ICYMI: Wholesome Direct

About a week ago, we were lucky enough to be included in the recent Wholesome Direct stream. If you don’t know it, it’s an annual streamed conference that shows off uplifting indie titles. Because we were a “World Premiere”, we also got featured on their Steam page, and it’s drummed up a bit of interest.

Prior to the direct, we hadn’t really done much (read: any) marketing and so we had a few hundred wishlists to our names. Now as I’m writing this, that number has jumped up to almost 7,000! Our goal is to get above 10k before putting our demo on Steam this fall, so we’re well on our way!

Also, Opie and the Sprites made it on the t-shirt :).

Amanda, Patrick and I worked hard to get assets ready for the direct, including a new trailer that shows off Mae creating (and accidentally wrecking) the cosmos. Sound design homie Carlos pitched in to write all the music / SFX for the 2 minute trailer:

Overall, we’re really happy with the response we’ve gotten from the Direct, and we’re excited to keep this momentum going!

Bird calls as a mechanic

Now back to actually making this game… this might be my favorite thing I’ve prototyped. Previously, the way players collected Sound Sprites always felt just a little too simple… run up to them, hold right trigger to play music long enough… and they’re yours.

I thought it would be cool to instead create something where you listen out for Sprites, recognize their melody (like a bird call) and if you successfully play it back to them, they join your herd.

I threw together a prototype and tested with some folks around here (including my wife and children, who patiently, but unabashedly, pointed out the glaring flaws in the first few iterations).

After some adjustments it’s feeling really fun. The input on the right analog stick is meant to feel gestural, like performing a trick in the game Skate.

Gameplay doesn’t ever pause… if you’ve learned a Sprite’s melody by heart, you can run up to them, play it, and have them join you. It feels almost like you’re in on a secret or something.

Side note – this means you can now fully jam out at will alongside any melodies you’ve created. There’s even a secret bend feature thrown in if you really wanna wail. 🎸

We’ll be taking a chunk of our demo (and this mechanic) to the ATL Game Devs meetup in July. If you’re local- come on through!

What I’ve been playing

Nothing at the moment 😔. The Star Fox remake is coming out on Switch 2 soon, and I’m excited about that (not to mention the Ocarina of Time remake later this year). I’ve heard some people saying Mina the Hollower is really fun. If you have any recs, please let me know!

See you next month!

– Chase

Out of roughly 1,500 applicants, our game was selected as one of the ~50 games for the upcoming Wholesome Direct Showcase!!! If you haven’t heard of it, Wholesome Direct is a digital conference highlighting unique games with uplifting themes. (Not a lot of Call of Duty on WD). The showcase happens on June 6th at 12 EST. Needless to say we are PUMPED.

In conjunction with the showcase, we’ll be premiering an official “Announcement Trailer”, which we’ve been hard at work on the past few weeks. It shows off Mae creating the cosmos (and subsequently breaking them). I dusted off my copy of Illustrator and did the style frames for the intro… Amanda animated it and Patrick designed a bit of Opie’s “cosmic realm”. Plus our homie Carlos (Le Navigateur) did all the music + sfx for us in addition to his normal job and living the rest of his life. (Big thanks to Carlos).

In addition to prepping for Wholesome, we’ve been adding quite a lot to the game, mostly in response to the playtest we did earlier this year (if you participated- thanks again! Your feedback truly was helpful to us. It very much framed this next version of Wild Chorus.)

I won’t go into much detail yet, but here’s some quick hits:

• Sound Sprites now have more specific types and actual abilities (that change based on how many you have)

• We have a world map!

• “Soundcrafting” has changed dramatically… simpler… but somehow more musical freedom. (I’ll do a deep dive on this in an upcoming newsletter).

Here’s a few screenshots / vids / etc for you to get a look at what’s been going on:

That’s all for this month! I’ll share another update after the conference sometime in June.

What I’ve been playing: Crow Country

I’ve been hyped for this game for a looong time. Ever since I saw the first trailer absolutely dripping with PS1-era Resident Evil vibes. If you’ve ever played those games, you’ll know exactly what you’re in for: moody ambiance, creepy little staggering zombies, puzzles that are sometimes comical in their unlikeliness… tank controls.

I will admit the controls could probably have used an upgrade, but the devs for this game held fast to the source material. If you’re looking for a nostalgia hit with some cheeky horror, it’s a great 5 hr play. Plus it’s set in Atlanta!

Get the Wild Chorus Demo

If you did ask for a key and didn’t get one, check your spam folder. If it’s not there, respond to this email and we’ll get you sorted.

Feedback so far

We’ve had some really helpful (and heartening) responses. Here’s some of the most common things we’ve heard:

The positives ❤️

• World building / Characters / Dialogue

• Art style

• Music style

• Freedom of musical creation as a core mechanic. Many people said they want even more of this. Which is awesome to hear.

• Cleaning up Silence feels satisfying

The, shall we say, areas of improvement 😮‍💨

• The Drum instrument mechanic is clunky. Almost every single person commented on this – you are not alone haha. More on this later in this post.

• Greater understanding of which instrument is required when. AKA AFFORDANCE

• Health system is whack. We know. We hate it too. We have thoughts.

Feature requests 🧪

• A MAP

• Deeper dive on lore

• A chance to sit and play music freeform with the sound sprites. This one realllllly excites me, personally. I’ve been wanting to mess around with this, but haven’t really been able to justify putting in the time, since we had bigger problems to solve. I can’t wait to try this out.

Spotlight on The Drum mechanic

This is one of those mechanics that we have iterated on maybe 10 different times now. Each time it improves juuuuust a bit more. And tbh I thought with this last one we had nailed it. But in getting your feedback and watching new people try it, it’s still not. quite. right.

But! We realized it wasn’t necessarily a problem with the mechanic itself… it was the way the timing was communicated. People were (understandably) treating the bar as a paddle to bounce the star with. They were pushing the button early to make the “paddle” rise to meet the star.

So I designed a few different versions of the timing indicator, tested with various folks who had tried the old one… and it seems to be much improved. It’s still skill-testing, but not so much that players wonder why they’ve failed the timing.

