[LD 34] Harmony Bloom

Bensonance

We made a tranquil musical puzzle game about growing melodies and soothing the world back into growth and life. It's kinda a mashup of Cadence and Hyper Light Drifter. Was interested in making a game where you interact with a world through music/sound.

@Sean_Goncalves did art+ sound. @Tim_Harbour did music.

Although it's not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the result - I think it shows some good promise, and proves the potential of the idea.





Would love to hear your thoughts:
1. What do you think about the mechanic, does it seem interesting to figure out?
2. What do you think of the difficulty curve?
3. Do you think having more sound-only (no visual cues) puzzles would be too hard, or make the experience better/purer?
4. How long (and possibly deep i.e. multiple rows) do you think the puzzles could be before becoming exhausting/convoluted?

Windows (recommended)
Web
Ludum Dare Page

Tuism

Thanks for HTML version :D This is what I put on LD's rating for you guys:

So esoteric! I liked that you're trying something very different, but I feel like it missed the target on being a game... Unless I missed something completely :/

- Where's the gameplay? Progress amounts to matching exactly what's given with what seemed like an overly complex set of controls. Simon says, without any real-time challenge aspect.

- The travelling between bits seemed very unnecessary and uninteresting. The same gripe I had with Shadow of the Colossus and Titan Souls.

- I couldn't work out what to do with empty blocks and gave up. Leaving them empty resulted in the crack of a wrong option. Couldn't see any other control options.

- Having to position the player to see the whole puzzle was kinda irritating. The camera should auto-centre when you're in the area.

Otherwise:

- Amazing graphics, Sword & Sworcery esque, of course :)
- Pleasant sounds, though a bit sparse.
- The bird metaphor was cool, but there was a bit of a disparity between having a shadow indicating where the bird "was" vs where your click lands. It's weird.
- Great juice and details.

Cool experiment, perhaps needs a bit more thought on the mechanics to make it work-outable rather than rote copying what's there. Of course, I may have missed something completely :/

-----------------------------

And here are for your four questions:

1) I don't get what's there to figure out, it seems to be rote copy-paste, and the first problem I come across was the blank block, and since the other mechanic didn't require figuring out I just thought it was either a bug or a missed step somewhere, and the thought of walking back so long just didn't appeal to me so I stopped.

2) Sorry, see above.

3) The problem right now is that I could play the game without any sounds and it really wouldn't be any different. Or at least that's what it felt like. And the sound didn't really add to the aesthetic of the game that much - in cadence it's about making a musical loop. Here the sounds kinda just felt tacked on.

4) Sorry, see one :/

Bensonance

@Tuism Thanks for the feedback dude! :D

The gameplay certainly is very minimalist - it's a style I wanted to try. The gameplay only really exists once you encounter the blank blocks (which is probably a bit too slow judging by your thoughts). The idea is to play the correct solution, hearing the notes, then placing the trees that match those notes. When the visual cues are there, it's just a matter of matching color and length. But without a cue, you're trying to match the note/sound in the solution to the tree that makes that note.

I was quite afraid to make people play fully without visual cues, but perhaps I should have made a larger portion of the puzzles have no cues.

Yeah i'm not a big fan of arb travelling either. The idea was to have more interactive sequences (like the GIF above) in the empty spaces, but we ran out of time :).

Agreed about the camera positioning - was on my list! :D

Thanks <3.

Tuism

OH! I totally didn't understand that to be the case, I think it was introduced too abruptly and without any real clues as to how that worked. I wonder if everyone else got it and I was just dumb about it :P

MCA

I agree with what Truism has already said. I didn't make the sound-plant type connection, it was less obvious than the colour-plant type inference, so when i got to the last puzzles missing blocks I got confused. The sounds for red and blue are too similar if not the same, as are the sounds for purple and orange, which adds to the confusion I think.

I think that there is promise for the game - it just needs to be explained a bit more clearly perhaps, and the sounds to be more different - maybe make the waterfall blocks high-light as well when giving the clue? With more plants and different notes there's some nice potential for an interesting music puzzle game.

Having background music might be a distraction. Maybe have ambient natural sounds instead - water, birds, what have you...

Tuism

A suggestion, make the game music the loop of whatever you were last interacting with, until you get to a puzzle, then it goes silent and lets you play with the puzzle. Then use that loop for music (even if you didn't finish it and it's broken :P) when you leave the puzzle.

