspirations from how Animal Well designed its own secrets, by agencing them into layers. The first layer is the basic game experience, then if you look a bit closer you find a second layer, that then lead you to a third layer that require to go deeper into puzzle solving, etc. But I'll detail all of that another time.

Music

The main inspiration for Symphonies Garden music was SoGreatAndPowerful, an artist from the early Brony fandom back in 2010! Their electro-pop uses a lot of short loops that can be introduced and cut abruptly, and switch from one chord to another seamlessly. I'm still in admiration of their style, and it has been a long while since I wanted to pay a tribute to them. I mostly used as reference A Beautiful Heart, The Standard Model, and A Sorceress Girl, from which I borrowed some of the chords structure and progression. A secondary inspiration was Fantastic Plastic Machine, which mix of electro and acoustic could be a great fit. See Reaching for the Stars or Why Not?, that has interesting combinations of instruments.

The main challenge when composing this dynamic song was to make each instrument interesting individually. Player should notice when they activate one, and any combination should work! I thus can't really write a set of instruments that will stay in the background without being noticed, each of them should bring something to the table. Another challenging parts are transitions between sections. For now, there is none: you navigate from a zone to another with only a short fading. But this feels odd when you go from few instruments to a lot of them. Unfortunately, this will likely be the case for most players, as they are encouraged to collect seeds before navigating, and thus deactivate a lot of instruments by doing so. So I plan to add "transitions" layers that would play when the player navigate between two sections, to smooth the change between them.

Initially I wanted to keep the scope small and limit myself to between 6 and 8 instruments per zone. But I was quite inspired, and was able to write up to 13 for each! Which is actually really more satisfying in term of experience. I have still ideas for others, and have at least one other section planned. So although I've made great progress already, it is far from finished!

Road map

For now the alpha has a vertical slice, the main gameplay loop, basic animations, and an ending. But there are still other feature that I plan to develop before getting to the beta. Here is what I'll work on:

• Additional mechanics to balance the tiles that the player has access to and how they progress through the song
• A tutorial, or at least some kind of on-boarding and introduction to the mechanics
• Two secrets ending, their associated rules, and music
• Visuals, with animated background and UX improvement
• SFX, with sounds for most actions and events in the game, which should blend nicely with the music
• Responsive UX,to make the game playable on mobile or any screen
• Accessibility to allow playing with a keyboard and read label on buttons

Then the beta will be focused on more secrets mechanics and ending, that will be a bit more advanced and challenging. After that it will be mostly polishing before the release!

I'm making progress pretty fast now. I'm eager to read your feedback, and show you what's next for this game. See you hopefully soon!