Before:

After:

But you can be the judge! I’ve pushed out the updated drum to Steam. You can grab it and try out, if you like. I’d be curious to hear if it’s feeling better.

What’s next?

Right now, we’re focused on wireframing out what will ultimately be our Steam demo release. We did a team sprint, talking through a few options for the world layout.

Here’s a teaser that I don’t expect anyone to be able to digest:

Once we pick a direction (or more likely some combination of the two), I’ll jump back into Unity, greybox it and get some local folks to test it.

I’m also playing with a few new mechanic prototypes, like this melody tracing mechanic Opie could use to teach a song to sound sprites. 🌟🌟🌟

Then it’s onto creating some of the mechanics you all have requested (Map + Free Jazz moment shortlisted).

More to come soon!

What we’ve been playing: Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip

Credit to Amanda for digging this one up.

This game asks the question “What if Grand Theft Auto was set in an absurd town where the main character doesn’t want to become a crime kingpin, but just wants to collect enough turbo stuff to drive his taxi cab into space?”

It’s a game design lesson in not trying to make things make sense and just doing things because they make you laugh.

Perform important tasks to get junk. ex: beat kindergartners at a game of soccer, but the ball is a big squishy orange. Turn that junk into turbo for you taxi. Get to space so you don’t have to worry about getting good grades anymore.

It’s maybe a 4 hour experience. Short and sweet and Terry’s voice “lines” will leave you grinning a big goofy grin the whole time.

If you’re interested in playing our teaser demo (and giving us feedback on it), simply fill out the form on the other side of this button:

Get the Wild Chorus Demo

Once Steam gives us the green light, we’ll send out private keys for you to download and play it. Should be sometime next week.

If you don’t have a Steam account, we should be able to get you the demo in the near future. Just note that in your form.

Excited for you all to finally take this thing for a spin!!

– The Wild Chorus Team

It went really well!! It was our very first time showing off the game in a public space (apart from game dev meetups here and there). We manned the booth from 8:30am til 6pm every day, Friday through Sunday. Our spot was literally right inside the main entrance, so pretty much everyone that walked through the doors got a chance to see Opie and the Sound Sprites.

Day one had lighter attendance - around 25 people played the game. Which, honestly, was great. We found a few game-breaking bugs that we had to profusely apologize for. Thankfully, the folks sitting down to play were usually forgiving, and just excited to take it for a spin. I had to spend a bit of time late that night (after a few beers and trick-or-treating was wrapped) squashing bugs one by one. Not the wisest course of action. But it worked out.

Days two and three both had more people coming to play, plus a good amount of folks just hanging around and watching. I’m especially proud of the variety of players that seemed to be able to finish the demo. People of all ages and backgrounds came by and spent 20 to sometimes 40 minutes with it. Some of course decided it wasn’t their thing and bounced off of it after a few minutes. There were even a few people who seemed personally offended that we made the game. But for every one of those, there were 10 others honestly gushing about it.

For a small, scrappy team like us, this was validating in ways that’s difficult to describe. We’ve spent over a year creating this thing organically, piece-by-piece. There have been many highs and just as many (definitely more) lows. Imposter syndrome has hit all of us a few times now. (What the hell were we thinking making this? Is this concept too far out? Should we have just made some dumb Vampire Survivors clone????)

But watching people get it… like REALLY get it and dig it… meant so, so much to us.

There’s an interesting phenomenon when you create something and someone else experiences it. It’s like the quantum theory that observing something changes it (yes, I’ve been playing Outer Wilds, and yes, I will be going into detail about it later in this newsletter 🙂.) When people interact with something you’ve made, they walk away with a version of it in their heads that is their own. It’s maybe not exactly what you designed, but it’s what connected with them. I hadn’t experienced that before, and it was incredibly energizing to watch first-hand. Some people loved the way they could choose how Leonard’s cabin song and visuals came together… others just wanted to get the biggest posse of Sound Sprites they could. And you could tell they felt like it was their Sound Sprites or their version of Leonard’s cabin. It was a really cool moment, getting juuuust a glimpse of the game becoming something more than solely our project.

Anyway, it was a long weekend. We were worn out, but very happy and very motivated. Our team celebrated at SOS in Decatur (a great tiki spot, if you’re ever in the area). My wife, Taylor, and our kids surprised us with our first fan art. Personally, I think they nailed the art style.

So what’s next?

We’re back at it this week doing some interaction + visual work around the frog mini-boss. Patrick drew up the Silent / fixed versions of the frog from his chair at DreamHack. Her name is Sandy.

I added in Patrick’s art / fixed a bunch of bugs we found (like one where the heads kept disappearing) and created some simple minor key boss music + melodies for Opie’s flute and drum. I’ll likely be asking Carlos to make better versions of both (he did our excellent trailer music and sfx and doesn’t know that I will be hitting him up for this and he’s possibly finding out right now). Amanda’s helping with motion for the frog + some other elements around the Wilds.

We’ve got a long doc with bugfixes, tweaks, etc from DreamHack that we’ll be tackling over the next few weeks. Then we’re planning to privately share the demo out to folks who are interested / would be willing to give us feedback. I’ll send out an email just for that in the coming weeks.

Lastly – just a reminder that if you’re on Steam and haven’t wishlisted us, please consider doing it! The more wishlists we get, the more Steam starts to take notice and shares us with other people who might be interested. And the snowball rolls downhill.

Wishlist us on Steam

What I’ve been playing: Outer Wilds

I’m late to this party, but it’s good to finally be here. I actually bought Outer Wilds a year ago, played for 15 minutes and decided it wasn’t for me. It just starts out so slowly, without any hand-holding. There’s no collectibles, no goal indicators. Just… get through the tutorial, get in your rocket ship, explore different planets in the solar system and figure out why the universe seems to be dying.

But last week I was off, so I stuck with it… and wow what a game. I’ve never played anything that gave me so many visceral reactions. Like the first time I crashed into the water planet called “Giant’s Deep”… I came in fast through cloud cover, dodged a bunch of cyclones swirling towards me, then immediately hit the water hard, and went under, upside down. I had a genuine fight or flight reaction in my body, and had to put the game down for a sec. I broke out into a cold sweat. I checked reddit. This is apparently a common reaction to this game haha.

