That led to me creating my first real video editing project that i eventually titled Chain Factor Chaos:

It’s a pretty rough final product execution wise, and conceptually i don’t like what I did with the first big “section” anymore (the first 3’40”), but I’m still incredibly happy with the rest of it leading to the recap transition (3’40”-9’00″ish). A part of me would love to take a second crack at it given the sort of video editing chops I have now, but a) i don’t know that I still have access to the source video anymore, and b) if it came down to it i’d rather do something new from scratch than re-hash an old project.

In any case, when I posted my blog entry that talked about the project, Frank Lantz happened to come across it and commented on it saying how much he liked it. I remember feeling very touched (and, truth be told, a little overwhelmed) that he took the time to write to me. I wrote him an email to say “you’re welcome”, and we had a brief email exchange where he gave me more nice words about it. After that exchange, that was that.

Fast forward eight years later to yesterday.

Recently, a new browser game called Universal Paperclips has made the viral rounds. It’s what some people classify as an “idler”, and it’s a game type i’ve enjoyed playing in the past, so when my brother shared it with me, I said, “sure, i’ll give it a shot.” After I finally finished the game (which ended up taking a few days), there was an end credit line that said, “(c) 2017 by Frank Lantz”.

And i was like, “i recognize that name… oh! It’s the Chain Factor guy!” It took me a moment, but even after eight years I remembered who he was, the interactions we exchanged. So i found him on twitter, and said, “hey, i just finished your new game, remember me?” and he tweeted me back and said, “Of course!”, said he still found the video amazing, and it was nice to reconnect. I told him that his game was great and that I was going to play it as part of a video game marathon for charity, and he tweeted a link to my charity page and also gave me a donation.

Such a random eight-years-apart reconnection made with a damned awesome guy. I might start using twitter more often because it definitely shouldn’t be another eight years before we interact again.

For me, the most fundamental brilliance about the design of Super Hexagon is how it parallels the mastery of learning a musical instrument (as well as other skills), primarily because of the relativity of perceived difficulty.  Super Hexagon has six difficulty stages which are broken into two sets of three.  When i first started to play the game, Stage 1 (labeled “Hard”) felt daunting enough as it was – everything seemed to be moving incredibly quickly, and i was constantly dying in 10s or less.  This happened often – probably literally hundreds of times – before i got past that point and then it took maybe another 50-75 tries to hit the 20s mark.  As i got more comfortable with it, it became easier to reach higher rates of achievement, but much of it still felt like floundering and a reactionary approach to the game as opposed to true mastery.

The main difficulty difference between Stage 3 (labeled “Hardest”) versus Stage 1 is speed – not just the speed of the obstacles coming at you, but also how quickly you move as a player.  Despite my level of comfort increasing in Stages 1 and 2 where getting 30-40s was, if not easy, at least more graspable, that slight increase of speed and mobility of Stage 3 schooled me for probably at least 200-300 gameplays before i passed 15s for the first time.  At this point i was fairly obsessed with the game, trying to achieve the 60s mark, and i discovered that trying to play Stage 1 and 2 would throw me off because the timing felt so different from Stage 1, so i deliberately stopped playing those stages for a good week or so while i attempted to master Stage 3.

I think it was when i was able to get to the 40-50s mark in Stage 3 that I decided to take a break and go back to Stage 1, and I discovered to my surprise that Stage 1 didn’t just feel easy, it felt slow.  I remember the sensation of playing the game for the first time and thinking that i had to react so quickly to everything, something that would induce an adrenaline rush and a sense of urgency.  But after I had trained myself to get used to the way Stage 3 was timed, I went back to Stage 1 and felt like i had all of the time in the world to react to what was going on – enough that I could sometimes make a poor judgement call, realize that a fraction of a second later, and then make an error correction that would cause me to not die, which is something that felt impossible when i first started.  And once i got good enough at Stage 3 and started to play the “challenge stages”, Stage 6 schooled me in the same way that Stage 3 had initially, and then when i got good enough at that and went back to Stage 3, Stage 3 similarly felt not just easy but slow.  This feeling was further amplified the more people i showed the game to who would try the first stage, watch me play the sixth stage, and be flabbergasted at how i could react so quickly when it no longer felt quick to me at all.  Conceptually this ended up being reinforced by people who started to obsess with the game as much as me that would describe a similar experience of those early stages feeling like a crawl compared to the later stages once they became expert players.

