[INTRO MUSIC]
Hey.
Stephanie Essin at GDC.
I'm talking with Do Park.
He is from BYU.
Him and his team won best visual quality last night and IUGS.
And we're here to talk all about the game.
So, Do, give us a rundown of what this game is all about.
Yeah.
So pretty much, it's the first fighting rhythm game.
And it's where you're just trying
to beat the opponent by hitting them on the beat to the rhythm.
And so, it's really fun.
OK.
So I know that you guys have two characters so far.
Talk about that.
Yeah.
So we have Maestra, which is the classical character,
and Riff, who is the rock character.
And we decided to go with just those two genres,
because we felt like those clashed the most.
And we wanted our two staple characters.
So that's why we picked classical and rock.
Very cool.
So you guys won visual quality.
So talk a little bit about what went into that, the thought
behind it, and why it is so unique.
Yeah.
So we had an awesome art director, Vanessa Palmer.
And she pretty much just led us on making sure
that since this is a fighting game that we want to make sure
our characters stand out.
We had a very hard visual hierarchy system,
where we made sure that the characters and their effects
and their animations stood out, they're
all warm colors, and stuff in the background.
We made those cool, so that the player wouldn't
get distracted into playing if they only clash
with the other characters.
Because we wanted it to feel like a classical character,
we wanted her to have classical motifs.
So she's a violin.
And a lot of her design choices around that, smooth flowing
lines.
And then Rock is just this hardcore guy, and so
lots of blocky shapes and a big contrast
versus Maestra's slim body.
Right.
And they both moved so differently.
Maestra was more of this very proper, almost
like a conductor, where the other guy was a little bit more
rough and tumble, banging on the floor type of thing.
So was that intentional?
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
And so we had some awesome animators.
And Fish was the animation [INAUDIBLE]
Him and Vanessa are making sure that everything about them,
like scream, whatever the genre they are.
So Maestra, just like you were talking about,
she was a composer.
We looked at a lot of composers for reference.
We looked at a lot of dancers, things like that.
And then Rock, we looked at a lot of rock concerts and people
and how they acted when they are just jamming out
and stuff like that.
OK.
I kind of noticed that the game was
like Marvel vs. Capcom: New Age of Heroes from Dreamcast Era.
Did you guys have any influence from that?
Yeah.
So we looked at so many fighter games.
It was actually really fun, because we also had the excuse
to play all of them, right?
And so with Marvel vs. Capcom we actually
had referenced some of their characters
and how the game developer pushed their personalities.
And so that's why we were like, this character
is totally super pompous.
Everything about it is pompous.
How are we going to do that with Riff?
How are we going to make him like a rock character?
And so always building upon people's shoulders.
Yeah.
Of course.
Getting influenced by someone, that's really, really awesome.
So talk a little bit about last night at IUGS.
Big crowd, a lot of people in the room.
Were you guys expecting to come out on top like this?
We had no clue.
We were just like, OK.
Hopefully the game will speak for itself.
We just want to go and present and see how it went.
We were super nervous.
We were really excited when they announced
that we were into the showcase.
And then we actually won something from it, so.
Really, really cool stuff here.
So if someone wanted to go play the game, where would they go?
Check it out on Steam.
Go download it.
OK.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah.
All right.
And remember, you guys, check out the links
provided to learn more about the game, to play it,
and to enjoy all the things it has to offer.
And thanks for watching.