Audiosurf

I'm the designer and programmer of Audiosurf, Dylan Fitterer. I launched BestGameEver.com a while back and released a new game every Friday. One of those 7-day games, Tune Racer, has grown into Audiosurf.

Magic: the Gathering first got me thinking like a game designer. It's a brilliant game and I spent months and months developing new cards and game variations. The first computer game I attempted was a stupidly ambitious FPS which included nearly all the depth of the collectible card game. It was a massive failure and I was completely hooked anyway.

Mostly a lack of confidence - I didn't see anywhere I could fit in the main industry. Lucky for me it went that way.

An independent game developer is one who can follow a game design wherever it leads.

A lot of things have become easy, but none of those things can make a game really interesting - because they're easy. Not that games need amazing technology to be interesting. It could be amazing design too, but both are hard.

I love the frontier feeling of games. It just seems like there's so many surprises left.

I watched it go by a few times and it was finally the year! It's hard to let other people judge the game and especially hard to ask for it, but being an IGF finalist has brought a lot of attention to Audiosurf. I just couldn't be happier.

It's hard to pin down an origin point since it went through many variations. The Tune Racer prototype from BestGameEver was the first time it took a shape you could recognize as Audiosurf. But even after that, it went in many directions.

It was Rez that inspired me to try building music games. Rez is such a perfect synthesis of gameplay and music. That and Acid Music set me exploring game/music-authoring combinations. I did a prototype called Loop Hoops in that direction. You scored baskets at separate music stations to bring loops into a live song.

Audiosurf is different since it's about getting into music that's already recorded, but I do think musicians will enjoy writing stuff to ride in. You could even think of that as level design.

Without a lot of direction - I tried everything that came to mind and then picked favorites. It had to be abstract to fit the mood of any music, primarily procedural to match the shape of any song, and colorful to display the traffic's synchronization with beat intensities. Inspiration came from lots of places like Darwinia, Rez, Drivey, and F-Zero.

Probably that the music synchronization was taking place out in front of the player's vehicle. Audiosurf used to only react to music at the instant you heard it. The traffic/music patterns had to be created in a fog just ahead of the player.

That was solved by analyzing the entire song before play begins. Now the music reaction is synced exactly with the player's vehicle, yet they can still look off in the distance to see upcoming patterns. This had the added benefit of giving the player a graphical sense for anticipating their music. Enhanced anticipation is a pretty big part of what makes Audiosurf a memorable experience.

I chased many, many dead ends. That's not really an error - it's part of the process. However, some of them went way too far and should have been killed off earlier. I hate to think of the number of hours I spent trying to force Audiosurf's boss battle variant to be fun.

Audiosurf has been in development 3-4 years and the finish is close. I've promised February 2008 on the Audiosurf website to create a new deadline now that the IGF deadline has passed.

Audiosurf is built in Quest3D and C++. It incorporates some great libraries such as BASS, MusicBrainz, Subversion, and the iTunes (Quicktime) SDK.

Your music. You choose the mood, the pace, the challenge. To play a short ride - choose a short song. You can create a unique racetrack to match the experience you want and it's just one click.

I haven't been to GDC since 2001 and am excited about going next year for the Independent Games Festival. After that, another music game or a whole new direction? We'll see.