I recently replayed this eccentric 'musical memory game' I actually finished and released in 2019. Despite some fears that I'd cringe over concerns about its content, I ended up feeling mostly impressed and in some cases surprisingly emotional! It's such a shame so few people got to experience the most moving moments though due to the gameplay barrier in the way...
I was in my Discord server recently, and people brought this game up, saying that it moved them to tears. I hadn't played it in probably years - though I'd been intending to replay it for a while - so this got me curious, and prompted me to go back to it.
I spent about five hours - split over as many days - playing through it again, to the end... though my completion percentage is 77%; I'd still like to get 200% on all the songs.
I wanted to write about it... but knew I'd already done that the last time I revisited it. I thought I'd actually posted what I wrote, but apparently not; looks like I felt the timing was poor due to ∞ some stuff in the news at the time ∞. After reading through it, though, my feelings here in late 2023 seem to be essentially the same as when I replayed it just six months or so after releasing it, so I'll just include what I wrote back then here with some slight edits, and an extra bit at the end with some stats relating to sales and player achievements.
(This is from May or June 2020, about 6 months after finishing development.)
I replayed [Memody: Sindrel Song] for the first time since finishing it six months ago, and overall I'm really pleased I made it, though I recognise that it's likely different to what most players would be familiar with (and they might perceive certain bits as racist!).
My feelings about Sindrel Song have been mixed over the past few months [since releasing it]. It was my way of creating light in a dark period of my life, coming to terms with my potential memory loss from brain cancer surgery (though thankfully that didn't end up affecting me), plus my general mental illness, including an episode of suicidal ideation that very nearly ended my life.
So... fairly dark topics to base a game around.
I'd been concerned that perhaps in my madness I'd written stuff into it that I'd cringe about looking back on it, plus it never sold well at all (only around 100 copies [I'll revisit the sales stats as of August 2023 at the end]), so overall I'd mostly just been avoiding coming back to it, or even really thinking about it.
So it was with some reluctance that I started it up again, bracing myself for embarrassment... but I was pleasantly surprised!
Overall, I'm really pleased with essentially every aspect of the game! I'll go through the key three individually.
Dialogue
I feel that the bits that shine the brightest are the dialogue, the characters, the setting, the lore, and the general atmosphere. The 'six days to live' thing is compelling, I feel. I feel like each one of the characters is distinct, each is explored in depth, each has their role and their different stories which resonate with real issues that people face. Some of the dialogue is clever, or touching, or funny (though it feels weird saying that about my own work)!
During every one of the game's six days and their nights, each of the characters you've already visited unlocks a new conversation. I spent most of my playtime exploring these optional bits of dialogue, and it always felt like something I got to do rather than something I had to do. A welcome opportunity, never a chore!
I vaguely recalled most of it - I did write it, after all - but some of it [or most of it, during my 2023 playthrough] felt somewhat new to me. When making the game, I had to read and reread every single line to the point where it wasn't really possible for me to see it from a distance, as a whole, as a player would; I was always looking for errors, redundancy, continuity issues, typos, things that weren't working or didn't fit, things to change, redundancy. It was nice actually playing the game, and being able to enjoy each conversation as a whole rather than picking each line apart.
Some of the exchanges sent chills down my spine, others made me tear up. Or made me laugh! There were times where I felt my attention wandering, but they were few; there were more times where a line lit up a spark of interest; "ah, that's an intriguing concept!", "ooh, that ties in with what they said before!"
Some of my favourite exchanges are with Remedy and Duhrge on the sixth night, Hammer in the epilogue, and Hearth towards the end, though I also like the exchanges between Memody and Duhrge in general, I like Course's dialogue as a whole, Hammer's other dialogue makes me laugh, I find Vivace entertaining... Actually, it's hard to pick favourites because I like essentially all the dialogue!
There are some long exchanges Memody has with her inner demon which likely go on in excess, or which might make people uncomfortable. This was the point; it's not a nice thing, having (metaphorical) demons in your head, who latch onto and obsess at length over little things that aren't objectively worthy of that kind of attention, or which warp everything into ridiculous self-loathing. I tried to add comedy to it to underline the absurdity of it all, though I feel it's the kind of thing that would garner mixed opinions; maybe it'd be seen as flippant, even mocking, or just annoying. I suppose mental illness is a volatile area to explore in general, because of how intensely it affects people's lives. This was just my attempt at trying to deal with my own. Better writers would surely have handled it differently. I did my best.
Gameplay
The gameplay is based around memory and music, and it's... unique. You have to mimic note sequences at a fairly high tempo immediately after hearing them, and it's quite challenging as it's about sequence memory rather than reaction.
I do like it, but I can also understand why it's too unfamiliar to be easily appealing to most people. I'd summarise it (and the whole game, really) as "mentally engaging": you have to really pay attention, and if your mind wanders, you'll slip up. It can get taxing, and easily frustrating.
This also adds a palpable tension, though, like walking along the edge of a cliff; the threat of failure really gets the adrenaline pumping, and the thrill of success when you do get it right is well beyond what you'd ever get from something more forgiving!
Personally, I really enjoy this kind of gameplay, and the most disappointing thing about replaying the game for me is that I couldn't really replay it as a new player would. If you're playing on Challenge mode and you mess up a certain number of times, the song ends. The game expects this to happen a few times, and charts your progress on a graph at the end so you can watch as you improve with each attempt. I really enjoyed this, but I've now learned the songs so thoroughly that even after six months without attempting them, I was getting 180%-200% completion in my first try. I didn't have to replay the songs, nor did I get to see the graph grow. I had nothing to aim for, and, well, it was disappointing!
