Today is the culmination of a long journey to explore the limits of strategy games. Porting the funky title Backbeat to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. When we started working on the first prototype in the spring of 2020, we knew there was a lot of potential for this project. This is his second title for our small indie studio and we wanted to add some cuts from his first game, Hexagroove: Tactical DJ. Colorful characters and an experience that feels as good as the sound. We’re in the process of refining our Release Candidate for this winter’s release, and we’re excited to bring all of this to PlayStation.
When I started designing the Backbeat foundation, I wanted to inherit some principles from Hexagroove and introduce some new ones. The game blends the spatial challenges of Sokoban-style games with the squad-based resource management of stealth strategy titles. Your challenge is to move his band of four characters through a series of isometric maps within a limited number of turns. How you spend these turns and which paths you choose will affect the many shared resources that grow and shrink over the course of the level. Each character’s timeline is controlled individually but interdependent. Opening doors and distracting enemies should be done to the benefit of all four.
In contrast to Hexagroove’s synth-fueled EDM soundtrack, Backbeat builds on a vast pool of live music riffs, improvisations and solos recorded from Stockholm’s finest funk masters. . Changing map orientation, manipulating doors, and blasting enemies with a powerful saxophone all add unique audio clips to the queue, and these audio clips play in sequence as you complete levels. This gives your unique solution its own personalized victory song. All the strums, thumps and toots sounded so good, I had to find a way to make them shine even brighter. After playing around with the dev kit, he found his DualSense wireless controller for PlayStation 5 to be the perfect tool to back up studio musicians.
We started by working with composer Pete Fraser to bring strong musical elements to the most interactive parts of Backbeat. Something succeeds (or fails) as soon as you press the button. All of these moments have to be satisfying…and musical! Copy every burst of chords, fanfares, strums and drum hits sampled from studio musicians and input them into the DualSense controller authoring tool. to generate tactile and musical harmonies that enhance the sound effects used at the same points in the game. Then use stacks of filters, amplifiers and equalizers to tune the vibrations and focus your attention on the frequencies you associate with these kinds of flourishes. After those small tweaks, the DualSense controller plays the perfect chorus to match the music and effects reverberating through your hi-fi or headphones.
Great music is just one part of the experience I wanted Backbeat to offer. This game takes place in 1995 and pays homage to the great 32-bit arcade and console games I grew up in in the back rooms of smoky restaurants and family dens. This is reflected not only in the retro low-poly style of the characters and backgrounds, but also in the iconography and sound effects. Manipulating time is key to understanding Backbeat’s core agenda, so he’s embraced analog technology and integrated the skeuomorphism of sampled videocassette tapes into his UI and feedback. Changing characters will fast-forward or rewind the game to the point where the active character has advanced. This involves audiovisual tape distortion, and holding the rewind button in the game loops the cassette sample with speedups and slowdowns for each interaction. This is another great place to use DualSense to enhance the immersion and instinctive nostalgia that Backbeat is aiming for. Press and hold the circular button and listen to the soothing vibrations of the DualSense controller built directly from a thick white spinning spool.
Today, we’re giving you a sneak peek at the full experience coming to PlayStation soon. We hope you got a good vibe from this short trip through some of Backbeat’s first levels. And follow suit as we near a crescendo of his sophomore title in our studio. Enjoy the show. You are part of it.
The Backbeat Demo Tape is available for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 starting today.
