Playhear : Square Paper City

How an Electronic Music Album would sound and look if it was a Video Game?

Welcome to a new way to listen to music with this first opus of Playhear, a series of musical pieces made into games!

Surreal City

Settled in a weird and minimalistic place, Square Paper City is a Musical Walking Simulator with mazes, some puzzles and a bouncy and dynamic world.

A new way to play a music album

This interactive experience will make you live and feel a music LP as something new: semi-procedural, designed according to the game and the levels, moving and modulating according to your actions. The simplest inputs have dramatic consequences over your musical experience.
There's also rhythmic totems to test your rhythm abilities, some shooting skills to help you find your way in the monochromatic mazes, some light Parkour, and other fancy mechanics.

Made with experimentations in mind

I made this game in solo, following my emotions and knowledge, testing visual technologies and interactive audio systems to provide a psychedelic but dynamic and fun walking game in a living painting!



I have also been working closely with some audio plugin developers as a tester and sound designer.
This game is a tribute to them (Unfiltered Audio, Rhizomatic, UVI, Bitwig, Sugar Bytes...) and to experimenters.






Finally, here's the

• Push the Boundaries of the Way we Play/Listen to Music: a technical and artistic approach to interactive music
  
• Automatic Writing and Serendipity: a surreal way of composing the story and developing the game content with serendipity.
  
• Minimalistic Systems and UI: more immersion for the player. No complexity, immediate onboarding.
  
• Synaesthesia: attempt to make a world that lives according to music and visual connections.
  
• Focus on Experimental Art and Trippy Mood: I wish to experiment on both the technical art and the interactive music system in order to push the boundaries of abstract and artistic games.
  
• Diversity in electronic music genres: as I always done in my musical career
  
• This Game is an Instrument as Much as it is an Art Piece: give the opportunity to the player to play the game as an album or live show during a party or whatever.
  
• Use a Limited Range of Instruments: especially those that I'm testing for audio developers friends and a few others that I really need for the overall quality of the music

A game made by Tomavatars