There are many many similar experiences that i’ve had with other video games, particularly music video games, and i know that there are a lot of professions, particularly sports, in which that comes into play as well.  In one of James Burke’s early television shows Connections, Burke used race car driving as that analogy, saying that professional race car drivers are so practiced in driving at fast speeds that they feel like they have all of the time in the world to react to situations around them that they’ve turned into instinct and reflex.  With sports and other professions, there’s a science behind how someone can be trained to get to that level of achievement, a pedagogical approach combined with hours and days of practice.  With Super Hexagon, the game design monopolizes on that science, creating an experience that is easy for anyone to grasp just by picking up the game and pressing “go”, but takes hours and days to master, and, more importantly, rewarding the time spent by the player in very concrete measurable and iterative ways that motivate the player to want to get even better. I knew i was improving at the game, and that fueled me to reach that next step of expertise by constantly analysing how i could improve on my technique, then applying those techniques and practicing them over and over again, all motivated by sheer determination of wanting to reach a decent level of mastery – which i eventually did.

Although the paradigm of Maverick Bird is more akin to Flappy Bird than Super Hexagon, the craft of the game design reminds me strongly of Super Hexagon in a way that Flappy Bird fails to achieve.

With Flappy Bird, there’s a measurable finite amount of situations the player has to learn in order to master the game.  Not to say that the game is easy; the margin of error to pass through the pipes and iterate your score is very narrow, and the physics of maneuvering the flappy bird takes some getting used to.  You’re given no “training mode” or any degree of forgiveness for imperfection.  You either get through the pipe, or you die.  But once you get used to the gravity physics and learn how to manipulate the flapping to get to where you need to get through the pipes, achieving high scores is seemingly left to simple practice and repetition.

That’s definitely a contrasting experience to that of playing Maverick Bird which i’ve now played for at least twice as long as its flappy counterpart, and I’m not only still learning how to get any level of mastery, but i’m also determined to do so in a way that i’m not motivated by Flappy Bird.  With Cavanagh’s clone, it feels worth it to spend the time to experiment and explore new techniques and approaches and hone the precision of my gameplay in an attempt to more achieve more consistently, and that’s more complicated than it initially seems because of how the arc path of the maverick bird’s “flap” is not equal to the rate in which obstacles roll by (which is also true of Flappy Bird but to a much lesser degree), which means that the same obstacles sometimes requires a completely different action depending on where the bird is in its flight path, which can be subtly manipulated to make it easier or harder depending on when you’ve flapped previously.

And never mind what the “drop” action does to add more flexibility and depth to the gameplay.

From all of this, it makes it seem that Maverick Bird is the superior Flappy Bird experience.  It captures the essence of Flappy Bird’s simplicity and expands on it in a Super Hexagon kind of way, complete with high-powered techno soundtrack.  It’s immensely gratifying to get better at the game, not just to get a new high score, but to reliably get higher scores or become more consistent in dealing with obstacles and how to prepare for them.

That said, Flappy Bird does achieve something that Maverick Bird doesn’t do, something that i think is fundamental to skill-building that today’s world sometimes loses sight of.  I had said that once the mechanics of Flappy Bird is mastered, high achievability is seemingly achieved through simple repetition, but the reality of it is more complicated than that and more profound.  To excel at Flappy Bird, the player has to have patience and perseverance, be willing to put in the time to practice the repetitions, which results in a level of confidence that getting the platinum medal 9 times out of 10 is a given, that achieving newer high scores is just a matter of time.  And in that way, Flappy Bird is more akin to what is needed by the aspiring professional musician, the snare line of a world class DCI or WGI drumline that works to play every single simple and complex note with absolute clarity, the aspiring concert pianist who practices his scales every day for two hours prior to working on the actual music no matter how many times he’s played them before, the collegiate music conductor who spends the first ten minutes of every rehearsal with long tones, making sure that everyone in her ensemble is using their ears to blend and balance.