[Interestingly, this was mostly true in 2023 too, as I could still mostly remember the songs and completed them in my first try. Though in the postgame you unlock an Expert mode, where you fail from making a single mistake, so I've been able to experience the gradual progression again through that.]
But I suppose this permanent mastery is true of a lot of games. It's why people do obscure challenge runs, if the mechanics will allow them. This game doesn't really allow for that (unless you tried to do something like playing with your eyes shut!), but I suppose most people don't play games more than once anyway, and certainly not to the excessive degree a developer has to, so it wouldn't be an issue for the majority. It's like saying a story's less fun the second time because you already know all the twists. That doesn't mean it's not amazing the first time!
Overall, though, while I'm glad I made a game like this and do enjoy playing it, I consider the gameplay to have been a valuable experiment, but ultimately one which didn't exactly succeed. I'll likely stick to more traditional and familiar gameplay styles in future, using my own idiosyncrasies to define details rather than the entire shape.
Music
Composing for this was an interesting challenge, since the game handles (most of) the music differently to what I'd usually do.
For a start, I had to limit the number of notes available, so as to not be overwhelming. I'm really pleased with the system I came up with, where there are two modes (light and dark) with just six notes each. Rather than taking the obvious route and using the standard major and minor scales most popular music use for light or dark moods, I went with the more exotic Mixolydian and Phrygian modal scales, being careful to keep the notes that best contained the individual feel of each.
In hindsight from 2023, it feels odd to me that I omitted the 3rd from the Phrygian since that's important to establish a minor triad on the tonic...
(These examples are C Mixolydian and C Phrygian for clarity; the game actually uses Bb Mixolydian and Ab Phrygian. The greyed out notes are the ones omitted from the 6-note scales in game.)
Personally I feel Mixolydian sounds brighter than the standard major, and has an eccentric, otherworldly colour to it that I absolutely love. A lot of my compositions end up in Mixolydian! I don't use Phrygian so much, but I feel it sounds darker than the standard minor.
For the interactive music, I couldn't just import a prepared wav file, as I typically would with any other game (and which I did for 'fixed' music like the area and world map tracks). Instead, the game generates the (interactive) music on the fly by assembling short clips. I probably should have used midi encoding for this, but instead it reads from a hand-written .txt file which looks like this:
Making those was... interesting, and I probably should have made myself an editor or something, in hindsight, rather than stupidly typing them out. Oh well, it works!
I had to keep each little melody simple enough to be immediately memorable, but not so simple as to be too boring. With so few notes to work with, I was pleased with the variety I was able to achieve.
I also reduced the backing instrumentation to just bongos (^v), a shaker (x), a timpani (O), and a synth pad, partly so then I could use this system, partly because I felt it was best to remove all distractions if the player was supposed to be focusing on just the notes that they needed to play.
[Though Remedy's song - and only hers - also has a brief appearance from a flute. I decided after adding it that it was from Vivace in the distance, but can't recall whether that's mentioned in the dialogue.]
Composing with all these limitations was a challenge, but I'm really pleased with the results. I find all the songs very appealing both to listen to and to play! Vivace's and Course's are my favourites.
The songs use 'lyrics' too, and apart from a couple of 'meh' lines, I'm mostly pleased with the stories these tell, and their melodic flow. I liked blending the meanings of the lyrics and the notes themselves, like for example by having words like 'light' or 'life' played on the light scale even when they appeared in otherwise dark melodies, or vice versa.
Unfortunately, the text-based nature of the lyrics makes them easy to miss when you're focusing on memorising and playing notes. Voice acting would have really helped, but sadly that's not one of the few things I'm not capable of doing by myself!
[As of 2023, I still listen to the OST - made up of mostly minimalist ambient-but-still-melodic pieces - fairly often. I'm very proud of it! ∞ It's been on Bandcamp for ages. ∞]
Graphics
I'd only ever made games in 2D in the past; this was my first foray into the world of 3D. I was really happy about what I'd achieved at the time, and I still do feel that the overall atmosphere and colours are really enchantingly beautiful. Each area and character has its own feel and colour palette, and I like how differently they all look and feel during night and day.
I find the sindrel models cute, and I like their animations [interesting; during my 2023 playthrough, the amateurish animations stood out to me as something that don't really hold up anymore]. I particularly like what I did regarding emoting - it's a system I've refined over a few years, and which I'm continuing to use in Divine Dreams [which is what I was working on back when I wrote this in 2020] - where each line of dialogue contains an instruction to set the eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and ears position, and the neck and head rotations. It means I don't have to animate each emote individually, and it allows for a lot of subtle facial shifts which I feel communicate a whole lot. They add immensely to the written lines.
As it was my first 3D project, though, I can see now that the graphics are rather rough in a lot of places. I'm no longer fond of the flat faceted rocks, for example, though it's a look common to many indie games because it's easy to make. I've got it in Divine Dreams too, though I'm intending to experiment with different approaches soon.
I'm also annoyed by the choppiness of the outlines! Look at Vivace's (the one on the left) earrings here, or her hair, or the edge of her top. Compare it with the outlines on this Lucario from one of the Pokemon games (Sun and Moon probably):
I was using what I think, from all I've read, is the standard way of generating outlines in 3D, but whatever technique Pokemon uses looks way better, essentially flawless, and I don't know why that is. I've been wondering about it for ages! Maybe it's got something to do with how the models are made compared to how mine are made; mine are quite low poly, which is likely a big part of it. I don't know. [I'm still not entirely sure in 2023, but I've moved away from outlines in my most recent projects.]