Elyaradine

I like the overall tranquil feel, and I played all the way to when the big tree lights up. (Did I play all of it then? Because I like it! :D)

It wasn't clear to me at first that a blank square meant you were supposed to listen to the music and infer what the note was. Perhaps having a "?" there or something might've made that clearer, though perhaps there's a smarter way to do that.

The connection between the tree sounds and the pitch of the audio cue was very unclear. Actually, I think that the first tone it plays is just wrong, i.e. if I hold the mouse down for an extended note, the first note has a different pitch to the two following (longer) ones for some of the trees.

I think I reached some of the ones that required holding down on the mouse before I reached the text that teaches that one can do that. I got pretty frustrated knowing that what was required was a longer note while not knowing that a longer note was possible. I came back to this thread, saw the gif and the larger tree there, and then realised what I could do. I think a visual cue for pressing and holding on a tree patch would help a lot with suggesting that more can be done with it. In Windows when you have a tablet installed, or in I think Fable 3, if you click and hold, a circle fills up over ~0.5s. Maybe something along those lines might work.

I think wandering between areas can be quite relaxing, and could work well given the rest of the theming, as long as there are interesting things to see and even purely aesthetic rewards for exploring.

I think it'd sound pretty damn wonderful if, when you got the tune right, there was more "body" to the tune that gets played. Like, maybe instead of a tree playing all of the tunes you've got in sequence, it actually played them all together (maybe they actually all harmonise with one another?), with some warm bass- or cello-ambient strings or something...

I can understand wanting to explore making it more audio-focused (it's certainly worth exploring), but I think it's currently got more interesting in what it's conveying with the visuals. Maybe the visuals just got a lot more polish than the audio did.

Sometimes I clicked on a tree patch by accident, causing a tree to be placed. At that point, clicking on the waterfall entrance wouldn't play the full audio any more (when the wrong tree is reached, it doesn't play the correct sound, but instead plays the "broken" sound instead, so there was then never any opportunity to listen to what it was actually supposed to be, and I had to just keep guessing until I got it right. I also didn't seem to be able to remove a tree and change it to something else, having to click the waterfall and wait for it to destroy the "wrong" plant for me. I think I'd just always like the chance to hear the original tune again.

I found the use of healing a land and regrowing a forest as a theme to be a pretty cool way of inspiring progression.

Barring the frustrations with communication, I enjoyed the experience. If you work on it further, I'd suggest exploring other art styles: the art works fine for a game jam and rapid content creation, but I think it's a bit coarse and abrasive for the feeling you seem to have going.

Tuism

Ben, have you played Flower? You should play Flower :)

Tim_Harbour

The issues you guys mention about not understanding what to do...I never had that problem and before you say anything :P I literally never saw the game or got any input from Ben or Sean before I played it so I didn't have any insider info. I obviously played with sound because I kinda imagined it was necessary since it was a music puzzle game. I pretty much just correlated the sound to the colour from the beginning and from there it was pretty easy and fun.

I guess a pointer could be made to pay careful attention to the sound and plant correlations... but that might kill the fun of figuring it out... though one criticism I must put forward is that different certain coloured flowers had the same note as a SFX which made one or two of the puzzles a bit confusing.

The idea with the music was to start very sparse and tranquil and build up almost like the garden was playing music as you unlock different sections of it. I enjoyed the way Sean managed to fit the sfx with the music but I also think they could be blended a bit better, some of the SFX stuck out as really loud among some other.

@Tuisms idea of using the sfx as a loop, I feel that would get really tired really quickly. I think what would be better is to blend the ambient music with the SFX better and make them link together rather than sitting separately from each other.

Otherwise I really enjoyed playing it :D and didn't struggle except for a one small bug. (If you solve the puzzles out of order something bugs out and you can't progress.) Loved the GFX (Ben) and SFX and puzzles (Sean) ! Great job!

Tim_Harbour

For anyone interested here is just the music layers :D

https://soundcloud.com/jumpshipmusic/sets/harmony-bloom

MCA

Perhaps instead of having single note linked to each type of plant, it's a different instrument - relating to Tim's music?
You could still have short-medium-long phrases, and then it links to the building layers of the background music too as the puzzles become more complex.
The first couple of puzzles would need to be single plants, maybe, to introduce the first couple of instruments, and from there on the player can deduce new instruments and plants from the sounds.

