Empty Clip have just announced an intriguing and gorgeous-looking musical shooter called Symphony Worlds, which is a successor of sorts to their earlier Symphony.
Symphony Worlds takes your music collection and apparently uses it to construct a tiny planet that will thematically match it, but you can also use different sorts of music within your collection to power-up your own abilities and resources. You’re basically a DJ deity.
The trailer showcases the game’s beautiful, stylishly low-poly artwork and shooter gameplay. The world transformations look pretty dramatic.
The one thing this trailer doesn’t do a great job of showing is the interplay between the music and the game. The action happening in this trailer doesn’t really seem to sync with anything from Vivaldi’s “Summer”… but then, that’s not really how music will be used in the finished game.
From a press release: “More than just for world creation, music is integrated at every turn and is the player’s ally as it provides resources and special abilities based on its personality. Need to get out of a jam? Kick-in some heavy-metal. Need to plant a forest? Time for a delicate classical piece. Terrain, weather, day-night cycle, vegetation: everything has an impact on gameplay, and everything is influenced by the music.
That’s obviously harder to show in a trailer, but it’s intriguing. I like the idea of having to power up your combat powers by queuing up death metal, then switching to some Baroque for a building phase.
Empty Clip are preparing for a Kickstarter this summer, and are aiming for a 2016 release for Symphony Worlds.