Cadence, the first game from South African indie studio Made With Monster Love, is one part puzzle, and one part music generator.
Coming from two person team Peter Cardwell-Gardner and Rodain Joubert, Cadence challenges players to create loops between connected nodes, each playing a musical note using the myriad of pre-set sounds programmed into the software. Players can not only create their own puzzles and share them, but also export their tracks to other musical projects.
“Cadence is an aesthetically pleasing playground of musical puzzles. It’s a sandbox. It’s an exploration of music through challenge. It has open-ended puzzles, it has sound editing tools, and it has the ability to let you make a song in a minute,” says Rodain Joubert, designer at Made With Monster Love.
“Players are presented with a collection of these little points, arranged in space, and each of these points plays a musical note,” he continues. “These points represent puzzles that can only be solved if you manage to connect them all in a way that creates an infinite loop of pulses, which move through the connections and play music along the way.
“These puzzles actually, for the most part, end up having more than one solution, depending on the particular way that you choose to connect the points, activating different notes at different times. Basically, it’s just about creating paths through elements, and exploring and finding other paths that work, exploiting a lot of really cool rules of propagation and loop logic that click into place so elegantly, that I absolutely had to join the project.”
The Made With Monster Love team started off making games as a hobby, building friendships through the South African indie community and online game jams, before moving on to professional projects.
“I started off making games as early as any other game dev, as a kid, and then picked up the odd tool here and there during my teenage years,” says Joubert. “Then finally, I did a whole bunch of hobbyist game development in the local South African community until I made it big with one of them, and that was Desktop Dungeons. After the success of that, I basically started searching around for a more artistic endeavour. That’s when I found Peter and the work that he was doing with Cadence.
“Peter and I met through the South African game community, Make Games SA. We had both been members for quite a while, done a lot of prominent stuff here and there, Peter in particular was always very involved in organising community events and getting locals together for socials. I knew him a bit from his leadership role there, but I also knew him from the art game prototypes that he’d often make. He’d very frequently participate in Ludum Dare [online game jam], and The Global Game Jam, and other things like that. His games always had a very distinct aesthetic need above all else. It was nice because, I think at the time, maybe not so much nowadays, the South African community is very concerned with games that don’t go to the places that Peter regularly looks at. He was very much a fresh breath of air.”
A simple loop in Cadence
The South African scene is growing, with developers not only making more games, but a greater variety of them.
“It always deserves more attention, but it’s actually been growing steadily in the last couple of years,” Joubert says. “The South African game community, until about two years ago, was very small and only consisted of a few devout members. Only two years ago it became legitimised as an association locally, recognised by the government, and started organising trade shows, expos and things like that. So, it’s a very new organisation, but it’s doing quite well for itself, especially considering where it was before.
“What I quite like about the community is that it’s the right size where there’s still a certain comradery and intimacy, without getting so swollen that you have to start working through red tape. It’s a great group of people.”
He continues: “There used to be a bit of a one track direction with South African games, I only say that because I feel like, for the most part, they used to be very conservative, or copy cats, or homage driven. Things that we already recognised and liked. Whereas what I’ve really appreciated in the past few years, is that so many South Africans are starting to embrace the idea that they can start creating new kinds of games, and interesting stuff.
“If there is a prevailing personality in South African game development, it’s the devil-may-care, punk attitude. That comes with a lot of South African games and game developers. This is where Free Lives comes from, the BroForce developers. Nothing about them is moderate. It’s a very rock star, parties and beer vibe sometimes, which is really fun.”
Cadence started life as a game jam entry, coming fifth in its category at Ludum Dare 26. Originally called Synesthesis, this early concept laid some of the fundamental foundations for Cadence, namely its artistic style and basic gameplay mechanics.
“It was the Ludum Dare comp that had minimalism as its theme, so the minimalism aspect of it is one of the strongest things that got carried through to Cadence,” says Joubert. “It’s something that’s always been reinforced and adhered to in its design. There was a very early art-deco influence as well.”
