Like many music games, Planck is about creating a polyphony of sound. Unlike many music games, you need to shoot stuff to do it.
Planck, an indie game from developer Shadegrown Games, wants to reinvent the music-game genre by making you shoot stuff. It’s not the first time that somebody has thought to spice up rhythm games by adding a shooting mechanic – most notable is perhaps the loved Rez, but what seems cool about Planck is the organic way it all comes together depending on what you shoot.
The game itself plays like a typical front-scrolling shooter, but every time you hit the little “motes” that inhabit the world with energy, they explode and release the trapped sound within. The song itself is predetermined, it seems, but whether you destroy certain motes or not will affect how the game sounds.
“I think Planck makes a meaningful contribution to the future of music games. We see it as the natural follow-up to titles that rely solely on timed button presses meant to match pre-recorded, licensed music content,” said Planck project lead and Shadegrown founder Matthew Burns in a press release that not-so-subtly took a little dig at the onetime popularity of games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
“There’s so much yet to explore where music and gameplay meet; it’s one of the most exciting areas you could be working in as a developer right now. We can’t wait to see what gamers make of it.”
If you’re wondering how Planck works, there’s a 12-minute developer walkthrough here, though it’s more than half a year old and some stuff might have changed since then.