Tim_Harbour

Yeah, I agree @MCA, I wanted to be more involved with intergration of music and sfx but there wasn't enough time and I had a pretty busy weekend... I think at this point the sfx and music are a bit seperate but the idea was to make the music sparse and open enough for the notes to fit on top. Every now and then the melodies fit really nicely in with the music, would be nice to get that happening more often ! :D

Sean_Goncalves

Hey all sorry I'm only replying now, I'm away at the moment and Internet isn't the greatest out here.

Firstly thanks everyone for playing the game we really appreciate it and Secondly thank you all very much for the feedback its always awesome hearing about other people's experiences and ideas around a game you're making and how it can be improved and all of it is super useful so thanks :D

From my side I'd like to say I agree with @Elyaradine about the art style, I'm quite proficient in pixel art and the game seemed to be quite art heavy initially so it was my default to allow mass production of a somewhat higher quality within the time limit.

But if we do take it further I'd definitely like to explore other avenues stylistically, and I was actually wondering what you guys would advise, I have some ideas but some of you are a lot more experienced and I'd like to hear what suggestions you may have.

In terms of the notes not syncing with the plants I do believe this may have been my fault I don't think it's so much a syncing thing but more a pitch and actual sound usage issue there isn't enough variation in the sounds for a player to easily distinguish one from the other.

Going forward either I'll address that (with different instruments/synths or allowing for a much wider variety in the pitch of the notes), or alternatively I'll let @Tim_Harbour take over all that stuff so there's also a much more coherent link between the music and actual sounds of the puzzles.

But yet again thanks all :)

Tim_Harbour

@Sean_Goncalves I think you did a great job with the SFX :D I wish we just had more time to fine tune and integrate...they came out awesome in my opinion :D

Nandrew

I loved this demo. Played to the end as well.

I enjoyed the sound puzzle elements and would definitely feel comfortable if it was removed more from visual puzzle elements from the start, if you wanted to intensify that aspect of the game.

Since it's difficult to bring puzzle mechanics into a purely playspace, perhaps this suggestion is helpful:

Sound puzzles could be musical sequences which follow one or two rules that you need to discern: like a lightweight, audio version of Luminare (I'd imagine that with only sound cues challenges could get difficult as it is!).

If you made your sound operate on a few axes, you get more rules to construct out of that pool (every second sound is a brass instrument, pitch always goes high-low-high-low, etc).

Every time you click on the puzzle to "hear" its solution, it can generate a random set of notes which simply has to adhere to the chosen rule. Players have to then *deduce* via listening for musical patterns over several melodies!

Again, this doesn't have to be a particularly hard game: I think it would just be a way you can test something uncommon for players, which could feel super meaningful in itself.

Nandrew

Also really like the idea of interactive environmental thingies that are just along the way to puzzles: having visually beautiful effects being triggered would make a lovely sort of "collectible" in the game, so I hope you follow through with that if you go further ;)

Sean_Goncalves

@Tim_Harbour thanks man, I was actually pretty happy with the sound effects overall as well it was just the puzzle sounds that I wasn't.

I tried to get something that matched the music you made but was still different enough so that you'd have been able to hear them over the music, and in the end I just don't think they were different enough from each other, and that is why I think people had difficulty in doing the puzzles purely based on sound ques.

TheFuntastic

Did you say mash up of Cadence and Hyper Light Drifter? Woot!

So here is some of my feedback:

Art & Feel (including sound design)
- This is so lovely. I really like the space you've created. Reminds of Swords & Sworcery in the a good way
- Love the little pixel art bird familiar cursor. Really nice detail that he lands.
- But felt a bit disjointed with the character. I almost felt like I was playing as the bird and constantly had to wait for the human to catch up which was frustrating.

Bugs and stuff:
Had a couple of crashes, also the final tree wouldn't light up even though I'd solved all the puzzles. But acceptable for a jam game.

