A puzzle game at its core, Resynth explores the intersection between music and digital gameplay. This ground-breaking game is the debut title of Polyphonic LP – an independent game studio founded by seasoned developers Sam Izzo and Andrew Trevillian.
Sam is a jazz pianist and Andy is working towards a PhD investigating synaesthetic approaches to game design. Resynth is the brainchild of that research.
Film Victoria chatted to the versatile duo about the ins and outs of the company, their eagerly anticipated début title and its backstory, and what’s looming on their horizon.
Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of your company and your début title Resynth?
Sam: Andy and I met at Blue Tongue Entertainment, where we worked on de Blob 1 and 2 and an unreleased game. I was a programmer and Andy was the lead level designer. I did a lot of tools work which meant I often had to liaise with the level designers to see what they needed, what issues they were having. From that working relationship Andy and I became good friends. After Blue Tongue shut down in 2011 Andy started teaching in games at Swinburne, started a PhD, and I started doing contract work. We would catch up regularly at our favourite pub to talk about the latest games we’d been playing. I helped Andrew with a couple of prototypes he was building as part of his PhD. They all involved sound or music and colour in some way; they were exploring the concept of synaesthesia. One day he showed me one that was like a step sequencer crossed with Sokoban, the classic block pushing puzzle game.
Andrew: The more we talked about it the more we thought it was something that we could take beyond the research and commercialise. We had both been wanting to do our own thing and make our own games, so this seemed like the perfect project to take that first step with. That prototype became Resynth, and we formed our company, Polyphonic LP, to work on it.
What are the core aspects of Resynth and how did the game evolve in response to your backgrounds in music and research studies on synaesthesia?
Sam: We both play a lot of different types of games, but in particular we both enjoy puzzle games. Resynth is a puzzle game at its core, where the puzzles are short musical tunes. As musicians we wanted the music to sound great, so initially we asked a jazz musician friend to compose a few one-bar melodies for us that we then tried to turn into puzzles. It quickly became evident that the puzzle and the melody are so entwined that they have to be created together.
Andrew: There’s a direct relationship between colour and sound in the core design of Resynth. Higher sounds are matched with brighter, lighter colours, and deeper sounds with darker hues. These relationships are drawn straight from the research. As a player, you’re tasked with bringing colour and musical order back to a chaotic arrangement of elements in each of our puzzles. Making sure the visual and auditory feedback really ramped up as the player worked towards the solution was something we spent a lot of time refining.
What have been the greatest rewards and challenges of starting your own company and flying solo?
Sam: Because we had always made games for other people and now we would be doing everything ourselves, we wanted a small project that we could take from concept to finished product on the App Store relatively quickly. It wasn’t as quick as we planned - it never is - but we sure did learn a lot - from the ins and outs of the platform holders, tax and finance, grant applications, to showing the game in public at festivals. Actually one thing that has been really fun is going to events and demonstrating the game and watching people play it. At big companies you rarely have an opportunity to be the face of a game because you’re usually in a big team and there’s a marketing department handling it for you. In this case there’s no one else to do it. It’s really exciting and sometimes terrifying to watch people playing the thing that you created.
Andrew: The uncertainty can be really challenging. We’re releasing something we’ve invested a lot of love in, out into the wild. Who knows if it will stick? If people will like it? Thankfully, across development we’ve been honoured to be nominated for a bunch of awards and selected for festivals and exhibitions. As Sam says, watching people play the game in those contexts is really satisfying, and having it recognised alongside projects by much bigger and higher profile studios has been amazing. This goes some way towards easing pre-release nerves.
Sam, as a jazz pianist, how involved were you in the musical side of the things? Did you compose anything for Resynth or were you mainly on the programming and coding front?
Sam: I’m a semi-professional jazz pianist. I love playing music, and I love playing in bands. But unfortunately I haven’t composed anything for Resynth. As the only programmer on the team, all the coding and other technical tasks came down to me.. Also because the level design and music are intricately linked, you can’t just compose for the game; you have to also create the puzzle itself. But maybe now that all the big ticket things are done I can have a shot at it.
Andrew, given that your PhD studies explore how colour and sound affect people’s perception, can Resynth be considered as a game interpretation of your research?
Andrew: The PhD I’m working on is about making games based on the research and writing about the process and outcomes. Resynth started as one of a half a dozen prototypes I’ve made as part of that. Each of the prototypes explores relationships between the senses and how those relationships might be used in game design to engage players more deeply. So Resynth is definitely a game based interpretation of the research, but as we developed it, it’s necessarily evolved into something more ambitious. The audience for a PhD is quite different to the audience for a commercially released game.
What was your reaction to Resynth being nominated in two categories and an honourable mention at the 2016 Australian Game Developer Awards? What do these accolades and events represent for Victorian game developers?
Sam: We were so excited and happy to be nominated. At the awards night, all the nominees are projected onto a big screen, so it was a huge rush to see the game up there, with the music coming through the huge sound system. You’re surrounded by colleagues and friends in the industry, and everyone is so happy, there’s so much energy in the room. It’s really a great way to showcase the creativity in the Australian games industry.
Andrew: We entered the awards without a great deal of expectation, so it was amazing to be nominated alongside so many other cool projects. And it was a great way to cap off Melbourne International Games Week, where we’d also been featured in the Unite Melbourne, Made with Unity showcase. Being recognised for the work you’ve put into something you believe in is really satisfying, and it’s helped us meet so many great people in the game development community.
Will the strategy for Polyphonic LP be focused on games with musical elements? Will you explore new territories for alternative amalgamations?
Sam: Definitely! The goal with Polyphonic LP is to make games with music or sound as an integral part of the experience. That might be in a very obvious way like with Resynth where you are creating a melody as you play the game, or it might be in more subtle ways, like maybe the game’s soundscape responds to your actions in the world. We’ve got some great ideas we want to explore in the future.
Andrew: There’s something incredibly and subconsciously engaging about music. And there are rich parallels between music and game design. As a species, we’ve been playing music and playing games with one another for millennia. It seems to us that there’s plenty of fertile ground to explore at the intersection of those two playful forms.