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TIGSource ForumsCommunityTownhall"Music of the Spheres", a PC puzzle game about bouncing bullets and Islamic art
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Author Topic: "Music of the Spheres", a PC puzzle game about bouncing bullets and Islamic art  (Read 3666 times)
Inverse Square
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« on: April 25, 2013, 04:16:06 AM »

Hey, so this should make y'all laugh. Three and a half years ago (christ I wish it wasn't that long!) I made my first post in this forum - a thread asking for people to recommend me games with bouncing bullets in them, as research for a game I was making. It was a helpful thread for me!

Well... I've been working on the game for a large portion of the time since then, and I released Music of the Spheres yesterday! You can get it on Desura for $5 here. If you like it, or you like the look of it, you can vote me up on Steam Greenlight here.

Description
"Music of the Spheres" is a puzzle-shooter. Here's the website, with a new trailer on it. The game has been covered on Penny-Arcade, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Polygon.

The controls of the game are simple: you can fire bullets in eight directions. The bullets bounce, and when they bounce, a musical note is played. Your goal is to hit some rather intelligent moving targets with your bullets. Here's a quote from Rock, Paper, Shotgun's preview:

There’s a beauty in the apparent simplicity of the design, which like much that is contemplative is far more complex than it first appears. It’s somehow reassuring to play a puzzle game that is entirely disinclined to frustrate, hoping to create mindful, soothing spaces instead.

I wanted to show people the most beautiful possibilities within the mechanics, and I wanted to do it in a smooth way; the game's main influence is Portal. I've been working on MotS mostly on my own for the last few years. It includes music by Stephane D'Ascoli and some animations by Thomas Frose and Jac Mitchel, but the design, AI, programming, sound, and most of the art (and PR!) is all me.

I'm Hamish Todd by the way; you might have seen my diagram-heavy articles about classic games on Kotaku/Destructoid/Gamasutra. I'm a mathematician, and that comes through in my games as much as in my articles. MotS contains puzzles based on patterns from maths and physics, and its backgrounds are influenced by a branch of Islamic geometric art which I found out about while studying the mathematics of virus shells. Music of the Spheres is about shooting, but I dislike violence, so we worked hard to give a mannered, respectful feeling to the relationship between you and your playmates (/targets!).

Do you know what I think I'm going to do now? I think I'm gonna go make a thread asking for research material for my NEXT game :D
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Udderdude
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« Reply #1 on: April 25, 2013, 05:22:44 AM »

Looks interesting, is there a demo version?
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Inverse Square
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« Reply #2 on: April 27, 2013, 12:42:43 AM »

Afraid not - the game is intentionally quite short, and so doesn't really lend itself to the "demo version/full version" structure.
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