Interaction:
- So it took me quite a while to figure out the metaphor you were going for. Seeing the main gif on this thread helped.
- If you're going for a call and response thing, it's really important you need to be able to repeat the music. Often if you've planted some seeds you can't hear the melody without clearing everything.
- To drive home this point, you really you want to make the sound as accessible as possible:
Click a block on the within the pattern, hear just that sound without the rest of the melody.
Click on the monolith itself, hear the whole melody.
Click on a tree you've planted, hear it's tone again.
Scrolling through tree options with mousewheel, hear tone of the tree.
Finished your sequence, click on trees to hear how smart you are.
All this is important because it helps build your tonal library of which tree is which.

- I like that colors were there as a secondary reference, but once you figure that out it loses any puzzle aspect and you had to resort the "missing blocks" paradigm.
- Having to time my duration of notes for a "spaced out zen game" felt really awkward. I'd prefer a non time based mechanic. Like maybe you plant extra seeds. Or maybe you have to sow a bigger square. Or maybe you have to water your seeds and the more they grow the longer the sound is.
- Also, You have a wonderful grid structure everywhere. The monolith blocks were quite confusing because the information density was very high (in particular longer notes). You could definitely take advantage of traditional music paradigms:



Audio Games
So a lot of refinements, but do you really want to is the better question? I am not at all a fan of call and response music games. In general our ears aren't as attuned as our eyes, and yet we know that it's bad design to rely on colours that colour blind people struggle with. Considering a much greater percentage of the population is "tone-blind" why trust this upon them?

A first step, much with like accesible colour theory - give people as many secondary clues to help differentiate. Tones in different registers (Bass, Middle, Treble). Distinctive Timbres for each plant (resonant, nasal, hollow, deep, full, wide). Different instruments (flute, violin, piano - or whatever the zen ambient equivalents are).

Though I think it would far more interesting (an obvious reflection on my own design aesthetic) if you used the trees simply as different families of sound, and provided a more abstract gardening goal. You could use far more literal gardening metaphors (completing quests to find new seeds, hewing the ground, watering your plant, finding potions to heal your trees when they get sick) that would make your avatar more relevant. I believe it would be very rewarding to see this activity cultivate and shape the sound your garden produces. In this way the users could actually procedurally "grow" their own melodies. Though I haven't played it myself I think Starseed pilgrim might be a very good reference.

Overall all though I love the ambition and feel of you tried to create here ;)

tl;dr Don't make an audio game. You will hate your life.

Bensonance

Hey all! Sorry i didn't respond to this sooner! The game has it's innate problems as @TheFu

Thanks for all your excellent feedback - despite the game being a bit clumsy so far, I'm glad some of you really sensed the vision of the game <3.

@Elyaradine Thanks for the feedback! Lots of good points, and I specifically agree about the body of the song solutions. Initially i wanted each area to result in an overall melody that was part of a bigger song. I definitely want to tie the puzzle sounds/music to the overall music played more. We'll have a meeting with @Tim_Harbour soon hopefully to discuss how we can achieve this.

@Nandrew Love the idea of a Luminare-esque thing, think it would be really cool!

@TheFuntasic Thanks a bunch for your really detailed and thoughtful feedback <3. I really identify with your last paragraph

Though I think it would far more interesting (an obvious reflection on my own design aesthetic) if you used the trees simply as different families of sound, and provided a more abstract gardening goal. You could use far more literal gardening metaphors (completing quests to find new seeds, hewing the ground, watering your plant, finding potions to heal your trees when they get sick) that would make your avatar more relevant. I believe it would be very rewarding to see this activity cultivate and shape the sound your garden produces. In this way the users could actually procedurally "grow" their own melodies. Though I haven't played it myself I think Starseed pilgrim might be a very good reference.

I think this is where the design will head a bit more. The vision is to make a game where you make music by planting different sets of seeds in your own garden area to make songs. So you'll have a little area that's your home, and you go out to different areas to unlock seeds for your own garden/songs. I fancy the idea of different areas having different families of sound, like you mentioned: Area A) guitar. Area B) Electronic etc. I think for now we'll focus on a more linear experience: garden area, set number of areas, set notes. BUT:

I believe it would be very rewarding to see this activity cultivate and shape the sound your garden produces

I really like the underlying subtext of this sentence of yours. Makes it sound like cultivating your notes/melody is wild and difficult to control mechanism, which could lead to a wonderful procedurality (at a small level) to how you develop individual notes.

Thanks again, all <3.