Overall, though, while it obviously can't compare to the work of a trained team with a big budget, I like how the game looks, considering I made all the graphics myself while new to 3D (and while doing everything else myself too) [and while recovering from brain cancer]. It's certainly no worse than a lot of indie games out there!
So yes, I like Sindrel Song, and I'm glad I made it. I feel it's a worthwhile experience, though I'm aware it's idiosyncratic and isn't exactly built to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's more like ~art~, pretentious as it feels to say, in that its main purpose is to communicate a message, to move people, rather than just a toy that's meant for 'mindless' entertainment. I don't say that to disparage games which are more like that; rather, I understand that most games are like that because it's what people turn to games for, and maybe this isn't really a clean fit for the medium as a whole.
I've already mentioned a few flaws, things I could have done differently, but I've yet to touch on the most concerning that I noticed: the racist undertones! Obviously(?) not intentional, but I can see how people would perceive certain elements in that way.
The game was largely inspired by studying sexual selection as part of an evolutionary biology class at university. This is essentially the set of behaviours and physical traits which are used to attract or choose reproductive partners.
∞ Birds are often used as striking examples ∞ of sexual selection because their displays are visual and obvious. One example from the lectures which stuck with me was what that linked-to Wikipedia article describes like this:
In parrots, ornate males with brighter plumage are preferred by the females. These males are typically immunologically superior with higher leukocyte counts. This evidence supports the idea that bright plumage is an “honest” signal involved in mating.
The 'honest' there means that this is an accurate signal of 'hidden' traits; the only way to be vibrant is to be healthy. A dishonest signal would be if birds coated their feathers in external pigments - makeup, essentially - to enhance appearance beyond what genetics have naturally provided, as it's the genes - not the makeup - which will be passed to the offspring. Honest signals are more a case of 'what you see is what you get'.
That university course also heavily covered human attractiveness [for example, the exam literally had questions like 'which of these male faces is more likely to have more short-term sexual encounters?'], plus I'd been reading a lot about incels and such who were apparently unlucky in love due to being ugly, but this lack of luck was blamed on their personalities by those who'd rather judge than care, and who believed that attractiveness was entirely subjective (it's not) due to highly valuing human freedom, equal value, and potential for change. The thought that an aspect of our 'value' is determined for us when we're born seems to be appalling to people with certain (political? idealistic?) worldviews. While the incels were lost in exaggerated delusions, an honest look at the world - not one through a political lens - does reveal that the naturally attractive do succeed much more readily in the mating game, just as those with naturally higher intelligence fare better in intellectual domains, or those with greater stamina prevail in athletic domains. It's just nature.
I wanted to explore this, and the sindrels were originally designed for a game where you played as either a male or female sindrel with a randomly-generated genetic vibrancy to their skin, which determined how other characters interacted with you; that is, they'd be nicer to you the 'better-looking' you were. Skin colour was a really obvious way of showing 'attractiveness' even from the back, and unlike some simulation of facial attractiveness, it only required a single variable. The point of that planned game was to show that we're not all playing life with the same rules, and factors out of our control make a massive difference in regards to the challenges we face and the degree to which others try to help or harm us. I hoped it'd encourage sympathy - rather than judgement - towards those with different experiences (the opposite sex, the ugly).
[I just took the time to reread ∞ the monstrously long post I wrote about the original sindrel mating-based game way back in 2018 ∞ (with broken formatting I'm reluctant to fix in case I mess things up further). It begins with with a lengthy rant about stuff that makes me embarrassed now, but also glad I'm past that lowest point in my life (that was just a few weeks before the major brain surgery I'd spent years dreading). A lot of what I wrote comes across as naive to slightly-older me. Both I and the world have changed since then. Oh well; interesting to see some stuff about how these sindrels were first imagined, at least.]
Sindrel Song is quite different to that original sindrel game, but I kept the same idea and played with the concept, incorporated ideas from it into sindrels' lore, again hoping to encourage sympathy for those who nature hadn't blessed.
The game also has overarching themes of light and darkness, which are universal and have strong connotations. Light is bright and good and life and desirable, dark is dull and pain and death and dreadful.
Unfortunately, however, all this leads to some uncomfortable racist implications! Characters are treated worse for having darker skin, while having brighter skin is more desirable. It's uncomfortable.
In hindsight, I wish I'd used something like height instead - which does correspond to an obvious attractiveness variable in humans - to avoid these implications, but, well, it's done now [that wouldn't have worked for both sexes anyway, so... ehh]. I just hope that people will understand the purpose behind it rather than reacting based on their views about race in humans. It's not meant to be making any points about that; sindrel society is not human society, and I think that judging humans based on their skin colour is ridiculous to the point where it baffles me that people do it. Human skin colour isn't a fitness indicator, though; unlike in the aforementioned parrots - and sindrels - there's no connection between humans' skin colour and their physical or mental abilities.
[Reviewing this in 2023, I wonder whether people would be just as bothered by the sindrels having clear, biologically-determined 'gender' roles, considering the stuff related to all that in the Zeitgeist. I recall one negative review said something like that.]
(Seems I last replayed it in October 2021, and added this extra bit to the end of this post, with the intention of finishing it... Can't remember why I didn't.)
I return to this again after several months without touching it. It was only last year that I released it, but it feels like a lifetime ago in terms of mental change and development. I've learned so much more about indie games since then, and the way that I approached and released this feels so naive to me now!
