A Music Game For People Who Don’t Know Anything About Music

OFFBEAT is a game for anyone who wants to make music but doesn’t know where to start. The crucial word is game. We aren’t trying to make, I don’t know, an educational toy or whatever. The internet is already full of music-theory-explainers and how-to-use-a-DAW videos. That stuff is all very boring and, more importantly, it already exists. Everyone who has an appetite for learning-theory-from-a-bloke-on-youtube is already feasting. But I suspect a lot of folks do not find that it whets their appetite.

We also want to teach our players something real. There are other music-games where you build tracks out of prewritten loops, or solve abstract puzzles that somehow output pieces of music, but my belief is that those games are using music as decoration rather than subject matter, and I think they’re less interesting for it. After finishing OFFBEAT, our players should be ready to pick up FL Studio or Reaper or Logic and feel right at home.

So! Big ambitions. How are we gonna do it?

Silliness

First and foremost, the game is daft. The musical instruments make funny sounds, the tasks come from all kinds of weird people, the writing and art are over-the-top. This is obviously appealing on an aesthetic level because we’re playful folks and we like spending our days looking at gnomes and putting googly-eyes on paper shredders. 

But there’s a more earnest intention too, which is that absurdity makes the game approachable. One of the great killers of creativity is ego. How often have you seen a beginner try some new activity for the first time, and do badly, and give themselves a hard time for not being as good as a professional? And how often do you think those poor folks get turned off an activity they might otherwise enjoy? So the silliness of OFFBEAT is a pre-emptive antidote to that. If you don’t like the way your piece of music sounds, then what were you expecting? You recorded it using a mechanical monkey and a cat piano. But if, on the other hand, you get a good tune out of these strange tools, then you feel like a wizard.

Puzzle-ness

We expect that players won’t know what they’re doing, when they first sit down with the game. The sequencer is a complicated beast and musical composition is fraught with pitfalls. We can’t explain every single god-damn thing to the player before we let them loose, because that’d be boring. But here, the fact that we’re making a game helps us. In a puzzle game, your expectation is that you’ll be confronted with situations where you don’t know how to proceed, and that’s OK. This is why your uncle specifies that “the dog ate the bleedin’ instructions” when he gives you the sequencer. You aren’t going to be given a comprehensive guide to this handsome machine. You’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.

The same logic applies to what we call the “saliences” system - the thing where playing an instrument makes little word-descriptions of the sound appear next to it. By asking the player to “find” certain sounds using their equipment, we encourage them to explore what all these controls do for themselves, treating them as puzzles to be solved. Because the whole point of a puzzle is that it’s OK not to know the answer straight away.

Onboarding

We spend ages fiddling with the opening beats of the game. Early on in development, we handed our friend Joel (hi Joel!) a build and told him that his objective was simply “to record any piece of music”. His found this very difficult, which was instructive. None of our early playtesters knew what a “sequencer” was, and so their assumption was that you had to write music by clicking on the keys of the cat piano directly. Ew!

In the current version of the game, the first thing the player does is plug the cat piano into the sequencer. Immediately, the sequencer springs to life and starts playing an annoying tune (presumably the result of your uncle’s cackhanded fiddling before he sent the thing to you). Your first task is to turn it off, and in order to do this, you have to look at the sequencer itself. This is an important teaching moment - you see musical notes on a grid, you see them flashing as they make sound, and you have to search the controls for a “stop” button to quieten it. 

So in that moment, you’ve learned several things. The sequencer plays other instruments. It can be started and stopped. It lets you organise musical notes into patterns. By representing this as a puzzle to be solved, we teach the player a whole lot of what they need to know to play the game in one interactive blink-and-you-miss-it moment. That’s the difference between onboarding and tutorialisation, I think.

Farting About

The most important thing, though, is that the design of the game asks players to write a lot of little pieces of music. Perfectionism is the death of good art, and I always feel sad when I look at (for example) a music production subreddit and see someone posting about how they’ve spent 6 months working on their first piece of music, endlessly refining it in search of perfection. I think you learn nothing from that kind of approach. There’s a reason that surgeons practice but musicians play.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote over 300 songs together. Was every single one good? Hell no! But they were prolific. They wrote together often, and they always finished the song in a given writing session. By the end of OFFBEAT, you’ll have written 90ish tiny little songs in all sorts of styles and with all sorts of sounds. You’ll know the basics of composition, mixing, sound design. You’ll have worked out little tricks that you enjoy - ways to write a drum pattern, ways to use a delay pedal, ways to approach melody - that will be yours and yours alone. That’s the stuff you really need.

p.s. As I write this, we’re just about to launch into early access! Wowee! Go wishlist us here if you haven’t!