Online play brings yet another huge amount of complexity to this. “For example, our animations always need to have their impactful moments land at multiples of 0.5 seconds, which we then scale to the BPM and sync to the beat.” This still doesn’t do much to address having to account for input windows, however, which can be make or break in a twin-stick shooter where timing is crucial. “Everything in the game needs to be animated and scripted so that it syncs up to the beat,” says Cooper.

How do you tie music into a gameplay foundation this unpredictable, though? That’s where the help of an audio analysis algorithm comes in. Everything from the items you can pick up, enemies you destroy, to even the dungeons themselves are entirely randomised with each new run, letting Drastic Games maximise the impact of the content a small studio such as itself can produce while retaining a grand scale. Select indie releases like BPM: Bullets Per Minute and Crypt of the NecroDancer have toyed with this shooting-meets-music fusion before, true, but Soundfall ups the ante by making almost everything procedural by design. “The first breakthrough on music mechanics was getting some capsule-shaped proto enemies bouncing to the beat.” And as far as premises go, blasting in time to the tune proved a tempting one. “We were influenced by games like Audioshield, Ikaruga, Geometry Wars, and Assault Android Cactus – high-energy rhythm and bullet hell games with slick graphics and a cool premise,” he says. Creative director Nick Cooper makes no bones about the road to keeping Soundfall on track being long – it’s been five-and-half years since development began after being fully funded on Fig – but the game’s unique combination of twin-stick and music-based action is one that the team, made up of Epic Games alumni, have had faith in right from the very start.

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