Replaying it has brought a lot of insecurities to the surface. My first half-an-hour was coloured by imagined judgements from others, thoughts that this thing is basically my weird mind on naked display and that there are are probably a lot of things that don't resonate with people, or which they'd mock, because they stray from what people are used to seeing and expressing. I get the feeling from the many, many indie games I've looked at these past few weeks that most play it safe, so to speak, just presenting basic action gameplay without straying into emotion, or if they have plots it's stuff like "we must slay the sorcerer to save the king!" or "I feel a moment of doubt about my prowess as a warrior, but my resolve is quickly restored when I realise my strength". Or something. This has a lot more wallowing in mental illness and heartfelt expressions of emotional support right from the start.
I've been playing Undertale recently, which seems to be renowned for its friendliness, but to me it seems like 90% humour with some hints at caring that come out much later, the soft belly exposed for a moment. Maybe that's what people are more receptive to.
Or so I wondered while looking at this game again. I was also concerned that maybe the dialogue was too much; too long, too deeply going into lore stuff that won't make any sense to the player. It'd be better to dive into gameplay and introduce that more gradually. The graphics also look quite primitive to me now in a way they didn't just last year. I suppose I have more to compare to now.
But after playing through the first song, I felt I was already becoming immersed in and familiar with the world again, and those concerns largely evaporated. I wanted to write this before continuing on though. I'll continue playing...
[Disappointingly, I didn't write anything else about that playthrough, as the old post ends here? I wonder if I even finished it!]
(This marks the end of the post I wrote ages ago. The following bits are an addition written in August 2023.)
I noticed some bugs when playing through the game this time around, most notably some of the note button circle things staying brightened when they shouldn't, or - far more annoyingly - sometimes the progress recording would be skipped when failing a song and the graph wouldn't be updated. I also saw some notifications from Discord that seemed to be mentions of known bugs, though I haven't checked what was mentioned because honestly the thought of digging up the dusty old files of a flop of a game to figure out some likely-sloppily-written old code isn't exactly one that appeals to me.
I made a few screenshots from this recent playthrough, and just looking at some of them make my heart tingle and my eyes start to well up. I've been lacking motivation and conviction about the writing of my most recent project, Dreamons, thinking maybe I don't have it in me to write characters even I would care about, so seeing this old work and feeling so pleased with and moved by it is perhaps the most worthwhile thing I've got out of revisiting this. I've been thinking a lot about how I should approach that in a similar direction to this, narratively at least.
One of the biggest things that I learned from this - but which I haven't mentioned in the bits I wrote years ago, apparently - was that people prefer games that are familiar, which this isn't. I always used to think that novelty and innovation were desirable and impressive things to be aimed for, though it seems that what people actually want is an experience that's maybe 90+% similar to things they've experienced in the past, with only a relatively small amount of variation.
This isn't that. A lot of people assumed it was a rhythm game, since apparently they're the only genre which focuses entirely on music? Which I find strange. Since this isn't a rhythm game though, people got frustrated when it didn't have the features or gameplay expected of those.
I was told that it was similar to a game called ∞ Space Channel 5 ∞, which I'd never played (and still haven't). I checked the (linked-to) Wikipedia page for that the other day, and saw that it took a whole team of people a long time to come up with the basic gameplay concepts, and it was well-received, with one publication (that I've never heard of, so maybe this is worth nothing) giving it a perfect score, and GameSpy calling it "a work of art in every sense of the word". Others praised it and recommended it for its uniqueness and charm.
Makes me wonder whether this game might ever have got such a reaction, had I had the right connections, and whether it dealing with darker themes than that thing did would have worked in its favour or against it when assessing its artistic merits and accessibility as a fun experience.
There must be so many hidden gems out there that could potentially make a significant impact in people's lives, but they're not able to because there's no way for those people to ever find them, or because the lack of apparent interest from others discourages them from spending the necessary time to reach their most moving moments. Such a shame.
I've been thinking that maybe I'll post about this game on Reddit, probably as a postmortem. From what I've seen in the past, people who read those care most about the money-making data, so I checked those for this. Currently the sales stats look like this:
276 sales of the main game
+ 96 sales of the soundtrack
= US$2,635 gross revenue
Subtracting Steam's 30% cut of the revenue and converting to my currency, that's about £1450.
Every time I look up typical income figures for ordinary jobs I find different values, but I think that amount would be an unimpressive income for a month's work in a mediocre career.
So clearly this game was a flop, though that's not news to me. I never even tried to promote it.
Something that I find more sad is the stats for the achievements. There are three for each song - completion on casual mode, 100% completion on challenge mode, and 200% completion - so it's fairly easy to gauge the progress of everyone who gave the game a go. ∞ You can view this game's global achievements list here. ∞
Of those fewer than 300 players, only 67.2% made it through the easy version of the first song; the tutorial, essentially. Only 2.6% of people finished the game, and only 1% achieved full 200% completion for all songs, though I wonder whether that number's some kind of minimum and maybe I'm the only one who's got it.
It's such a shame, because the game's strongest, most potentially moving scenes happen during the later sections, but it looks like only a handful of people ever got to experience them.
The playtime data is quite depressing:
About half of the people who tried it quit in the first hour. I wonder how similar this is to other games, though, especially unfamiliar indies. The only direct comparison I have is to MARDEK's data, which look like this:
Though that's a much longer game, and I suspect most people who bought it already had fond memories of it. I've probably spent more time with MSS than anyone, and my playtime across multiple full playthroughs is still only 24.5 hours; it only takes a handful of hours to finish.
