Game: Earworm

Earworm is an innovative game for Windows. You make the soundtrack: All music is arranged in realtime based on your game-actions.

Download “Earworm” (zip, ca. 18MB)

Can you find the supersecret Keycombo for starting the game in the supersecret HappyHardcore-Mode?

To run the game in fullscreen-mode, set “fullscreen = 1″ in earworm ini. Resolution and quality settings are there too. THE GAME IS OPTIMIZED FOR 16:9 ASPECT RATIOS AND HD RESOLUTIONS! But 16:10 will most likely also work.

The game features a realtime sample-playing and sequencer-engine which recombinates samples and loops based on musical criteria, completely controlled by the game.
It even features dynamic processing and turntable-like control of playback speed. The idea was to write a game music synthesizer with a simple API like

• play a song
• change to another part of that song at the earliest possible opportunity
• react appropriately to fuzzy dramaturgic measurements like “amount of danger”
• smoothly change tempo
• play stuff in parallel

Of course, the result has to

• always sound good, “musical” and “fitting”
• stay always in sync with the game
• never stop

So I hacked a lot of assumptions about the structure of music into the controller engine, and came up with a manageable system of describing “songs”. The possibilities and permutations are without limit, I will most likely further explore the area of realtime interactive music and visualisation systems.

Enjoy