Perseverance in that Flappy Bird sensibility, therefore, feels more like a test of will and determination that has to come from within where Maverick Bird is Flappy Bird’s virtuosic and flashy partner, where the test of will and determination is inherently encouraged by the subtly complex game design.  Both of them serve as an interesting complement to each other, and to me serves as an interesting set of analogies to important life skills; it’s the Flappy Bird sort of perseverance through almost a decade of patience and determination that got me to where i am today as a musician and what i humbly feel is a successful career as a collegiate marching band instructor and music composer.  It’s the Maverick Bird sort of desire for virtuosic excellence and mastery that drives me to constantly exceed my own set of expectations and goals in those realms and in every other aspect of my life, to apply the fundamentals that i’ve drilled so meticulously into innovative and polished results.

It’s possible that that analogy is a little self-masturbatory and stretches a bit thin.  That’s okay; both Birds are still damned fun to play, if nothing else, you can take away that as the bottom line if you want.

The electronic music program in my undergrad at West Chester helped engrain in me a preference of electronic music as an interactive performance art versus a static “tape piece” that involves no live element. Not that i don’t think that tape pieces have value or their place in our modern music history, it can just be more challenging for a piece to resonate with me as both a composer or an audience member if conceived that way.

That’s really a separate discussion; i bring this up because in the past half year or so my brother has started dabbling into creating flash games and i thought it would be fun to try my hand at creating the background music. The more i would discover about some of flash’s flexibility when it comes to music handling, the more my brain shifted the musical conception away from “background music” to “interactive sound experience”.

Most flash games i’ve played across the internet have a typical video game sound paradigm. There are two types of sounds: background music that will change occasionally based on a scene change or a severe game state change, and foreground effects that are more directly interactive with the character. For a lot of games, particularly certain genres of games such as 2-d scrollers, i think that paradigm works pretty well and can only be mucked about with when you have a particularly unique element to the game, but the two games that my brother have in development that i’m involved in are more puzzle like in nature and involve various evolving game states that lend itself well to having the music programmed with a much more direct relationship with what’s happening in the actual game.

It’s hard to explain without the games being complete to show examples; once those games go live i’ll probably write a post about the music and my philosophies behind its creation. But to exemplify the approach i’m taking with these games, here’s a two examples of existing games out there and how i would approach the sound experience with them. The first is a directly interactive sound experience based on gameplay elements, and the second is a more passive sound experience in which the background music evolves based on the evolution of the gameplay story.

Example One: dropsum 1.3

The “arcade game” gameplay has the most diverse gamestates that lend to sound manipulation, so i’m basing my brainstorming off of that.

The first easy thing to consider is the “required” number. The game starts off as a “9 required”. After you complete a certain amount of stages, the game changes to “11 required”, then “15 required”, then “19 required” (which no one has ever reached because it’s frickin’ impossible). This to me naturally lends itself to creating a base music layer that’s founded on time signatures: 9/8 for the 9 required, 11/8 for the 11 required, 15/8 for the 15 required, then probably 4/4 for the 19 required because for those that could ever get that far and are paying attention enough, it will throw them completely off.

The second easy thing to consider is the bubble numbers themselves. When you first start the game, you only get numbers up to 4. As you complete stages, more bubble numbers get added to increase the difficulty. I think the highest number i’ve ever gotten was 12. That lends itself to pitch classes, as in when you only have bubbles numbering up to 4, there’s only 4 pitches in the music vocabulary, when it gets to 5 you add a pitch, &c. I could see this done as either directly correlative to the base 9/8 layer material (the 9/8 layer is a rhythmic ostinato that starts off with 4 pitches and then adds more pitches to it as the numbers go up) or as a separate layer (the 9/8 base layer establishes a tonal vocabulary and a melody is put on top of that that only uses 4 pitches to start but then adds more pitches to it as the numbers go up).

