It’s fairly safe to say that it wasn’t long ago when people didn’t really care about how a game sounded. It was all ‘polygon count’ this and ‘number of on-screen enemies’ that. People didn’t deem the audio of their game to be that important.
Times have changed. We’ve got orchestras knocking out themes from our favourite games, downloadable soundtracks and press releases telling us to get excited about artists that feature within upcoming games. One of those upcoming games that has some very interesting audio is Beatbuddy.
Music is often restricted to play just a bit part role in games: No matter how good the composer is, no matter how moving the score, this entire element of a game’s development can often be tuned out with little or no impact to gameplay. Not so with Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians. Here is a game where the music is as central to the experience as the character onscreen, where nodding your head to the beat can help you float through Beatbuddy’s mix of adventure and puzzle solving more easily. It is a strong and unusual concert, although the focus on following the music bears unexpected consequences for the longevity of the puzzle based gameplay.
Justin Chou jams to the funky-fresh grooves of the new iOS version of BeatBuddy, and plans to take the game from GDC to the dark depths of the NYC subway.
The folks over at THREAKS recently announced that their title has just topped over 700,000 copies sold on PC and iOS, impressive numbers for an indie game with relatively little publicity.
