Asterism

Full Moon
Dev Blog #01

16 April 2022

What is Asterism?

Asterism is a personal project that I recently received funding for through Creative Scotland. I have been working on it in my spare time since late 2020, but will be working on it full-time as of this month! Here's the description I'm working with right now:

Asterism is an interactive music album. A digital series of playable music videos that allow exploration and interaction with visual worlds that relate to the narrative of each music track. The narrative follows themes around personal expression, self-acceptance, anxiety and mental health.

It is set on and around the planets of the solar system, taking the player on a journey from the sun out towards the expanse of space. Each song on the album is represented by a planet or location in space that acts as the setting for an interactive music video, where the player may take actions that relate to the narrative and the world. The space between songs acts as a set of interludes where the overarching narrative surrounding the songs unfolds.

The worlds of the songs each have different visual styles, with a mixture of digital and non-digital artforms, but there is a consistency with simple controls across the game to allow the experience to be accessible, immersive and playful.

What is a Full Moon Dev Blog?

Two things I am keen to do on this project are to immerse myself in the theme of the game, and to create regular updates on my progress for anyone who is interested in how it's going.

What's a reasonable frequency for me to expect myself to make these updates? Probably once per month.

What happens roughly once a month in our solar system? A full moon!

And so, rather than trying to decide on a robust marketing strategy, I'll be letting the phases of the moon guide my project upates for Asterism.

I've put up a calendar to remind me next to my desk:

Origins of Asterism

To me, this project is a culmination of a number of prototypes and ideas I've had over several years. I have also been very inspired by a few specific games and albums, which I'll link to further below.

The combination of a feeling of exploration, along with the pacing and expressiveness of your actions within a narrative is something that video games does very well. It's something I've experienced in other art-forms, such as immersive theatre, dance, or perhaps just with play in general. I've also experienced these feelings at gigs, when dancing to the music and experiencing that music in a familiar but completely new way. In a similar way, I've experienced this when I'm travelling back from the gig, drunk on the bus home, listening to that same music and noticing new details of it, while watching blurry lights speed past in the dark outside. Expressive motion through a space, alongside music, revisiting and discovering new perspectives.

Quite a few of my previous games explore these ideas, and it's only really in hindsight I can put them in a big list and say how they connect and have influenced my ideas for Asterism so far.

I'm a big fan of the concept of Flat Games. I love the minimal controls and space these games give you for reflection, observation and a sense of motion. Meditative spaces to explore ideas. I took part in a Flat Game Jam in Bristol in 2017 where I made a 2.5D flat game about a walk in a forest. I wanted to make a semi-3D environment to move through using craft materials, and to avoid menus or popups I placed the dialogue within the game world itself, so that it lined up as you approached it. I'm keen to look into this idea some more for Asterism for using dialogue.



Later that year I created two more games that were designed around motion and exploration of a space.

Limbo Train is one of the first Bitsy games I made, in which I wanted to recreate the feeling of sitting on a train, staring out of the window at the scenery flying past while listening to music, mulling things over in my head for hours.



This System is still one of my favourite games that I've made. It's another game about mulling things over (there's a theme here), but this time the game environment is created from collaged photos of backgrounds and words written in stones, sand, leaves etc. It's a poem about cycles in life and nature.



For Global Game Jam in 2019, I made a game called Orbit, inspired by the jam's theme of 'What does home mean to you?'. This is probably the closest game conceptually to Asterism, with the little rocket ship starting at the centre and gradually venturing further and further out into space as an analogy to feelings of security vs. uncertainty, and a desire to explore.



I read The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin that year, which felt unlike any other book I had read. I was extremely inspired by the way the book revisited the same location (the tombs) over and over again over many years in the lifetime of the protagonist as she grew to learn its intricacies in great detail, and the metaphor this provides of the character learning about herself. I made a short Bitsy game, Cave, to try and capture what I had enjoyed in particular from the book.



One of the first games I made that specifically started to explore ideas around movement through a space in conjunction with music is a prototype called Dark. The prototype is mostly just a single road, that you can walk down and look around, but it got me thinking about how to integrate 2D art into a 3D environment, and constructing it more like a theatre set in an abstract way, like with Forest Walk.



