Right, and it ties into what you were saying about messaging and making it clear. Music is kind of the universal language, isn’t it? Everybody understands rhythm — even if you don’t have rhythm, everybody can follow a beat, generally.
We really lean into that consistent heartbeat that underpins everything across Tempopo through the different soundtracks, and the actions that the characters take occur on and off half beats or full beats. They synchronise perfectly and the flowers within the levels are singing and pushing towards that rhythm. It all plays back into itself in such a way that even if you’re just watching the visual reactions, you can almost feel the timing, you know.
We have really strong accessibility goals with our games. Anytime we have an audio element, we make sure that there is a visual element that accompanies it with an equal level of weight. It’s wildly unnecessary to build something where you’re excluding a bunch of people. That’s why this game is musical, but it is not a music rhythm game.
And though there isn’t actually a visible three-dimensional grid, I think that this audio-visual sync helps you conceptualize a grid. The game can be beautiful and not have to be segmented up and look like a two-dimensional thing, but it can still have that sense of delineated space because of how everything syncs up.
Nature is another big part of this game. What do you think that relationship between music and nature is and how do you think that applies to Tempopo? Or does that come up in the game as one of the big themes?
For us, nature and gardens came about because we wanted to unify all the elements in the game. Once you have music and magic and characters and movement and collection and all these things, ‘How do you actually bring this together?’ We tried to think of real-world concepts that tie these disparate elements together.
Gardens are a perfect fit. They’re wonderfully calming places full of big personalities that have to coexist together and support each other. They’re feeding nitrogen into the soil that the other one uses. A garden is a very diverse place with different elements, but everything is working together. So we thought, ‘Why not lean into this element of nature where we already have this place where people feel calm and relaxed?’ Gardens are a place that people design and they want to make feel like their own, so we brought that into the game as well.
Even Mythbusters showed that the flowers respond to music and grow faster when music is playing, right? Like, why wouldn’t plants want to jam out like the rest of us?
What a perfect answer! Getting into the gameplay, you’ve got a little command wheel that looks like a flower, with petals that allow you to put down different commands. Where did that idea come from and can you give us some examples of how it’ll be used in-game?
These are what we’re calling “instructions” for now, so you’re placing them down to try and create a perfect plan. Every level is a rescue where you’re trying to collect the flowers that have been lost and take them back to your garden. Then, as the player, you can design your little musical garden.
Like, why wouldn’t plants want to jam out like the rest of us?
Essentially, Hana [the main character] is conducting the music and the Tempopo are following the beat. They’re great at moving, but it’s up to you to tell them what to do. We started coming up with different actions that would help with cooperative elements. I guess this is where I was inspired by some of those classic puzzle games like Lemming, where you’re telling one to be like a blocker or build a bridge or do something like that and work together. It all comes back to the idea that this game’s theme is harmony.
Harmony and bringing people together through video games is such an important thing. That’s something that you’ve done in Unpacking. There is a real sense of harmony when you get everything in the right place. Here it feels similar in a completely different way.
A huge part of that in Tempopo is where you can just press the play button, the handle will start conducting, the music will be going, and the characters will move around and do everything, and then you can press that button again and it just resets everything back. The way that people play and engage with the game is about this kind of approach — do they spend a long time looking at something and thinking it through, or do they just iterate and make little changes all the time and feel like I’m getting closer to this perfect movement of this concerto of elements working together?
That helps a lot with not wanting people to feel frustrated or scared of the game because I don’t think there’s much value in a puzzle game judging how you solve a puzzle. It doesn’t feel like a very interesting thing to me.
It’s not, you want to bring [players] in and make them feel like they’re clever. It’s not about how difficult it is. It’s about how satisfying it is. You don’t satisfy anybody by saying, “Oh no, you did that wrong.” Not that there shouldn’t be a wrong answer, but there shouldn’t be a way to punish you if you do it wrong.
And that’s been a really tricky thing to come from a game like Unpacking which has essentially no fail states, to a game like Tempopo, which has a more pure puzzle theme running through it. The really important bit for me with Tempopo is the emotional arc for the player. It’s where we probably spent the most amount of time in development — using the music, the interface, all of the tools, to make you feel calm while you’re playing. If you can calm people down while they’re solving problems, they’ll have a much higher sense of satisfaction.
That’s why this game is musical, but it is not a music rhythm game.
I think the worst case for me is when I’ve played a puzzle game and I felt really tense about everything and then I finally solved the thing but I’m terrified of whatever is happening next. I want people playing this game to be sitting back and enjoying their time with it. We’ve had people in playtest sit there, press the button to play the music, and listen and sit back for five minutes while they watch everything hop around. It goes through the cycle of all the different musical tracks and everything and they’re looking at the space and thinking, ‘What should I do?’
So there’s still an element of trial and error in some levels?
Absolutely. It’s trial and error in a way where it’s purposeful. We’re calling it “planning and execution,” the idea that you press the button, you’ve got your plan, you’re watching it play out, and you’re [thinking], “Is this the right plan?” In getting there, the game is trying to help you stay in the right mindset, and it’s not judging you, it’s not telling you that you’ve restarted 300 times.
‘Planning and execution’ is a much better term — we’re allowed to make mistakes. You just have to keep trying things and you’ll get there eventually. Watching it play out and hearing that people will just sit there and listen to the music, go through the motions, and not feel under any pressure, is delightful. That’s really important for the genre.
Yeah! And we’re trying to build more accessible tools around the interface because that’s a big part of trying to make a game that works for younger and older players. It’s a puzzle game so we’re going to have challenging puzzles in there for people to get stuck into but we’re also trying to have a really easy curve to explain all the mechanics and extra accessibility options to allow those with less experience with puzzle games to solve things differently. [I’m] not sure I want to deep dive into the specifics of all those things yet just because we’re still testing and implementing things. But there will be options there to make the game really work for younger players as well as more experienced puzzlers.
Tempopo is really a game about the emotional state that you are going to be in while you play
Tempopo is really a game about the emotional state that you are going to be in while you play it. And I think that’s largely where I want to push it. We have self-described it internally as a very soft game; it has this softness about it that when you play it, you feel connected, not judged.
Soft and cosy is good, and it’s got to have something that will keep us coming back to it, whether you’ve got experience with puzzle games or not.
Yeah, and we’re really hoping that there’s more to it than just solving the puzzles as well for where people will want to stick around because of the experience. There’s this other element to it which is not just about solving puzzles. I think it’s super important to give the player a chance to unwind and do something that’s entirely within their control.
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.
Thank you to Sanatana for speaking to us, very late at night. Tempopo is due to launch on Switch in 2024.