The next thing to consider is color. Color in the bubbles change too quickly for the music to undergo drastic changes; you want the music to be indicative of the gameplay flow, and adding and removing completely new music elements based on the appearance and disappearance of color on the playfield would contradict the gameplay flow and feel disruptive. But the colors are also not ignorable; visually they’re right in your face and they’re key to you succeeding in the game, so for there to be *no* aural correlation to that visual element feels wrong. An easy solution is to have each color represent a timbre and just add that timbre to the existing melody line (based on the “bubble numbers are melody” idea), and maybe the presence (read: volume) of that particular timbre is directly related to how much of that color there is. For example, if the main melody is a piano single-note melody, yellow could be that same melody up the octave with a glock sound that you can only barely hear when there’s 5 or less yellows on the board, and every 5 yellows the volume increases.

Powerups are an interesting thing to this game too mainly because there’s a finite number of powerups that you can have. That’s a severe gameplay flaw, but lends itself great to creating some sort of countermelody or chordal backdrop that gets more ‘full’ the more powerups you have. The problem with that concept is that that aural aesthetic creates a sense of reward for having a full set of powerups which doesn’t quite correlate to real gameplay strategy since you need to get rid of powerups to make way for more powerful powerups if you have a lot of useless ones. That wouldn’t deter me from exploring that idea, but it may prevent me from feeling comfortable using sound in that way because of the contradicting message.

Example Two: The Company of Myself

my youtube playthrough

The music for TCoM is actually very well suited to the game and doesn’t need change. But if philosophically i were to change the music style and approach, it would go something like this:

There’s a typical background music loop that incorporates a melody of some sort. At the start of every new scene, elements of a countermelody get added. Say the countermelody is 12 notes total in a loop. At the end of scene 1, two of those notes get revealed. At the end of scene 2, two more notes get revealed. &c. That countermelody volumewise is clearly put in the background and stays there. This leads up to the scene where we first encounter Kathryn where the countermelody switches from background to foreground, fully complementing the main melody. In the scene where Kathryn “dies”, that countermelody abruptly shuts off.

Actually, at that moment when Kathryn dies, it’d probably be better for the entire music track to shut off for the remainder of that scene. Then when the next scene comes in, there’s a slow fade-in to the main music loop, but there’s a character change to that music loop, something that clearly reflects on the plot reveal of Kathryn’s death. Maybe the Kathryn countermelody is still incorporated, but in a fragmented and dissonant way as opposed to as a complement.

I feel there could be some musical correlation to the creation and execution of “history copies”, but the easy answer of creating some sort of ‘echo’ remnant would require a lot of care in the main loop’s composition to make sure that the echo doesn’t clash with itself. A different approach could be to create a different “flavor” of the main loop for each history iteration, and to enhance that with changing some of the visual background elements upon each history creation. For example, every time that a history iteration needs to be created, create some visual decay or abstractness in the background, and have the music loop include some dissonance or semi-tones that give it a less stable character.

That might have to peak in a level like the last one where you’re creating a *lot* of multiple history copies in order to achieve completion of the level, but if you do it five times and then just leave it, that might not be so bad visually if you’re able to continue the effect aurally in some way at least for another 10 or 15 iterations. it’d be tricky but doable; it probably lends itself to maybe creating a gameplay paradigm where there’s only a finite version of history copies you are allowed to make before you have to restart (which would probably eliminate the last level from existing).

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Those are just two examples off of the top of my head that i feel approach the sound experience in the game differently than the way a lot of game music tends to be implemented. Again, not every game can use this sort of aesthetic, but for games that have that sort of interactive potential – either directly interactive like the first example, or scene/story based evolution like the second example – it feels like something that’s greatly underutilized that could greatly enhance a person’s playing experience and level of depth to the game at both a conscious and subconscious level.

We’ll see how that turns out with my brother’s games once they’re fully developed.