I’ve played a lot of “small character fights big things” games, but never have I felt truly small and fragile in a cosmic way until Outer Wilds. Uncovering the galactic mystery bit-by-bit is so satisfying and reminds me of the olden days of Myst or 7th Guest.

Also how cool is it that your friends are scattered to different planets, playing various instruments? If you line up your scanner tool correctly, you can hear the full song. Definitely has some parallels to what we’re doing with Wild Chorus.

Here’s the theme for anyone curious. Bittersweet, just like the game:

Now that that’s finished, I’m on to Hades II.

See you all next month!

– The Wild Chorus team

Three pieces of exciting news actually:

Exciting news item one: STEAM PAGE LAUNCH

Big news for our little team – we’ve been working on this game for over a year and change, and our Steam page is finally live!!! 🎉

For the uninitiated, Steam is the main place indie games are sold online (though we’re also aiming for Nintendo Switch). Game studios publish their Steam page during development as a way to create interest and get the word out. If people browsing Steam like the game, they’ll often “wishlist” it, which tells Steam to show more people the game. About 20,000 Steam pages go live every year, so if you could give us a wishlist, it would be a huge help towards us being seen!

Check out our Steam Page!

Wishlist solicitations aside, this is a huuuuuge milestone for us. For me personally, it feels like completing Act One. We’ve put a lot into figuring out what this game is about / how it plays, and we’re finally ready to start showing it off.

Exciting news item two: Teaser Trailer

And one way to show it off is with a trailer! We spent a few weeks putting together this teaser for our Steam page. Amanda stitched it together beautifully and our buddy Carlos Andujar generously composed music and SFX. It flows really nicely and the ending logo animation Amanda and Patrick put together is so satisfying with the music. Check it out!

Exciting news item three: DreamHack ATL

The last piece of news I wanted to share isssss we got invited to show off our game Oct 31st - Nov 2nd at DreamHack here in Atlanta! We’ll be running a booth with two demo kiosks so you can come and play 10-15 minutes (or IDK 30 depending on what type of completionist maniac you might be). We’ll have some stuff to give away and some cool decor thanks to Amanda hand-crocheting us sound sprites.

I tried to convince Patrick to do flash tattoos at the convention but he informed me that it’s probably illegal / unsanitary / unwelcome there. Another time, perhaps. He will be guesting at Afterglow while he’s here, so if you’re in the market for a new tattoo check him out!

What else we’ve been doing

We’ve been heads down tightening up our demo. We got a lot of great feedback from our Brooklyn / Atlanta playtests. Here are a few things cherry-picked from our recent sprints:

The Lamplighter

Sound sprite visual designs

Before (dev art by me)

After (Patrick pass)

Frog Boss Greyboxing

A loose Zelda-like boss battle I started greyboxing last week (meaning I created it with just basic 3d shapes). Our game is more geared towards exploration vs. combat, but we do want to have a few encounters like this to keep players on their toes.

We didn’t have any music for it so I threw in one of my favorites from the SNES era + some SFX from another game. Curious if anyone recognizes them. :)

That’s all we’ve got for now - we’ll be playtesting in ATL again at My Parent’s Basement on October 7th. Feel free to come play our game! Or try out others – there’s lots of really fun / varied games to play around with.

Game of the Month: Silksong

You already know. Or… you might not. There are two camps right now. One that was anxiously pressing refresh the day Silksong released and broke every store it was launched on. And the other camp has probably never even heard of the game. No judgement from me either way.

I’ve gotta say this is one of the hardest games I’ve played in recent memory. I’m about 1/3 of the way through it and I’ve almost snapped by Switch in half ~20 times in rage. My children are worried about me. But I will prevail. Patrick’s already beaten it, but I’m taking my time… relishing the details and the rich story (aka sucking at it).

Honestly, the level of detail that Team Cherry put into this game is unbelievable.

It’s a 2d game that reads like a 3d world. The environments seem to recede infinitely into the background. Every bit of ragged cloth or damp moss reacts to Hornet, the main character, acrobatically bouncing around the environment. It’s been in the works for a long time, but I think it was well worth the wait. Even if I do go to bed every night with bloodshot eyes (from eye strain, not from crying because I keep dying during the runback to the Last Judge).

Thanks for reading - see you next time! 🎵

We took a break from Substack for June. A couple of vacations mixed with a couple of game sprints meant us focusing mostly on going full steam, polishing up this demo.

Which, I’m excited to say……… is finally ready for testing!!!

It’s a huge milestone for us. Up to this point, we’ve only shared the game with friends, family and a few other game devs in our circle. We’re finally ready to beat this thing up a bit with people who haven’t spent the last year-and-change staring at every pixel of the game.

We’re going to start lugging our Steam Decks to various game dev meetups in Atlanta / Brooklyn. Amanda and I will be at the ATL GameDevs meetup at My Parents’ Basement on August 5th. Patrick will be at Wonderville in Brooklyn on July 29th. Feel free to come play if you’re local!

We’re hoping to do a few more playtest events in the next few months, so if you know of any in Atlanta / NYC please let us know. 🙂

Once we’ve worn down the rougher edges, we are planning to share the demo with remote playtesters (like any of you fine people willing to give it a go). So be on the lookout for more info!

In the meantime here’s some bits and pieces of things we’ve made recently:

An ominous Silent gate

Look at it lookin at you.

An intro sequence

Amanda painstakingly frame-by-frame animated the letters that Patrick illustrated for our logotype. And since Opie falls from the cosmos, she gave him a dramatic entrance.

Brassy instrument prototyping

I’ve been prototyping an instrument upgrade Opie finds to help break through trickier Silence. As you keep time with the little indicator, Opie plays a big brassy melody, which pops nearby Silence creatures. Failing the timing causes the Silence to run away and regenerate.

Once we’ve tightened up the mechanics, we’ll do a visual pass with it to make it look nice and cohesive.

