So what’s the deal? Why are we working on something new right now?

As we demonstrated Planck and pitched it to various potential partners, the near-universal response was that it was too expensive to do as a larger PC or console game. But, they added, they’d be happy to talk to us about doing a much smaller version of Planck, for smartphones. I didn’t want to reject these suggestions out of hand, so we created a branch version of the game in order to test out various ideas and figure out what it would mean to simplify Planck for a smartphone’s capabilities and audience.

Going down that path, however, meant that we got away from some of the aspects of our original goal: to make the sprawling free-form dynamic music game we originally dreamed of making. The mobile device discussions are still ongoing, but it’s hard to make concrete progress on Planck right now when we don’t know what our real target is going to be.

Of course, no matter what happens, we’re also going to continue to pursue the grandest vision of what this game is meant to be on our own– it just won’t be with the greatest speed.

(Aside: “Why not do a Kickstarter?” is a question I’m often asked about finishing Planck. I’ve thought a lot about Kickstarter, especially in light of its recent string of great successes in funding excellent projects for awesome developers. Ultimately, I think our particular situation isn’t totally applicable— the amount of money that we could get through it would fall short of allowing us to leave our day jobs and work on the game full-time, which is really the only thing that would help us get the game done faster. Any amount of money up until that point doesn’t actually buy us a whole lot— we have the people and equipment to make the game, just not that dedicated length of time.)

In the meantime, though, we’ve decided to make something new.

It’ll be a smaller game than Planck—something designed from the very beginning to be something that people with day jobs can finish successfully. It’s also got many of the same principles and ideas as Planck: abstract colorful visuals and dynamic music that responds to your play. We’ve already begun testing this new game (it made some secret appearances at this year’s Game Developer Conference) and we’re excited to share it with you later this year. That’s right, we’re committing to having it out in a reasonable amount of time! We want to ship stuff, and we think focusing on this new game while we wait to find out what’s going to happen with Planck is our best strategy for doing so.

Information will be coming soon. Please look forward to it!

So what’s been happening? The first thing we’ve been doing is continuing to iterate on Planck’s core mechanics. In particular, we’re keen on trying out a new system that makes changing the color space of the level more explicit and less of the mysterious thing it used to be. Right now in the build we’ve got special “transverse motes” that create great changes in the level’s energy when hit. This makes mixing up the palette of sounds easier and potentially much more dramatic. We’ve got more to do on these— we need to adjust the levels to work with them and do their art—but it’s a promising step towards making our suite of player actions simpler and more powerful at the same time.

We’ve also been exploring some basic prototypes for other games in a similar vein to Planck, with the idea of doing something small and simple for mobile platforms. I wasn’t lying when I said that we ambitiously bit off a little more than we could chew trying to make Planck, so our desire as a team to get something out the door together sooner rather than later led us down this particular path. The prototypes aren’t too far afield from Planck in art and sonic style, but they do show some of the other interesting ways we can combine music and gameplay using the systems we’ve already built. I think we’ll be sharing some of those prototypes with you here at some point.

Tying in with the above is a significant amount of thought that’s going into the business side of things. Some people have asked if we would be open to doing a Minecraft-style paid open Alpha. We’re definitely open to that, but I think we would need to get farther along with the game before that could happen. Right now, we’re considering a wide range of possibilities as far as platforms and release strategies go. Navigating these waters can be confusing sometimes— depending upon whom you talk to, you can get very different answers about the viability of the options out there for a game such as ours. Sorting that all out is taking longer than we want it to, but I’m of the mind that, just like in life, in business it’s best not to rush into a relationship you haven’t fully thought through.

Finally, thanks to everyone who left a comment or sent us a message. It’s always great to hear from you.

If you came here looking for the playtest build link, you might have noticed that we’ve taken it down for the time being. We want to thank everyone who played the build and especially those who discussed it with us and with each other. Sharing work and putting stuff out into the wild always contains an element of fear, so it was great to see that the game 1. did not immediately blow up and 2. seemed to fare well in the court of somewhat-public opinion. The data and feedback we gathered will help us immensely as we continue to develop Planck! Finally, if you did miss the playtest build and wanted very badly to play it, or wanted to share it with someone, just use the Contact Us page to send me a note and I’ll hook you up.

See you next year!