Synersteel

Hey, Taskl! We chose to develop the game around three "worlds", each containing four songs that are all tied together through their lyrical content. Marshal did a fantastic job writing in a narrative, so Lars has to battle against Marty and his henchmen to stop from being devoured by the record industry. The worlds and songs reflect that.

Tutorial song: Where ya been, Lars?

World 1: Zombie T-Rex, 21 Concepts, Guitar Hero Hero, Space Game

World 2: Never Afraid, Flow Like Poe, Forgot About Jack, Hey There, Ophelia

Aaaaaaand one more world's-worth of songs, but I don't want to spoil it. They're some of Lars' greatest works, though!

~Anthony

Thanks for the questions!

So the cool thing about working with Lars is how much he understands the creative process. We bounced a lot of stuff off of him as we went along, but for the most part he really let us run with the core concepts that we proposed to him from the start of the project. We made a few adjustments here and there to make sure that it reflected him and his music, but there weren't really any major surprises for either end (at least from what I can tell) throughout the development process.

Anthony, our designer, can talk more about selecting individual songs, but the short answer is that we listened to A LOT of MC Lars music, over and over and over. We wanted to use the songs themselves to do most of the storytelling in the game, so it was really fun working with such a large catalog of original music. We had a lot of team meetings where we shared ideas, but Anthony really nailed it down in terms of what songs we should use when based on story and song/level complexity.

-Marshal

We'll be floating around the comments to jump in on any questions about the game's development or other technical stuff.

From our team:

-Anthony: Art and Design

-Nick: Programming

-Marshal: Writing and Marketing

If you want to check out the game, the demo is free, and we're also trying really hard to get through Steam Greenlight. If you like what you see, it would mean a lot for us if you voted.

Check out the game at MCLars.com/game

Question for Lars: What was the most surprising/unexpected thing about the game development process for you?

Heya, NoraStar, thanks for the great questions about the game. To add to Nick's reply, we wanted something slick, sleek, and "musical" for the game concept. The most important part of the game for us was to convey the "game feel" and combine the way the player feels with Lars' music. So we knew instantly that it needed to have something to do with rhythm. We worked on some things for the first week or two and finally settled on what you see and feel in the game. Thanks again! ~Anthony

Hey NoraStar!

The actual development was actually planned to be a 4 month project, but ended up taking 6 due to some personal issues we ran into along the way. We started in February of this year. We started discussions with Lars about it a few months before that!

The concept was largely Anthony's doing. We knew we wanted a game that worked well with Lars' music, and we did some playing around with music-based mobile games for inspiration. We then combined that with the retro 8-bit aesthetic to get a pretty unique experience!

-Nick