Into the third dimension

Our game is 2.5d. Meaning we use flat illustrations in a three-dimensional space. We do this primarily so we can keep the visual style really consistent.

Recently, we realized we just couldn’t get our game’s environment looking right without some actual 3d models mixed in. Which… none of us really know how to do. I made a log with some mushrooms on it one time and I think it took me like two weeks. And honestly, it looked like garbage.

Thankfully, Patrick offered to give it a shot… He sort of went into a hole for 4 or 5 days, and when he came out, he could model in Blender, unwrap UVs and paint on textures… because that’s just the kind of madman that he is. If you know him you’re probably not surprised by this at all hah.

Game of the month

I haven’t been playing any games this past month really, since this demo push (and life and having kids and other projects) has been absorbing a lot of that time. I did start Zelda: Majora’s Mask (again) and want to write about it soon. What an insane game.

See you next time!

We’ve had two art-focused mini-sprints in the past month. What that means is the three of us get together (virtually) for a few days or a full week and toss ideas / art / code back and forth. Usually we get a month’s worth of work done in a few short days. These two sprints really pushed the game forward towards a polished state.

Patrick concepted on a visual style for Opie’s hub area (and the Cosmic areas in general). Amanda animated Leonard and made his beard beautiful and flowy. We all collaborated a bunch of environmental things… like grasses, pathways, cliffsides. Stuff you might not notice, but add a lot to the overall feel. Plus we made a crazy mushroom spiral staircase that gets revealed at the end of a puzzle. (Small spoiler, if you’re worried about such things).

As of last night, Patrick has stepped into Blender to create 3d meshes for Opie’s hub that he’ll paint directly on. He hasn’t come back yet, so if you see him, please let him know we’re thinking about him.

Opie’s hub

Inspo:

Leonard

Mushroom Puzz

Thanks for reading - see you next month!

Part of making games, I’m realizing, is coming up with really fun ideas in your mind, testing them, and then discovering that what sounds fun when the coffee first hits doesn’t always equate to fun in practice.

This can be stressful at times because you’re always going into the unknown when prototyping new ideas. It can use up a lot of time and energy, and when an idea doesn’t pan out, it can feel really disheartening.

But – as a game designer, I’m getting better at coming up with cheaper versions of the thing we think is cool. Then we can watch if fail more quickly, iterate and hopefully find what we’re looking for faster.

All of that preamble to say, we’ve landed on a core mechanic that we’re pretty pumped about. Is it the final version? Probably not. But directionally, we think it’s exciting.

Gathering sound sprites – v2

A few months ago, I realized the way we collected sound sprites in the game was… kind of flat.

There was no real danger or challenge in it. You just sort of chased them around, played music at them and they disappeared into your hat to be crafted with later. It was boring and confusing and felt “game-y”. There were no enemies to pressure you. It was just kind of blah.

I was digging around for old games featuring instrument playing as the core mechanic and I happened on this PS2 treasure that I’ve never heard of and am not sure if anyone actually ever played.

In Herdy Gerdy (which I assume is the sound the game’s characters make as they walk), your goal is to use your musical instrument to herd small creatures into a pen and keep them away from predators. Which… seemed thematically pretty similar to what we’re doing here!

In our case, the creatures you’re protecting are the sound sprites... but we needed a “predator”. Silence isn’t inherently evil in our game, but it is definitely an ominous anti-sound presence. So it makes sense that if you’re trying to herd little sound sprites around, the Silence would in some way aim to block you from doing that.

We chatted as a team about it and decided to try out a pied-piper style herding mechanic.

And it was surprisingly fun. I made this simple prototype in Unity. I wrote a few scripts to make the sound sprites pause and hop vs. just constantly moving like zombies towards the player… and it was immediately really satisfying, even in this visually simple state.

We finessed it a bit more and ended up here:

Now, instead of the sound sprites shrinking down into some fictitious inventory, they follow close at your heels as you navigate the Wilds. Which sounds like a small change, but it actually has a significant impact… For two reasons:

1. The sound sprites are now susceptible to being swallowed up by Silence or being waylaid in some other way.

2. The sound sprites can actually assist Opie in getting through obstacles and explore further into the Wilds.

So we get added danger and added strategic choices. Do you grab a few sound sprites and leave the Wilds quickly to deposit them? Or do you use them to explore deeper and discover new abilities or maybe new passages into other parts of the Above World? Or do you just grab a bunch of them and feed them to hungry-looking Silence? It’s up to you, you sicko.

Patrick and I have a short art sprint coming up in two weeks. We’ll be looking to add lots of detail to the Wilds + get into visual design for Silence. After that, we’ll be finessing the demo and hopefully have it ready to share by end of April / May. Stay tuned!

Monthly Inspiration

This month’s game: Balatro

I have a problem with games that are inherently addictive. What I mean is – I have a problem with personal self-control when it comes to games that make you want “just one more round” looks over at snapped-in-half Overwatch game disc, RIP Zenyatta. I’ve avoided Balatro for a while for that reason, but I finally decided to give it a go.

What a crazy ass game.

It’s like someone heard about poker one night at a bar, then woke up the next day and kind of remembered how to play and decided to make an entire game based on it. Each playthrough has you building increasingly powerful poker decks (like making an entire deck of clubs cards, so you’re guaranteed a flush), and using bizarre jokers that let you do you things like score multiple times in a round, or build straights by skipping numbers here and there. It’s a brilliantly designed game, and I highly recommend it, and I have put it down and have stopped playing it because I do not trust myself.

Quick reminder (or for those new here) our game is about reconnecting a Silent, colorless world with music.

You do so by finding, collecting and protecting noise-making creatures we’ve dubbed “Sound Sprites”. They follow you around and help you overcome obstacles… sort of Pikmin-esque. (We’ve evolved this some since we talked about it last a few newsletters ago.)

But this week’s sprint was about the end goal for the Sound Sprites. Ultimately, your job is to combine your gathered creatures in order to create music and fix the world piece by piece. We refer to it as “Sound Crafting”. It’s what happens when you take two (or maybe more) Sound Sprites of different types and kinda… smush them together.

There’s no musical ability required to do this- you combine your sprites and then get to listen to (and watch) your results.