Hmm, it hadn't even occurred to me until right as I was finalising this post that I haven't checked the reviews on the game in years. So I have no idea if they're positive, negative, or a mix, or how many there are. Honestly, I don't even know if I can stomach the assumed disappointment, so I'll leave that to someone else to check, if you're so inclined.
Next, I suppose I'll write a postmortem for Reddit. Maybe I'll post about my intentions and insecurities in one of the mental health subs first to hopefully soften the inevitable hostility.
If nothing else, replaying this game inspired some ideas for how I could approach some newer projects, like Dreamons, which I'll write more about in another post once I've thought them through a bit more.
6 COMMENTS
Maniafig219~8M
I played Memody several times myself, and I loved it! I believe I said so quite often during beta testing, and I still believe that to this day, it's a wonderful game!
That said, I never got 200% on any of the songs... I did get decent scores though! Here are the best scores I got!
Well, I think it was generally accepted among testers that Vivace is the cutoff point where the game becomes hard, and Course is overall the hardest song... Though Memody's mammoth of a song of course is in its own league entirely! I cannot imagine getting 200% on that!
It's interesting that your feelings now line up with your feelings then, when I revisited the game I also felt it held up well with my initial impressions!
It's interesting that you find the dialogue the best part of the game - I personally think the same thing - since it was actually a pretty late addition to the game! I believe the game originally didn't actually have the ability to revisit the cast to get additional conversations with them. And I am so glad that you did add them, because it fleshes everybody out so much!
Honestly, I love all the characters. Hammer is hilarious, Remedy is precious, and Hearth overall is my favourite just how how positive and inspiring he is.
I actually really like the dialogues with the Symbiolite. Is that the name? I believe it changed a few times! Though, I actually was one of the people who thought the dialogue got too flippant, that the dialogue stood well on its own and the comedic elements often distracted from the emotional core of the scenes. Though it all comes together really well in the end!
I always thought the game's gameplay was really fun, and I don't understand why not more games do it! I really can only think of Memody and Space Channel 5, even though the concept of Simon Says puzzles appears all over in games, so few games actually use it as a central mechanic!
That said, I do remember finding Course somewhat of a brick wall... But it still felt good to overcome it and get good at it! But then there's the final song! That one took me 40 minutes to do on easy mode even on my repeat run! I've never even tried doing that one on challenge mode.
I still have folders of my progress graphs on Imgur from when I gave beta testing feedback! I remember not even getting to 20% for the longest time on Course's song!
What an unusual musical notation, in a text file like that!
You're right about variety though, every song does feel quite unique! And of course they all fit the character personalities. I still quite remember all the personal melodies, listening to the OST!
I never noticed the flute on Remedy's song, or rather, I never really connected that it meant something! It makes sense for Vivace to want to play along.
I have a great fondness for Hearth's song! I think I just love the lyrics "Life is worth living", "I want to know what happens next" and "I want to live". I also love how Memody's own melody from the start of the game returns as the final part of her own song!
For a first foray into 3D, Memody is genuinely impressive! It has a pleasant and distinct look, a nice palette, adequate animations. I love looking at all the different areas the Sindrel live in, they all feel distinct and matching of their characters! And as you say, the feels of the light and day variants are also lovely!
All the attention paid to the emoting system is wonderful! It adds so much to the dialogue to have such bespoke facial animations, I wish more games put in that much effort! I think that's an area where your games since Taming Dreams have really excelled, you convey so much character with body language and expressions!
It's funny, some people when they emulate these 3D Pokémon games actually mod out the outlines... What a shame! I think they look great myself, I think that gen 6 aesthetic is the best the Pokémon games have looked in 3D.
The thing about birds is interesting. It reminds me of this article I'd read about some sort of beetle species where the men would rather try to copulate with a brown bottle than a female beetle because that brown bottle triggered all those signals more than a real beetle ever could. This probably explains a lot about why humans can get more attracted by 2D images than real 3D people sometimes!
I sure do remember that era of the blogs on this site, it sure was tumultuous. I still can't relate to a lot of the stuff that was posted about all the time since pretty much all the research was about what men find attractive in women or women in men! It makes me wonder how different a man's ideal man and a woman's ideal woman looks.
I think someone would need to be really blind or be falling deep into the is/ought fallacy to deny some people have a harder time in life due to their looks. I think a lot of these people see completely average or plain good-looking incels complain nobody wants to be with them due to their outwards appearance when they really just have repulsive viewpoints, but then take a lazy shortcut and assume it must be like that for all incels.
The interesting thing is, these beauty standards can absolutely change over time. Liking women to be slender and thin, or to be plump and thicc. Pale skin going from a sign of nobility to one of reclusiveness, or how sunbathing to get a tanned skin became a thing at some point. And of course these standards also vary a lot by place!
I still think these concepts of beauty and intelligence and such are extremely complicated though, and of course despite general societal trends also very personal. There are norms about conventional attractiveness, yet people's personal preferences often heavily diverge from the norm. Are glasses attractive? Tattoos? A thicc booty? A big penis? There may be social norms, but there'll also always be a lot of exceptions. I'm reminded of all those articles about how being too conventionally attractive as a woman can have a lot of downsides, and how there's almost this expectation to doll up, but not look too good either. Remind me of a Dutch saying, "high trees catch more wind". People probably make more presumptions about some 10/10 Chad or Stacy than some unassuming plain looking person, for better or worse.
