Tired of seeing the same old gimmicky VR titles announced? Symphony of the Machine could be just what you’re looking for.
Stirfire Studios’ latest title (and their first foray into VR) aims to stand out from the pack by focussing more on a relaxing, immersive experience. We had a chat with Vee Pendergrast to tell us more about it.
Hello there. Who are you and what do you do?
Hi! I am Vee Pendergrast, Managing Director of Stirfire Studios, an independent game studio from Perth, Western Australia working on Symphony of the Machine. We make games for all platforms, but right now we are concentrating on VR because we want to experiment with what we can do artistically on those platforms.
Can you tell us a little about SotM?
Symphony is an immersive VR zen-puzzle game. The game takes you into a blasted landscape, where you travel toward and up into an alien-looking tower. Housed within this tower is an ancient machine which allows you to control the weather. By manipulating its mechanism based around an energy beam, you are able to activate certain symbols and regrow the plants of the tower and ultimately the surrounding landscape.
Symphony is a game that cannot exist outside of a VR experience with motion controls, as a lot of the game is about very tactile manipulation of the tower. In Symphony, we wanted to create a sensory experience with beautiful art, entrancing sound design and no time-related pressure. The game world is simply a nice place to be.
Following on from Freedom Fall, what inspired you to make the leap to VR and was it a daunting process?
It really happened more organically. We were working out our other major game project and then members of our team participated in Global Game Jam 2016, which had the theme of “Ritual.” After 48 hours of development, they walked out of the Jam with what essentially was a prototype of Symphony. It was originally in VR because the team wanted to experiment with the platform, but the resulting game really did not need to be a VR exclusive title.
However, it was still a lot of fun. So we showed it to our vendor partners and they came back with the feedback that it needed to be a more tactile experience. We took that feedback and redesigned it closer to its current form and evolved it organically to enhance the gameplay. We were not able to leave it alone once we started work on it at that game jam.
VR at the moment is an exciting place to be working with as there are conventions that have not really been defined in a hard way. A lot of people are experimenting with what the platforms can do, particularly with motion controllers. It can be daunting because there is still a lot of experimentation involved in making the game as accessible as we can.
What was the decision process around making a more peaceful VR experience as opposed to the more intense offerings we’ve seen so far?
Well, creatively it’s simply a far more subtle experience than the original Jam prototype. The real joy that we have had with the reception of Symphony at events like PAX AUS 2016 is that we have a very different product from most other VR developers. We want the players to try intense games, and then come back to Symphony when winding down.
The other major consideration was the design challenges around motion sickness. I myself suffer from motion sickness in VR and real life as well, so we really wanted to make a VR game that was accessible to players who may be confronted by VR’s intensity. They may be first-time VR players or simply people like me who would like to experience VR, but cannot handle the motion sickness of a more intense experience.
From the brief teaser trailer available, SotM hints at working together with technology can help us control climate change. Is this a conscious effort by the team to send a positive message to the world regarding climate change?
Like most things in Symphony, it is subtle in its approach, but yes, there is a theme in there. Members of our team have scientific backgrounds and we are conscious about what messages we can communicate through our games.
What’s next on the horizon for Stirfire Studios?
Right now we are concentrating very hard on getting Symphony shipped.
If you could use 5 words to get our readers hyped about SotM, what would they be?
Beautiful, peaceful, contemplative sensory experience.
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