And I say watch, because in the game’s world physical objects are heavily affected by the music around them. Silence means houses get reduced to shapeless blobs… Sound means those houses perk up and take shape once more.

But specific types of music can change the physical shape of things. For instance, say you’re trying to give form back to a gargantuan old tree… if you craft some flute-like sounds and plug them into it, it will probably firm up into its standard, floral form.

However… if you include some of the less common Sound Sprites in the mix, you might get some interesting results…

We spent a good chunk of our time this week in actual game design, whiteboarding the systems for how the player could add their Sound Sprites to objects. (There was talk of a Sound Sprite t-shirt cannon at one point).

The rest of the time was spent producing assets and testing prototypes to see if our ideas were sound. Patrick riffed on a variety of forms for the player to discover when experimenting with sound combinations.

While Amanda animated beautiful transitions frame-by-frame to bring to the objects to life.

And I jumped into Unity to build out a few different prototypes for us to try out. Here’s one of our last ones. We’re playing around with the idea of hidden constellations that act as sound loops. When Sound Sprites are installed into them, they “power up” and bring the object back to life.

Anyway- successful week, all told. It’s challenging to set aside time to do these sprints, but they’re incredibly valuable. We’re hoping to get another one in this spring.

Monthly Inspiration

This month’s game: Chants of Sinaar

I wrote this game off a while back, honestly, because of its name.

It sounds like a high-fantasy sci-fi series with various lordships and ladyships and a bunch of in-depth RPG intrigue that, frankly, I don’t have time for these days.

Ironically, the game is absolutely -nothing- like that. (You don’t even learn anyone’s name.) What you actually do is wake up at the base of an unknown tower where you don’t understand or speak the language. You start to piece together words based on context clues from reading signs and stumbling through short conversations with the locals. Once you think you know a few words, you can “lock your guesses in”, and those words will be translated for you for the rest of the game.

After you’ve figured out the language, you quickly realize there’s an entirely different group of people a level higher in the tower, who speak an entirely different language. And interestingly translating their words reveals that maybe they have prejudices against the other cultures (I.e. one culture refers to itself as “devotees”, while another refers to them as “impure). It’s a really beautiful puzzle game / detective experience that is definitely thematic to our world around us now. Plus the art style is fantastic. Every scene you walk into feels like its own Moebius illustration.

That’s it for February- we’re going to warmer climes for a bit, then back at it. We’re still aiming for late April to start sending out playtesting demos for those interested. We’ll let you know when it’s time to sign up!

Hello and happy 2025! Our team took a few weeks off for the holidays / a much needed break from the game. As of today, we’re back in the swing of things. It’s good to be back 🙂.

I will say, it’s always a little terrifying to open up the project after being away for a bit… things just have a way of breaking when you leave them alone? I’m not sure how that’s possible, but it’s a weird truth of gamedev. It’s like gremlins are always waiting in the wings for you to be gone for a few days so they can start chewing things up.

In any case, we feel lucky that we’ve had the ability to step away for a bit. It pulled us out of the day-to-day trenches, and gave us the chance to look at the game with fresh eyes. We met this morning to go over our plans for the next two quarters, and we’re super excited with the state of the game / where we hope to go.

As such, this newsletter won’t have much in the way of game-specific updates, but! we will share some high-level info with you all on the game’s roadmap + team. Plus a bit more about us and what has inspired each of us creatively over the past year.

Timeline & goals for 2025

Here’s our timeline, boiled down to the highlights for all you busy people:

There’s a lot to do before April. Some aspects of the main game loop still need exploration, dialogue systems need to be built and we want to create some interesting areas in the Wilds to draw people in and keep them exploring.

Thankfully, we’ve got a good group of people working on this thing.

Team updates

• We’re working with an excellent animator, Steven Darden, to help knock out some of Opie’s core animations. Check him out!

• Luke Webster is writing warm, synthy music & in-game sound effects for Opie’s instrument.

• Carlos Andujar has been helping concept the Sound Crafting part of the game (which is a tricky nut to crack, but is coming along). Also, his group Horchata Club has been a fantastic source of sanity for me personally during all of my prototyping.

2024 inspo corner

Each of us decided to do a little year in review and share some of the weird and wonderful things that inspired us over the year. We hope you enjoy, and feel free to share any recs you’ve got.

Chase - game design lead

Recent game - Naiad

Two years ago I saw a random post on a gamedev subreddit with a beautiful gif of this water creature swimming around and singing to fish. I started keeping my eye out for more, but the dev sort of went quiet. Suddenly a few weeks ago, they released the game!

Naiad is a peaceful adventure of a water nymph who follows the flow of a river, solves puzzles to help lost animals, and heals the ecosystem around them. It’s a great meditative game to relax to.

Game of the year - Cocoon

If you like meticulously-crafted puzzle games where you play as a bug-like creature and traverse worlds-within-worlds then great news Cocoon is the game made just for you. Two of the devs who worked on indie favorites Limbo and Inside started their own studio in Copenhagen. This is their first release, and honestly, it’s my favorite game in a long time. There’s no dialogue, no cutscenes, just eerie exploration on an unknown world and puzzles that make you feel like a genius when you finally tease them out. Plus the art is just fantastic.

Recent music - Zelda + Jazz

I’ve mentioned this before, but I struggle to write code while listening to music with lyrics. I absolutely love video game music (and especially music from the Zelda series). This jazz album incorporates most of my favorites from the series, and is really calming to listen to while untangling my spaghetti code. Even if you’re not a video game music person, I’d recommend it if you’re just looking for something chill to throw on in the background.

Music for the year - Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso: Tiny Desk Concert

I’m a huge Tiny Desk fan, and have been watching their videos for maybe over a decade now. But this show might honestly be the best one I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard it’s been played to death on TikTok, but I stay off of that platform, so apologies if you’re sick of hearing about it. The gist is: they’re a hip-hop (?) duo from Argentina who usually sing and rap over produced music. But for Tiny Desk, they brought in a live 9-piece band and absolutely blew everyone away. If you’re at all curious, I highly recommend checking it out!