Well, I'm sure the course also covered all that stuff! No doubt there's also of course also standards that transcend time and location and are nigh-universal. I don't imagine there's a society where being balding or having crooked teeth or saggy skin is regarded with aesthetic fondness.
2
Maniafig219~8M
For the Sindrels, perhaps the Symbiolite could've been what they base their beauty standards on? Something ostentatious yet also wholly alien.
I know there were times when I suggested using different phrases here and there to at least obfuscate the matter somewhat.
And yet, while the Sindrel society we are told about in the game puts a lot of value on skin tone and have clearly delineated roles for the male and female Sindrels... That is not what we see with the Wintrels at all. The whole point of them to me seems to be that they have transcended these factors, that with time and greater and greater understandings they are more alike than they are different.
Over time, the skin tones of all Wintrels grows paler and paler. Females lose their voice, they cannot read children, while the males have no reason to go and earn their wings.
Hammer succeeded at the conventions of Sindrel society while Dhurge did not, yet now they are both equals in this Wintrel society. Hammer's arrogance that he felt he earned in Sindrel society earned him mockery from the more aged and wise Hearth and Remedy.
Dhurge may not have wings, and yet he gets to live on anyway. Given enough time, I assume no Sindrel could ever tell Dhurge's skin was dusky while Hammer's was bright.
Vivace lived her whole life for music, blissfully eschewing the role society attributes to women without a moment of regret. And when nature takes her ability to sing from her, something that defined Owas next to the Imis, she made instruments of her own, not only triumphing over nature, but allowing the Imis to provide a role that nature only deems Owas should have.
Remedy showed empathy for the Sindrel who had a hard time in life, those born with low status like dusky or defects like damaged limbs. In the end she outright rejects the offer of a high-status Imi to instead spend her final moments consoling and enjoying her time with these low-status Imis instead, grieving over their premature deaths and choosing to live on so she can try to save and care for people.
And it's the same for Course too, she leads a whole life as a conventional Owa, but in what should be her final moments she begins to have doubts and regrets, should she have forsaken the low-status Imi she personally and intimately connected with for a high-status one she connected with less? In the end she chooses to not go into that birthing pod but seek out a new purpose instead.
And of course Hearth looked at all of Sindrel society and felt that their existence was short, brutal and cruel. He didn't want to die, he wanted to live on! And so he did just that, generation after generation, living on and trying in vain to recruit more people, only eventually stumbling on Vivace and seemingly becoming romantically intertwined with her, even though there is no natural child-rearing obligation they would fulfil by doing so.
Honestly, when you look at it, the whole game acknowledges that while society places value on these factors, a society where that does not happen is something that can be built and is something worth striving for.
Memody was cast out for her birth defect, the Symbiolite that fills her mind with toxic thoughts, but the Wintrels embrace and welcome her as one of their own.
The game's messaging overall to me seems extremely positive. Society may be cruel and callous, but it shouldn't be, and it doesn't have to be!
Well, that's my take on the game, anyhow!
It is a big shame the game didn't do better, I think it's incredibly unique and I love that about it! I lament how the rhythm game market is mired by all these reaction games, I want more Space Channel 5-esque games!
And yes, it was me who was always comparing the game to Space Channel 5! Though that series definitely doesn't really have a plot, I'd say it coasts by on having a strong aesthetic and ~vibes~ instead, which it does with charm and poise.
I don't believe only 2,6% of people beat the game! About 20% beat Hearth's stage, I cannot imagine that such a wide margin then gives up on the final song! The achievement must be bugged!
I think you'd be happy to know all of the game's reviews are positive!
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Tobias 1104~8M
Thanks for your positive comment(s)! Which I took a while to get around to because... well, I always do with replies to anything, but I also feared something more critical because I suppose it's hard for me to see past the game's flaws myself (plus general social anxiety issues).
I find your descriptions of how each of the characters triumphed in their own ways really beautiful, and they reminded me of how the whole idea originally was of transcendence and acceptance. I get so lost in assuming that people will only see the surface and reject based on that, and I don't know how much of it is due to social anxiety, past experiences, or the current Zeitgeist, and how accurate these assumptions would even be if more people were to have played it.
I should probably post about it on Reddit, but... maybe eventually. So many things I need to do at some point.
As for some other things you said that I'm responding to out of order:
It seems like it must be so frustrating getting so close to 200% on three of the songs!! I have managed to get 200% on Memody's, but I did make the thing after all. In hindsight, I definitely should have made it MUCH shorter, and there really should have been something clarifying that old melodies were being revisited. It's completely unreasonable to expect the player to remember them!
(There's a bit in Chrono Cross I vaguely remember where you have to remember some melody or something, then 'play' it back by using elements in the correct order to match the notes. I always wondered how anyone could ever do that without a guide! I couldn't even when playing the port recently.)
I think they're called Daemons in the final game? Though they were called Symboliotes at one point? I think that was it. Hazy memories.
I think you (or maybe someone else) described the basic mechanics as like Simon Says before, though I find that interesting because I never saw it that way myself. I had in mind things like this - [LINK] - which I thought weren't uncommon, though it does seem strange to me that there aren't more examples of that kind of thing being used as a fundamental gameplay mechanic (usually just small puzzles as part of a larger game), and that music games typically focus on rhythm when that's only part of what music is!
If it took you 40 minutes to finish Memody's Song, well, for one thing I definitely made it way too long, but also I wonder if that's why so few people got the completion achievement? Maybe they just got frustrated and quit.
