Crescendo
An arcade shmup in three acts, written to put an adaptive-music engine under real playing conditions. The soundtrack listens to how you fly.
Download
About
This is a test game. It was built to prove out game-audio, the .track engine behind Plainsong and Plainaudio. 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. The gameplay serves the music: every mechanic exists because it drives something audible.
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, focus), and twelve layers ride on them.
- Your playing style picks the next song: at the end of each verse 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 HUD names the branch and its cause before the song changes.
- 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.
- Three acts, three sound worlds: each act owns its songs, tempo and instrument palette (132 bpm, a 116 bpm halftime, then 148 bpm), while harmony and the leitmotif family tie it together.
- The boss sings its taunts in phoneme notation, with the English line burning under the field.
- Kills ring in the current chord: the kill sting is picked from a bank pre-transposed to the harmony playing at that moment.
Browser or download
Both run the same song graph and the same beat-driven waves. In the browser the short stings (kills, boss entrances, the sung taunts) fall back to a plainer substitute, and layer volumes cannot be faded, so the arrangement changes in steps at song boundaries rather than continuously. The downloads are where the mix actually breathes.
Tutorial
Move with WASD, the arrow keys, the left stick or the d-pad. Shoot with Space, J, the gamepad's south button or the right trigger. Focus with Shift, K, the left trigger or the left shoulder: the ship slows, its true hitbox appears and the shot spread narrows.
Not shooting charges a heavier shot in three stages. Escape or Start pauses, F11 toggles fullscreen, - and + set the volume. A connected controller works in the browser too: press any button on it once so the browser notices it.
- Kills chain into a score multiplier and arm the gun; grazing enemy bullets earns score and extra lives.
- Kill to take the rush route, graze to take the wire, hold your fire to cross the bridge.
- Three acts complete the run. A boss that takes no hit for twenty seconds loses interest and leaves.