Other stuff - Go to Dad

Over the break, my daughters and I worked on a simple game together, which they have titled “Go to Dad”. The premise of the game is this:

• Dad has chili

• You want chili

• The bats want to keep you from getting the chili (for reasons that are personal to them and so are none of your business!!)

• Use your jump rope you got for your birthday to swing over pits and avoid obstacles.

• Falling into a pit means dad wakes up and takes a bite of chili. If he eats it all, you go to bed hungry :(

It was pretty awesome to sit with my kids and iterate on a game concept + artwork for a few days. They even recorded all the SFX! Maybe someday I’ll throw it up on itch.io as a playable demo.

Amanda - animation lead

Recent Game/Game of The Year:

I'm lumping these two together as I haven't played many games this last year, but my pick is Zelda Echoes of Wisdom! Even after 20 something Zelda games, this one was surprisingly fresh. The echo puzzle mechanic is pretty genius, and as someone who doesn't enjoy close combat I really enjoyed that feature. I also just love that there are so many different solutions to each puzzle, so there's kind of infinite ways you can play it.

Recent Music: Being Dead

I've been really into the band Being Dead from Austin, TX. They're so silly and wholesome, which is coincidentally the exact same vibes as our game. Maybe we should ask them if they want to play it.

Music for the Year:

I'd say my vibes for 2024 were a mix of Khruangbin and Mildlife. Both just very chill and vibe-y bands which is usually what I love listening to when I just wanna zone out and get into a groove working on something.

Other Stuff: Most of my friends know my biggest hobby outside of animation is sewing, and I'm currently finishing up renovating my office/sewing area. So I'm excited to have more space to get back into that this year. Maybe there should some kind of Wild Chorus wearables??

Here's some of my favorite sewing projects I've done, and I started an IG offhand.makes if you care to follow along for more!

Patrick - art director

Recent Game

Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Risk of Rain 2. I played this a ton back in 2020, and found myself itching for the roguelike rng 3rd person shooter recently so I redownloaded it and dove in. It’s changed a lot since I played it last, and it feels like an entirely new game. The idea of the game is you run around a map looking for a teleporter to bring you to the next stage, while running + gunning some crazy aliens to earn money. There are chests littered throughout the map that you spend money to open. Each chest rewards you with a random item that gives you some buff. Then you start stacking buffs and hope for the best. The difficulty of the game increases as you play, so there’s always a sense of stress pushing you through the levels. It’s a rad game with solid shooting mechanics that has a level of randomness that keeps me coming back and hoping for better items in the next run.

Game of the Year

My game of the year is the Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree. Elden Ring is my favorite game of recent years, so getting a full DLC that takes about as much time as most games to complete is a huge W for me. It feels a little silly to make a DLC my game of the year, but if you’ve played it, then you get it.

Recent Music: NTS Radio

Recently I’ve been experiencing music fatigue and decision paralysis when I open spotify. How can you even choose an album or playlist or radio to listen to? SO I’ve been deferring to NTS Radio. If you haven’t heard of it, you should check it out. It’s a web-based radio that you can stream to your phone or computer. Let someone else do the hard work, sit back, and enjoy the music.

Music for the Year

I finally got into Ween this year. Listen to Ween. Ween was my love this year.

Other

Many of you already know, but I’m primarily a tattoo artist when I’m not drawing blobs of silence and trees for the game. I also paint, and make illustrations/drawings. Check me out on Instagram (my @ is just my name) to see my tattoo and painting work!

Outside of art stuff, I pretty much just play video games, cook, and watch movies. I love media. But I’m mostly making art. Yay :)

Thanks to all of you for joining us on this game dev journey- we’re really pumped to share our progress with you over the next few months. See you in February!

– The Wild Chorus team

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That’s it for now - see you in January!

Hello again, dear Wild Chorus newsletter subscribers. We’re back for another monthly digest with game updates for you all. This month, it’s a bit about foraging for Sounds, as well as a look into how Amanda makes Opie’s animations move so good.

But first, a high-level update on the project as a whole. We’re still trucking along with our “vertical slice,” basically a demo that shows off the main pieces of the game. We’re really excited with how it’s progressing and hope to have invites to playtest sometime early next year. Game dev always takes longer than I expect it to, which is something I’m forever learning how to be patient with. Will keep you all posted!

Now on to the main topic.

Foraging for Sounds (and a quick reminder on why you should care about doing that)

Wild Chorus has three main pieces to its gameplay loop:

• Forage for sound-making Sound Sprites in the Wilds.

• Craft those Sounds into song loops in the World (restoring the World one piece at a time).

• Gain abilities to delve deeper into the Wilds to forage for even more Sounds.

• Repeat.

Without these songs, the Silence will continue to creep into the World, rendering everything a Silent blobby mess… the inhabitants permanently disconnected from each other.

To keep that from happening, Opie has to start by getting ahold of some Sound Sprites. Which should be easy enough… except that 1. they are afraid and so are hiding and 2. they have recently become Silent themselves due to the event.

Thankfully, Opie is equipped with two tools to solve these issues: Echolocation and the Instrument.

Echolocation gives Opie the ability to clearly see in black and white where Sound or Silence is concentrated. This reveals hiding Sprites, secret pathways and other things we haven’t even thought of yet.

Once the Sprites are out bouncing / flying / phasing around, they have to be approached cautiously. Move too quickly, and they’ll scatter. Take too long, and they’ll go back into hiding. It’s some good, good tension that makes for interesting gameplay.

Finally, if you manage to get close enough to a Sound Sprite, charge your instrument and play a bit of melody before the Sprite sprints off. This juices the Sprite back up so it can start making sounds again.

Sort of like jump-starting a car battery, except instead of metal boxes filled with acid and lead, they’re jelly-like adorable little creatures.

Get out of the Wilds in one piece and you can start crafting song loops with your newly collected sound!

How we make Opie move

I love the way Opie moves. As a lanky, slow-moving person, something about those noodley limbs speaks to me on a personal level. When we were first concepting this game, we knew we wanted to do 2d illustration and animation to highlight Patrick and OK Motion’s excellent style.