I wonder where you read that thing about beetles! Maybe it was when I wrote about it on this blog!! Because I likely have, as I was fascinated by it when I found it and it comes up in my mind fairly often. The phenomena are called supernormal stimuli ( [LINK] ), and I find it interesting wondering about the limits. A narrow waist-to-hip ratio in women is widely considered attractive (to heterosexual men; it is annoying how much of this stuff becomes irrelevant if you're not a basic breeder !), but cartoon women often have exaggerated wasp waists which would cause the body to collapse if real.
I try to avoid talking too much about the evolutionary psychology stuff these days for fear of upsetting anyone (including myself), so I'll shut up about that for now!
I'll have to psyche myself up to check the Steam reviews, which I've yet to do... though it's reassuring to know they're all positive, at least! (I don't think they were before, so I wonder what happened there...)
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GrayNine32~8M
It's definitely a shame more people haven't tried Memody. As I mentioned on Discord, the reviews for it on Steam are actually unanimously positive, so people that give it a shot are pretty likely to love it.
I agree that the best part of the game is the dialog. The characters are all flawed in a beautiful way, and it's great to see how they handle their mental health- Remedy helping others in mental ruts now that she's found her happiness in life, Hammer setting goals and achieving them, Duhrge venting his negative thoughts, Vivace focusing on the positives in life, Course learning to live for herself, and Hearth wanting to live and see the future beyond what his body is built for. The unfolding lore is also very interesting- I read some of your old blogs about Sindrels before playing it, so I already knew about the biology/house plant stuff, but the Wintrels were a surprise to me, and I loved how their "immortality" is portrayed as only positive at first, but then you learn about the fading skin tones and voice loss. I hadn't even put it together that all of the communication going on was telepathic until the voice loss revelation was made, which made it hit all the harder! The lack of voice acting actually helps with this story beat, in my opinion- while Memody is singing the notes, she's "broadcasting" the lyrics. I loved the story so much that I questioned if it could've worked better as a visual novel until I got to Course.
But to talk about that, I have to talk about the gameplay. I was surprised to hear you had never heard of Space Channel 5 before- I guess it's a prime example of simultaneous invention. The two biggest differences (IMO) between the gameplay of the two are that SC5 puts its story between the sections you mimic and that SC5 requires you to stick to the rhythm when repeating the given melody. I personally had no issue with catching the lyrics with the former. I paid less attention to what notes were being played than I probably should have, instead memorizing by ear and reading the lyrics. This may have caused me to slip up whenever I wasn't sure how far away a multi-note gap was, but the lyrics did an amazing job of drilling in specific melodies! Most of the specific ones I still remember from Space Channel 5 are only because of their difficulty, but I'm sure I'll remember "music is the sound of who we are" and the like thanks to the lyrics. The fact that if you only care about 100% rhythm doesn't matter was kind of a relief- my rhythm isn't the best- but I'm not sure the game properly spelled this out well enough early on, or if it did perhaps I definitely missed it.
I mentioned earlier that I wasn't completely sold on the need for gameplay at first, but Course's song sold me on it. This is because of how well the game creates a feeling of encouragement. The "eye" allows you to practice a portion of any song you're having trouble with- if it seems impossible, you won't have to keep redoing earlier parts until you're able to clear it once and know that you can accomplish it. The progress graph is generally encouraging, and helps show that you (probably) are actually making progress throughout your attempts. Unlike most other music games (including Space Channel 5!), you absolutely need to eventually be able to play every portion of every song- even on the highest difficulty on Guitar Hero, you can just go "I'm not good enough" and stop playing notes altogether for a difficult portion of a song and still pass, since it punishes playing the wrong note more than not playing a note at all. It's like the game confronts your own personal demons telling you that you can't beat a difficult portion of the game-
"this part is impossible"
"ok, you can keep practicing it over and over again, no penalties"
"I've been at this for hours, I'll never make it"
"look at your progress, see how far you've come!"
"I'm already doing terribly this run, I want to start over"
"you can't; no restarting, and if you try to keep failing you'll just open up an eye; if you do well enough, you'll be at full health by the hard part though"
Course is where this really clicked for me. This is my progress graph for her (though as you mentioned, a couple times it didn't record):
All of this wound up becoming a beautiful harmony between the story and the mechanics.
The art was generally enjoyable. It's not a game I would recommend to anyone solely to marvel at the graphics, but it's very good for a first attempt, and I'd go as far as saying I like its consistent art style more than the mish-mash of vector art, sprites, and low-quality particle effects that MARDEK had.
Like you mentioned, there were some bugs. I don't expect you to fix any of these- you've already been drastically underpaid for how much work you've put into the game, and touching half-decade old code sounds like hell- but I figured I'd mention them for completeness's sake. The circle glow bug you mentioned happened to me, but was easily fixable by hitting all six notes. The chart update bug also happened to me, and was only mildly annoying. Two-decision menus that took up the whole screen wouldn't let me make a decision with the keyboard- every time you see the screen flash here, it's me pressing one of the six buttons (not just one of the two displayed)- but I was able to progress with the mouse:
The most annoying bug was definitely that if you played the last note too late, the failure message would be the "don't interrupt me" one rather than the "that wasn't quite the right melody" one. It was mildly immersion breaking, and slightly annoying being told something that just wasn't true. I've loved games with far more bugs, and the only one that remotely irked me was the incorrect failure message bug, but I figured I'd mention them to be comprehensive.