An early concept shot from Cadence precursor Synesthesis
However, as Cadence began to take shape after the contest, it came to be something more involving than a simple sound toy. The art-style kept minimalism at its core, but the team wanted to make it perfect for the game, rather than stick to an arbitrary style for the sake of it.
“We don’t really know quite what to call it nowadays, because we’ve been massaging it in response to need and letting it develop an identity of its own,” Joubert says. “Minimalism and clarity and crispness have always been at the fore, and with that, it just works to have bold geometry and clear shapes. The waveform theme lends itself very well to the idea of sound and sound generation, vibrations and echoes. What we wanted to do was use the minimum number of artistic elements to create the largest amount of life, energy and fulfilment in the game. We like to think that’s been working out well for us so far.”
As this was being honed, Made With Monster Love also had to whittle down exactly what they wanted to do with Cadence, drawing inspiration from other indie games and music software.
“A lot of music games out there either don’t give people enough creative power, they guide you through a nice journey, but it’s very much on rails. Or they give you that power and flexibility, but you don’t often know what to do with it. It can get very overwhelming,” says Joubert. “What I picked up on over the course of Cadence was that a lot of music games do try and be quite simple, and effective at the same time. But that’s a very, very difficult task. Often, it’s just the very best, and the most specialised tools which manage to do this properly. It means that what we’re trying to do with Cadence is quite ambitious and very, very exciting, because we’re trying to get the best of both out it, and we really are shooting for that.”
“There was also the idea of finding a different way to structure music, and build music,” he adds. “One of the things about Cadence is that it follows its own musical structure, and we mean that in a very physical sense, the puzzle structure itself is the flow of the song. You look at a Cadence circuit and you see music.”
A different view of Cadence
The puzzles in Cadence can have many solutions, and work on the tried-and-tested, “easy to learn, difficult to master” formula.
“I have a great love for the simplicity of the puzzle system and its emerging complexity,” Joubert says. “It’s not so difficult from the designer’s end to get an open ended puzzle in Cadence. The elements actually lend themselves towards alternatives.
“The most challenging puzzles can be very vicious, where there may only be one or two solutions available, and that’s when I go to town on creating something that really challenges the player. But that’s more for the ends of the game that only die-hard puzzle fans would explore, we’re really more interested in a, the word amphibious is coming to mind, kind of game, working in both worlds.”
While players can build their own loops and share them with others, it’s reach doesn’t stop there, also allowing users to take the music that they produce and export them to their other musical endeavours.
“Cadence is built to be useful. It’s built to be valuable,” Joubert says. “Which, of course, means all the community orientation, and sharing, but also those extra tools we want to give players that allow them to express themselves, to be creative and empowered, especially the people that’d formerly been too intimidated to try anything like that. It’s part of that musical friendliness package that we want to really accentuate.
“We really do value freedom and openness. What we want to do is make Cadence in such a way that the end user can actually take the stuff that they make, get it in a format that they need, and use those musical loops for their own project.
“Technically, it would be accessible to anyone who has a build of Cadence now. You could actually make your own levels from scratch very easily right now, it’s just that before we release the game proper, we want to neaten that up and make it far more streamlined.”
In its effort to let players to create their own original tracks, Cadence has its own custom synthesisers build into game, adding another unique element to the mix that elevates it from being a sound toy to bona fide music generator.
“Cadence wasn’t always built with a real-time synthesiser, which is why we were quite excited when we had that coming around,” says Joubert. “That’s when we felt that players actually had creative control and nuance. You can, as a player, go into the editor and tweak some very finely tuned variables to create your own sound, but we don’t want to give players an overwhelming array of options. We want to give them something that’s a lot more easily navigable.”
“Peter uses pure data,” he adds. “Which is an excellent set of libraries geared towards the task of synthesising. He hooks it into Unity using libPD, and using that technology creates synthesisers from there.
“Getting the synthesiser set up as a base was a pretty sizable task, but what’s been really big for Peter since then is fiddling, tweaking and refining to really get the sound that we want from Cadence. Once you get past the initial technical process, it’s actually a very untechnical thing, it’s an extremely playful process making a game like this.”