I felt very compelled with the idea of moving along a straight path in a game, so much so that I took it a step further to put the player on rails. I made a game called Autumn Light for the Meditations project. In Autumn Light, similar to Limbo Train, I wanted to recreate the feeling of motion while listening to music, in a bubble of thoughts. Instead of controlling their movement, the player has minimal interactions with the environment, changing sliders that control audio volume, temperature and sunlight. Each one pulls the player further into their own bubble as they drift above a crowded street while walking home. This was the first game I made that was designed to be completely in time with a music track, and was influenced by the work I was doing at the time on "Before I Forget".



Before I Forget is a game I created alongside other creatives with my company 3-Fold Games. One scene in particular helped me to process and put into practice many of these previous ideas around motion and music. I worked with some of the other team members to design a scene of the game where the protagonist, Sunita, is compelled to walk down a corridor she should be very familiar with towards a destination in her house that she knows she needs to get to. The corridor is representative of her fears, confusion and memories. It gets progressively longer and more convoluted, becoming a maze of newspaper clippings and fragments of conversations and voices. All of this is choreographed to a piece of music that grows in intensity. We initially tried this scene with the character on rails like with Autumn Light in order to time Sunita's journey along the corridor to the length of the track, but it was too important in that scene for the player to be in control of Sunita, rather than purely watching her move. The solution we came to was to use jump cuts at specific points in the track, which would teleport the player to new sections of corridor that corresponded to the narrative of the music, but still giving them the freedom to move and explore on their own. It felt similar to a music video, and hugely inspired the direction of my ideas moving forward.



In 2020 I made a game called Beat Skipping for a game jam, which directly explored the idea of a music video game. It uses a draft of a track that I wrote for Asterism, and jump cuts to take the player between different areas of the game in the intro, verse, chorus, bridge etc. I was very happy with how this turned out and it gave me a solid structure to begin thinking about how a music video game might work.



Some specific games I've played that have inspired some ideas around Asterism include:

Passage, by Jason Rohrer. Passage has been hugely influential on the way I think about many games I make. The simplicity and direct link between the movement / actions of the player and the narrative is extremely well executed, and helped me begin thinking about the ways that movement through a space can be used to tell a story.
Teenage Blob, by Team Lazerbeam. Teenage Blob is the closest game I have played to an interactive music video album. Again the simplicity of controls and creative use of movement and scenes within different parts of the songs makes an amazing connection to the music.
Pilgrimage, by Joost Eggermont and Jorrit De Vries. Pilgrimage is another great example of a music album game, though is slightly less curated as a music video album than Teenage Blob in my opinion, in terms of the pacing of what you are doing/seeing with the sections of music.
If Found..., by Dreamfeel. If Found... is a beautiful narrative game that I was lucky enough to contribute to in a small way during development. The pacing and motion of the hand-drawn art correlating to the narrative and audio is both chaotic and highly curated, and is super inspiring in terms of the emotional design.
Sayonara Wild Hearts, by Simogo. Sayonara Wild Hearts is a great example of a music game that asks the player to take action in time with the music, similar to a rythym game. The flow of the movement of the game has such a great feeling, and it was interesting to me to play and think about how the arcade / rythym game genre works, which is something that I'm not as keen to do with Asterism.
Outer Wilds, by Mobius Digital. I find Outer Wilds terrifying, in an existential space-travel way. But that's why I love it. I love the sense of distance and scale between planets, and the feelings it captures of isolation, awe, and the unknown. In that sense it's one of the best space games I've played.

I've also been really inspired by music albums that use spoken or radio interludes between songs, which I'm very keen to try something similar to with Asterism to tie the album together and provide extra narrative in between songs. In particular four albums that I love that do this in interesting ways are Songs for the Deaf, by Queens of the Stone Age, The Rainbow Goblins, by Masayoshi Takanaka, M83, by M83 and Wretched and Divine: The Story of the Wild Ones, by Black Veil Brides.
Recently I watched the amazing music video album Blue Weekend, by Wolf Alice, which is incredible in that every track has a video, with recurring characters and a story that progresses across the whole album, a concept video album?

Progress so far

So far I've mostly been prototyping and sketching out ideas for the game. I've created draft versions of most of the music tracks using digital instruments, which I'll be updating with recorded instruments later on in development. This blog post has gotten quite long already so I'll make sure to do a larger update on the development next time!

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