But – we also wanted to create an explorable world that felt like it had a lot of depth to it. 2d sidescrollers often struggle to offer that feeling and pure isometric worlds (like Zelda or Chrono Trigger) felt too static.

Ultimately, we settled on a “perspective camera with a low field of view,” which basically means a 3d world that we arrange a bunch of flat images in to give the feeling of 3d. So we get that experience of exploring a 3d world, but have total control over the art.

However, when it came time to illustrate and animate Opie, the style presented a few challenges. We went back and forth trying to get it to look right (what angle should the tops of Opie’s feet take when walking away from the camera???)

We racked our brains for a while until finally we landed on a solution that we’re pretty proud of (and is probably obvious to many people who have taken this route, but hey, we’re learning as we go.)

Our solution:

1. Patrick created reference illustrations of Opie’s different poses.

2. Amanda made reference animations for said poses.

3. We hired a 3d artist to model, rig and animate Opie (shout out to Dan Forke aka Wealthy Relative).

4. We took screen recordings of the model in-game as a reference.

5. Finally, Amanda hand-drew each frame of the animation over top of the reference 😅.

And here’s the result!

Could we have just used a simple toon shader on the 3d model? Probably! But it wouldn’t have been nearly as true to Patrick or OKMC’s style, and it’s really important to us that we keep the things consistent throughout the game for that all-important-yet-hard-to-pin-down element known as player immersion.

Monthly Inspiration

This month’s music: Billy Strings - Highway Prayers.

I’ll be the first to admit that Bluegrass isn’t for everyone. But somehow Billy Strings has broken out of the narrow lane that Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers cut long ago and has created a massive following with his own unique style. His latest album flows so well from spiraling out of control instrumentals, to hard-driving bluegrass, to more ambient psychedelic slow tunes. It finishes strong with a 5-part a capella gospel song called “Richard Petty”. I can’t stop listening to the whole album start to finish.

This month’s game: Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

This game is a testament to how Nintendo can take a formula that it has gone over a dozen or so times and still create something new for it. For those that don’t know, you play as Zelda for the first time in a full-length game. Unlike Link, who swings a sword and shield, Zelda has the ability to create copies of most things you encounter in the world. Spiders, birds, spiky sea urchins… a bed. And what’s especially impressive is that each of these “echoes” has some unique quality to it. Urchins poke enemies, birds can dive ground creatures, beds can be climbed on or slept in. My only complaint is that the story is basically a watered-down Saturday morning cartoon and can be painfully boring, but the gameplay more than makes up for it IMO.

Next month: Hopefully a bit about Crafting songs. Though honestly I’m wary of overpromising and then stressing out about writing these things. Let’s just see where it shakes out 🙂.

First, with a mea culpa. At the end of last month, I said this newsletter would be about game mechanics, specifically how to catch Sound Sprites. Turns out the mechanic(s) need a bit more time in the oven before they’re ready for your eyes. Game design is a bit like fumbling around in the dark looking for something you’ve never seen before. We do have mechanics we’re really excited about, but just want to hone in on them a bit more before we share them.

However! I’ve put together what I think is a cool behind the scenes look at how we design an environment for the game.

Before I jump into that I got a few questions last month on the theme of our game: music.

Some people were worried this would be:

1. A game that requires musical knowledge or skill.

2. A pure rhythm game like Guitar Hero.

I’m happy to say it’s neither of those things :). The game at its core is an adventure RPG, with some amount of randomness baked in (in the vein of Zelda or, a more recent favorite, Dave the Diver).

As you explore and use your abilities you should get the feeling of playing music without any of the baggage of notes, keys, time signatures, etc… Sort of creating the soundtrack to the game as you play it.

Also personally, I’ve spent enough of my life slack-jawed in front of the TV, desperately trying to keep up with “Freebird” on a garbage plastic guitar.

Alright now to the topic at hand: level design.

Where do levels come from?

Let’s start at the end. Here’s a lovely little spot in The Wilds.

Looks nice… but what all went into making it? and how does it fit into the context of the larger environment? and how do we stare at an empty screen and will an interactive world into being?

I’ll show you!

Overcoming The Blank Page

First, we decide as a team what key game moments need to happen in the level. Does Opie meet Leonard? How many Sound Sprite encounters should there be? Does Silence cause some navigational challenges? (Yes to all.)

Once we land on those key bits, I step away from my laptop and walk around the neighborhood. I talk out loud, describing the flow of the level like a movie. It might look insane to my neighbors, but it’s a cheap and surefire way to suss out pacing problems and discover what really makes me excited.

In this case, I started by saying something like “Opie arrives in The Wilds in a clearing. The forest is a bit too quiet, like something is off. He climbs a set of rough-hewn stairs, and continues down a well-worn pathway. Eventually he reaches the edge of a cliff, where a bridge made of floating leaves marks the path forward. A river flows below, pouring from the darkness of a cave opening.” etc etc until all of our level bullet points are hit and the pacing feels fun and engaging.

Then it’s time for a hastily drawn map. The jankier the better (as long as it’s legible).

I used to draw in a hardbound fancy sketchbook with a canvas binding and a nice little built in bookmark strap, but honestly, stuff like that just makes me tense up and sweat over everything I make. I pretty much exclusively sketch on 8.5” x 11” printer paper. I have stacks of them on my desk that just keep getting bigger… It does have a bit of a mad scientist vibe, but it keeps me loose and able to move quickly.

I ended up redoing the map for this environment (still very loosely) in Illustrator just for the sake of legibility for you beautiful people:

It may not look like much, but there’s a lot there! And because we took the time to talk through the story beats, it was pretty easy to lay in the map sections like puzzle pieces.

Into the Third Dimension

After we all agree that the map is feeling right, it’s time for the BLOCKOUT (aka greyboxing).

A blockout is simply using basic 3d shapes to rough in a level. It’s like a sketch you can walk around in. This is a great gut-check moment, since some of the choices we’ve made in designing the map don’t really add up when you navigate the environment.

Thankfully, it’s cheap to move spheres and cubes around, so we walk around a bit, move some stuff, walk around some more, until things are feeling great.