A better view of the tools available in Cadence.
Creating their own sounds allows Made With Monster Love to cram a great deal of variety into Cadence, which supports a multitude of different instruments.
“There are about two dozen pre-sets,” Joubert says. “That’re spread out over various kinds of sounds, we’ve got drum machine, we’ve got bass and pads, and a whole bunch of stuff for the melody. Theoretically, there can be as many of those as we want, and I think the final product in that regard, is going to be most heavily shaped by the beta community, feedback from early adopters.
“Cadence has been building up its baseline, building up its foundations, getting its technical stuff to work. But what we really want to do before release is emphasise the community involvement and audience interaction. If we really want the game to be valuable and not just novel, we really do have to listen to people, particularly early on.”
Joubert continues: “I always have a lot of fun whenever Peter makes a new sound update, or a few extra pre-sets and hands them over to me to see what I can do with them. I’ve always enjoyed making puzzles, and now Cadence lets me do that with music as well. I think that’s been absolutely great, just realising the game’s power as a creative tool and a sandbox, without even needing someone else to tell us.”
The team have taken Cadence to KickStarter in search of the funds to finish their ambitious project. This wasn’t a snap decision however, but one that was months in the making.
“It was October or November last year when we were first making preparations for the idea of a KickStarter, because we were running out of funds, we still needed a good half year of development at least to create a decent product, and our confidence was flagging,” says Joubert. So we decided, ‘Ok, well maybe now is the right time to bring it to KickStarter’ and to actually ask a broader audience if it was something they were willing to support. But unfortunately, it just wasn’t the right time of year for it. So we put Cadence on hiatus for three or four months, took up some contract work, did some freelancing and decided that we’d get to a Cadence KickStarter towards the beginning of 2015. Then in the month preceding our KickStarter release, we had an amazing set of exposure and feedback from the right sort of people, and a lot of prominent marketing opportunities, like our presence at South by South West, which we’re very proud of.
“If we get enough funds together, the glorious ideas that we have for setting up community support and doing things on the web, it would be really exciting if we could get there.”
The success of their KickStarter is vital to achieving the lofty goals that Made With Monster Love have set out for Cadence, because without funding, they might not be able to fulfil their idea’s true potential.
“If we couldn’t get the proper funding support for it, what we would release would be perhaps a little bit less than what we think it could potentially add,” Joubert says. “It would be more of an idle sound toy, or a once off experience, rather than what we would hope it could be, something that has a lot more value, something a little more paradigm shifting.
“I might go as far as saying that if we couldn’t get the KickStarter going, we wouldn’t get Cadence out. We might be able to manage a product that looks quite similar to it, but it wouldn’t quite be Cadence.”
Cadence lets you shape and alter the sounds that puzzles produce.
KickStarter permitting, Cadence is slated for release PC and Mac towards the end of 2015 or the start of 2016, with the iOS version coming later.
“We’re probably going to restrict it to the iPad, just because of processing power, and it’s optimised for iPad use as well,” says Joubert.
They’re entertaining the idea of other platforms too, but that’s dependent on investment.
“There’s the idea of support for other platforms, something that we can’t really support right now is Linux, for example,” Joubert explains. “We’d really like to, we just don’t have the time, the testing and the resources.”
Cadence’s combination of puzzles and music generation is genuinely interesting, and Made With Monster Love hope to turn that interest into something tangible, without having to explain every last detail.
“The most challenging part of development so far has been trying to explain the game properly. Trying to define something that is quite abstract and quite new. Trying to show people, ‘well, here’s a completely new paradigm on music, and music creation, but we’re still going to try and anchor it in stuff that you can relate to’.
“Because we’re focussing so hard on minimalism and elegance, it’s a constant to-and-fro between over-simplicity and over-explanation which generates complexity. We’re trying to tell people as little as possible, while still letting them understand the game.”
It’s embedded in the text above, but if you missed it, here’s another link to Made With Monster Love’s Cadence KickStarter.
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