Today marks the culmination of a long journey that explores the boundaries of a strategy game. We’re bringing our upcoming fun title Backbeat to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. When we started working on the first prototype in spring 2020, I knew the project had a lot of potential. It’s the second title from our tiny indie studio, and we wanted to add something that was cut from our first game, Hexagroove: Tactical DJ — a built-in system to showcase our mechanics. us slowly throughout the game, a story full of colorful characters and experiences that feels as great as it sounds. Currently refining our release candidate for launch this winter, I’m excited to have all of that possible on PlayStation.
As we started designing the foundation for Backbeat, we wanted to continue some of the principles from Hexagroove and introduce new ones as well. The game combines the space challenges of a sokoban-style game with the team-based resource management of a stealth strategy title. Your challenge is to move a group of four characters across a series of isometric maps in a limited number of turns. How you use those turns and the path you choose affect a number of shared resources, which grow and shrink throughout the level. Each character’s timeline is individually controlled but interdependent. Opening doors and deflecting enemies must be done for the benefit of all four, or they will hinder your team’s successful advance onto the stage.
In contrast to Hexagroove’s fusion-fuelled EDM soundtrack, Backbeat builds on a vast arsenal of riffs, improvisations and live solos recorded from the best funk masters in Stockholm. Change direction in the map, interact with doors, or blow up enemies with a powerful saxophone, all with unique audio tracks that are played back together in sequence after completing a level . This gives your unique solution its own personalized winning song. Every strum, pop, and blow sounded so good that I had to find a way to make them shine even more. After experimenting with the developer kit, I realized that the PlayStation 5’s DualSense wireless controller was the perfect tool to support our studio musicians.
I started working with our composer Pete Fraser to bring a strong musical element to Backbeat’s most interactive parts: when you hit something, swerve past an oncoming car, manipulating time… I feel these brief moments of interaction, when you push a button and instantly something succeeds (or fails), all these moments are very gratifying… and music! I copied chord sequences, gimmicks, accompaniments, and drum beats, all sampled from studio musicians, and fed them to the DualSense controller’s editing tools to create musical, tactile harmonies help reinforce sound effects used at similar points in the game. Next, I modulate the vibrations using a series of filters, amplifiers, and equalizers to bring attention to the frequencies we associate with these types of vibrations. After these small adjustments, the DualSense controller plays a perfectly timed chorus with the music and reverberation effects from your hi-fi or headphones.
Great music is just part of the experience I want to deliver in Backbeat. The game takes place in 1995, paying homage to the great 32-bit arcade and console games I grew up with in our smoky restaurant back rooms and family offices. . We did this not only with the classic low poly style of our characters and environments, but the visuals and sound effects as well. Timing is key to understanding the core of the Backbeat challenge, so we used similar technology and integrated the diversity of the sampling cassette into the user interface and response. When you change the character, the game will fast forward or rewind to the point where the active character has reached. This is accompanied by audiovisual distortion, and holding the rewind button in the game repeats cassette patterns including speeding up and slowing down at each interaction. This is another great place to use DualSense to increase the inner sense of immersion and nostalgia that we aim for in Backbeat. Press and hold the circular button and communicate with the gentle vibration of the DualSense controller, built directly from those curled, white, and rotating tubes.
Today, we’re giving you a small taste of the full experience coming to PlayStation. I hope you get some good vibes from this short ride through some of Backbeat’s first few levels, and stay tuned as we approach the climax of our studio’s second title. Enjoy the show, you are a part of it.
Backbeat Demo Tape is available now on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
