Planck Version Zero (v.0) is a prototype game that lets you interact with original music through shmup mechanics. Although it plays like a familiar top-down scrolling shooter, every in-game action is interpreted through a timing and beat-matching system, turning your play into the song you hear as you traverse the level.

One of the questions we’ve been getting about the Planck v.0 video is “looks neat, but what is really going on there?” It’s true that conveying the mechanics through a video isn’t ideal, and while I do have a short explanation I wrote up about how the game translates play into music, I thought it would be better to describe not just how it functions today but the path we took to get there over the last few months. Please click on to read the first of a multi-part series about how Planck v.0 works and how it came to be.

Part I of this series on the prototype “musical shooter” Planck v.0 dealt with how we try to interpret musical events on a granular level with quantization: the timing of discreet events, such as individual rhythmic hits, as they relate to gameplay. There’s more to music than that, of course, and there’s more to Planck than that as well. As we left off, I’d been put in contact with Brenton Woodrow, a student in his senior year of the game design baccalaureate program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.