From there, it’s just a matter of replacing geometry with hand-drawn 2d assets from Patrick, seeing what new art we’ll need to make, maybe generating a bit of concept art for key moments…

…also adding in particles, visual effects, other characters, creatures, some beautiful music from our very talented friend Luke Webster, testing mechanics in the space and finally we’ve got a living, breathing environment!

We’re excited for you all to someday walk around and explore it for yourselves.

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Monthly Inspiration

This month’s music: Khruangbin

This month’s musical inspiration comes from Amanda (and me, just kind of piling on :P). I asked her what she likes about Khruangbin, and she said that “even though the music doesn’t often have lyrics, the band still manages to tell a story through their instruments”. Which... is very poetic, and also spot on. We’ve both had their latest album “A LA SALA” on heavy rotation. My favorite of theirs has to be “Hasta el Cielo”, which is actually a dub remix of their second album. But before you run away saying “what is dub? this is getting pretentious” or “ugh that sounds terrible”, just give it a listen the next time you need to focus. It’s all the good stuff from Khruangbin, with just a bit of that tape-delayed-stretched-out feeling that dub is known for. It’ll really put you into a groove if you find yourself distracted.

This month’s game: Thank Goodness You’re Here

And now for something completely different. I’m not sure if this is technically a game, so much as an interactive British comedy. Your “abilities” in the game are walking, jumping and slapping everything in sight. (Your character is super small, so that usually means smacking people in the shins or the butt.) You’re sent to a small town in Yorkshire to meet with the mayor, but he’s busy, so you get suckered into performing small tasks for the townspeople, who always start by saying “THANK GOODNESS YOU’RE HERE”. It’s beautiful and dumb and perfectly short and I loved it. Also it’s by the people who published Untitled Goose Game, so you know you’re in for a good time.

Next Month: Actually diving into sound sprite capturing mechanics probably!!!

Do people leave comments on these things? Let’s find out!

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My name is Chase. I’m the Lead Game Designer / Game Dev on Wild Chorus. Like everyone on our small team, I wear a lot of hats, but I’m ultimately responsible for defining the skeleton of the game. The structure of it… how to translate our theme and lofty ideas into game systems, pixels and button presses. Usually this is accomplished through a mixture of poorly drawn sketches on printer paper, elaborate hand gestures on Zoom calls and a stream of prototypes in Unity (our game engine of choice).

I’ve been making games since I looked like this:

This is definitely the most ambitious project I’ve ever been a part of and I’m pumped to share some details and behind the scenes stuff in these newsletters. We’ve been getting lots of questions like “what’s the game about?”, “how do you play it?” or “is this really the best use of your time?” so I wanted to jump in and tackle a few of those.

Let’s start with a bit of story.

What’s the game about?

You are the apprentice to the Grand Maestro, Mae, whose job is keeping all of the universe in harmony through her elaborate musical compositions. She’s kind of a big deal, cosmically-speaking. She weaves her songs, the inhabitants of the world grow and thrive and the looming Silence that threatens all of existence is pushed back to the sidelines.

But Mae is a bit over-the-top… she likes her musical creations to be just so… and one day she takes her composition a little too far… annnnndd she destroys all of the Sound in the universe. And kind of blames you for it. Which is unfair, but such is the life of the apprentice to the Grand Maestro of all Existence.

Noticing an opportunity, the Silence begins to creep in. Quietly at first, and then even more quietly… until it begins to affect everything. The crisp, colorful shapes of civilization are reduced to black and white meaningless blobs. The inhabitants become listless and disconnected from one another.

Thankfully, there is one place, the Wilds, where sound flows naturally, without any Maestro to guide or shape it. It’s a beautiful, surreal, and sometimes dangerous place. And it’s the Wilds where you, Opus, aka “Opie”, are sent to recover the sounds that Mae lost.

Also Mae’s sort of preoccupied with her recent “mishap”, so if you could go ahead and create new compositions with those sounds and bring the World back into harmony before the Silence disconnects everything forever, that would be great. Thanks so much.

How do you play the game?

By finding & collecting sounds from creatures like these:

We’ve been calling them Sound Sprites amongst ourselves, but if you think of a better idea, feel free to send it our way. Naming things is hard.

Most of the Sound Sprites you find are skittish and afraid – you are a huge cosmic being after all. In order to approach them, you first have to calm them down. You do this with your trusty, yet-to-be-named instrument!

I’ll get into this more in future newsletters, but for now just know your goal is to:

1. Cautiously approach sound sprites in the Wilds & collect their sounds.

2. Use those sounds to craft new musical compositions.

3. Perform those compositions to reconnect the inhabitants of the world, push back the impending doom of the Silence and fix the gigantic mess that your self-absorbed mentor has pinned on you. Pretty straightforward.

Monthly Inspiration

We draw a lot of inspiration from music and other games, and we’d like to share a few with you every month. Get a bit of the method behind our madness.

Game this month: Animal Well

I really think we’re in a sweet spot for indie games right now. Gone are the days of needing blood, gore and guns to make a compelling game. Animal Well, by Chicago developer Shared Memory, is all about surviving as a tiny blob creature in a dark world full of gigantic animals. The beautiful pixel art and sparse music work together to make a really fantastic, eerie ambiance. The “powerups” you pick up throughout the game are, for some adorable reason, common kid’s toys (yoyo, bubble wand, firecracker, etc.). The puzzles can be pretty mind-bending, but if you stick with it, things snap into place nicely in a way that’s really rewarding.

Music this month: Plantasia

Mort Garson made this album in 1976 on a Moog synthesizer, apparently designing the songs for his wife’s plants to listen to as they grew big and strong. The track titles are excellent – stuff like “Symphony for a Spider Plant” or “Ode to an African Violet”. The idea of plants exploding to synthesized cosmic sounds put this on our moodboard early on in the project. For me personally, it’s a great uplifting album to listen to while writing code or maniacally sketching after too much coffee.

Next Month:

How do you actually catch Sound Sprites? No, it’s not like Pokémon. I’m sorry / you’re welcome. See you then!

Do you have thoughts about the game? Got any music / game / life recs for us?

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