At first those achievement stats looked a little grim to me too, but comparing them with other games they actually seem pretty normal. Keep in mind there's no achievement for waking up, which is the first tutorial, really, and compare them with Cave Story+'s:
Completing the second tutorial in both games is at 67.2%/67.7% for Memody/Cave Story (I'll use this formatting for the rest of these percentages), the midpoint is 41.3%/40.5%, the difficulty spike is 30.1%/31.8%, and normal completion is (some number marginally below 21.5%, there is none for doing Memody's song)/19.7%. The hardest achievement in both games is listed at 1.0%/0.7%, but it's possible to earn any Steam achievement without turning the game on thanks to the lack of cheat protection on the API, so I'd be surprised if either statistic is completely legitimate.
It's hard to tell anything from the player dropoff based on playtime, but maybe MARDEK's was unusually good compared to other games due to being a port? It's hard to tell without achievements, which are much easier to compare with other titles.
Overall the game was a beautiful work of art. I feel like I'm at peace with my mental health issues, but I could see the game giving me hope if I played it when I was younger, and even today it makes me feel like I'm not alone. Besides the miniscule bugs, the only other minor thing I would change is the "upcoming first note" hint denoting whether it's light or dark, and even that was only really an issue for the unprompted callback duets during the final song. More people need to know that this game exists.
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Tobias 1104~8M
Thanks for your long comment! I took a while to get around to it because I was dreading something more critical than it ended up being (plus general lack of energy due to my many mental issues). I appreciate hearing things about this game put in a positive light that I've struggled to see them in myself.
From what I recall, I made the game because I knew the brain surgery might impair my memory, but memory-training tasks could potentially help. I thought remembering increasingly long/difficult patterns and repeating them back was a fairly common 'game', though I suppose it's typically only used for short puzzles in larger games, or as those mobile apps that are more akin to newspaper crosswords than immersive experiences. I'd also been wishing I had perfect pitch so then I could better understand - and compose - music, but it's apparently impossible to develop after a certain window during childhood? Relative pitch seems to be trainable, though, and I got an app for that, though just listening to isolated tone pairs made it hard to bother ever using it. So I thought gameifying those things might be beneficial for me personally. Seems so odd to me that the only music-based games seem to be rhythm games, when music's so ubiquitous and rhythm is only a part of it.
I took some time the other day looking through the earliest builds of the game, and initially the intention was to have no visuals for the notes, only sounds! Which would have been even more inacessibly difficult for most people, probably. A lot of the helper mechanics I added to reduce my own frustration when trying to get through the songs!
I mainly drew on the ideas for the sindrels I described in that (embarrassingly) overly-long post because it saved me from coming up with something new while still addled from the surgery, and I can't recall much about how I even came up with the characters, so in hindsight I'm glad the narrative stuff worked as well as it did. Hopefully I can do just as well - or better - in future, more accessible projects.
I really appreciate seeing your progress graph for Course's song! Though I'm surprised you mention that one as the difficulty spike! I thought Vivace's was difficult too, though I suppose my experiences are very different because I had to approach the songs as I made them - tweaking things as I went - rather than consecutively in their final forms.
I also appreciate seeing the achievement stats for another game! In hindsight, I should have had an achievement just for starting the game (though I was using them for things that to me actually felt like achievements, which that doesn't!), and is the Memody's Song one bugged or something? Not that I'll be fixing any bugs at this point.
Cave Story was a port too, wasn't it? I remember playing the original many years ago, and I don't think it was on Steam. (Can't remember how I played it, though. Some random downloadable exe somewhere??)
I know that I should probably post about the game on Reddit, to increase the number of people who might ever get to experience it, but... well, currently I'm held back by insecurities. It's old, weird. Maybe people will hate it for one reason or another, and I don't want to have to deal with the stress. There are bugs that I should fix but don't want to. Etc.
One of several things I'm hoping to get to at some point, I suppose.
2
GrayNine32~8M
Vivace's was definitely harder than the previous songs, but Course's took me at least twice as long! I think without Vivace, Course would've stood out as too much of a difficulty jump, but as-is I think the difficulty is fine. Vivace made me experiment with ways of memorizing parts of the song (paying attention to if a note drops or jumps more than two notes away, looking at the visual cues instead of going by ear, etc) and Course really put those learning tools to the test.
Cave Story was originally a free PC indie game from a solo developer that made basically nothing off of the original release (ironic), Cave Story+ is a paid enhanced version on Steam from after he sold the rights to a company called Nicalis, and AFAIK how most people experience the game nowadays. From what I've seen of both communities, the vast majority of MARDEK players (interested enough to find other players or mods) found the game when they were younger, whereas most Cave Story players found the game via a retail version (whether that's the Steam version or a console one), but a sizeable chunk have been around since before then. If I had to put estimates on both, MARDEK is like 98/2 old/new players and Cave Story is like 15/85 veterans/post-Nicalis? They certainly put a lot of money into marketing the game, so it makes sense, I suppose.
Yeah, usually games have a *very* early achievement to anchor the others; I think one for Memody waking up would've fit the bill. And yeah, Mania and I talked about it a bit on Discord, the achievement for beating the game seems to be bugged, but I can't imagine many people made it through Hearth's song just stopped at the end.
I can understand not wanting to go back to your old code for fixing bugs, especially if you weren't documenting or commenting it very well in your post-surgery rush of inspiration, but I think the game is plenty good to show off on Reddit as-is. If you're having trouble believing in it, please read some of the Steam reviews! The game isn't perfect, but it's very unique, and its strengths have really touched some people!
![[LINK]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/592535605930622977/1139814175661637694/image.png){kind=link}
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