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Why it exists

This is a test game. It was built to prove out game-audio, the .track engine behind the music tools — the same format Plainsong composes in and Plainaudio plays. That engine claims a soundtrack can follow a game on two axes: layers fading in and out with the moment, and whole songs re-sequencing at musical boundaries. A demo track cannot show whether that holds up while someone is busy dodging, so the claim needed a game around it.

Which is why the design runs the other way round from usual: the gameplay serves the music. Every mechanic here exists because it drives something audible, and a mechanic that drives nothing has no reason to be in yet.

What to listen for

The mix follows the danger

Ten parameters go into the song while you play — enemies on screen, bullets in the air, near misses, kills, your last life, whether you are focusing. Twelve layers ride on them, so the arrangement thickens and thins without ever cutting.

Your playing style picks the next song

At the end of each verse the graph branches on how you have been playing: keep killing and it hardens into the rush, live off near misses and it thins to the wire, hold your fire and it opens into the bridge. The heads-up display names the branch and its cause before the song changes, so the connection is visible rather than mysterious.

The songs choreograph the enemies

Waves arrive on the chords of the verse, bullet curtains on the cascade of the wire, and the boss attacks in time. Nothing is scheduled on a timer that the music then has to catch up with.

Three acts, three sound worlds

Each act owns its songs, its tempo and its instrument palette — 132 bpm, then a 116 bpm halftime, then 148 bpm, the tempo of the boss songs. What carries across is the harmony and the leitmotif family, so it stays one album.

The boss sings

Its taunts are sung by the synthesizer in phoneme notation, with the English line burning under the field. It is the same warden all three times, wearing down from a threat into an admission.

Kills ring in the current chord

The kill sting is picked from a bank pre-transposed to the harmony playing at that moment, so it lands inside the song instead of on top of it.

Browser or download

Both run the same song graph and the same beat-driven waves. Two things are still missing in the browser: the short stings — kills, boss entrances, the sung taunts — fall back to a plainer substitute, and layer volumes cannot be faded there, so the arrangement changes in steps at song boundaries rather than continuously. The downloads are where the mix actually breathes; the browser is where you can try it in ten seconds.

Controls

Move with WASD, the arrow keys, the left stick or the d-pad. Shoot with Space or J. Hold Shift or K to focus: the ship slows, its true hitbox appears and the shot spread narrows. Not shooting charges a heavier shot in three stages. Escape pauses, F11 toggles fullscreen, − and + set the volume.

Links

• Source — the game, written in Rust
• game-audio — the engine this exists to test
• Music Tools — compose, share and play .track files
• More games — the rest of them