This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.Panoramical isunique. This collaboration between DJ and programmer Fernando Ramallo and Proteus cocreatorDavid Kanaga is an interactive experience that lets players manipulate the look, sound, and feel of a dozen abstract landscapes. It features musical collaborations with luminaries like Baiyon Pixeljunk Eden , doseone Samurai Gunn , Richard Flanagan FRACT , and Jukio Kallio Nuclear Throne .You don’t simply play this gameyou orchestrate an audiovisual performance.The soundscapes and landscapes can be manipulated usinga standard joypad, a keyboard and mouse, or a MIDI controller. A pro licensed version is available for DJs and VJs who want to incorporate it into their artowrks and live shows.Panoramical has been nominated for IGF awards in the categories of Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio, and the Nuovo Award.It also received honorable mention inthe Seumas McNally Grand Prizecategory.Fernando Ramallo andDavid Kanaga answered some questions about the game for Gamasutra.What’s your background in making games?Fernando: I have a background in digital animation, video, sound and graphic design so that was a good skillset for an independent developer. I only started making games in my early 20s, though. I worked at a studio for a few years before going solo in 2010, trying to make brainy, pretty abstract puzzle games, eventually moving on to focusing on interesting immersive experiences.David: Prior to Panoramical, I worked on a number of other musical games including Proteus, Dyad, and Ada.What development tools did you use?Fernando: Unity 4, Photoshop, Git, lots of notebooks of different sizesDavid: Ableton, MIDI keyboard, MIDI knobs, UnityHow much time did you spend working on the game?Fernando: Panoramical was my main focus for a whole three years. I did a thing or two in between, though, so it must’ve been around twoyears of full time work.David: Same, though part time for me. The project took long, it framed a whole period of life growth death/rebirth, snakeskin shedding.What inspired the idea behind Panoramical?Fernando: It came up when I stayed at David’s after GDC one year and he had a Korg Nanokontrol fader controller lying around. We started making a few prototypes for it where David would make the audio react to it in Ableton and I would make a little thing in Unity that used it as a controller. Then we ran them side by side so it had sort of fake reactive audio. One of the prototypes was about orbiting a planet and every slider changed the scale of things in the planet, the color of the sky, etc. It felt really good to have these broad changes in the visuals and audio at the same time.David: I’ll just add that when I first used Ableton, about eightyears ago, I’d never used music software that was so easy, such transparent affordances, dead easy to map parameters to MIDI I started w/fruityloops, which is easier for stepsequenced beats, but Ableton is easier for the whole process . I was becoming deeply interested in games at this time, RS Gold and for a while I considered Ableton no doubt the best game I’d played. I sometimes made little Ableton sets that were meant to be played by nonmusicians just twiddling knobs on a MIDI controller. So I was beyond stoked when we started this process that allowed this mode of working to mix with Fernando’s swoony visual flux.The game is so much about creation’mdashwhat are some specific examples of how players have used Panoramical in a special or unique way?Fernando: Oh boy.