Well, well, well. Fancy seeing you here. We’re back with some exciting news as we all collectively look at the calendar and think, jeez, August?! Already!?

IT'S ALMOST PLAYTEST TIME, BABY!!!

So if you’re subscribed to this newsletter (thank you!) it’s likely that you have some interest in playing the game we’re making called GO PHISH. Well, good news, because soon we’re gonna do a playtest through Steam to get a feel for how that all works, and let you get a taste of the current state of the game.

We first put GO PHISH into new players’ hands back in February, and it resulted in a slew of useful feedback. Since then, the game has been significantly refined and fleshed out, with a brand new dialogue system and a whole bunch of polish. There’s new animations, new music, new phishing targets, and fewer bugs (hopefully).

And that’s why I have decided, halfway through writing that sentence, and without consulting the rest of the team, that we are now officially in BETA! Were we before? Probably? Or maybe not? What does that mean? It means we’re in beta, okay! And it means the team now has to wear shirts and ties to all meetings because shit’s getting real. When we ship the game we will all be in full tuxedos WITH cummerbunds.

Anyway, if you wanna help us out and join the playtest, here’s how:

• Click this link and register your details.

• When the playtest goes live, we will email you a code to redeem in Steam.

• You will get to play the game! Probably for a couple weeks? Wow!

• Then you get to tell us what you enjoyed, like a proper Michelin restaurant reviewer.

Yes, we are still testing on PC only, sorry (no promises re: Steam Deck). But we can’t wait to hear what you think, as we stomp gleefully down the path toward a final product.

A WIP view of our music event in FMOD.

YOU PROMISED ME MUSIC!

Good memory! Let’s get into the meat of this month’s soup.

A great soundtrack elevates everything. As a musician myself, I was always going to have high standards for anything we made. We knew the vibe we wanted for GO PHISH – synthy, crunchy, wistful, with slow-creeping anxiety – but finding someone who could take those adjectives and make them audible was going to be important.

When we were thinking about who to bring on board, there were only a few names that were up to the task. Michael was the top of that list. From his current work as Slow Mons and former work in Brokers, we knew he had the skills to deliver something that both fit the game world AND stood on its own feet as great music in its own right.

This is Michael’s first time working on a video game, and he’s crushing it. You can look forward to an OST release when the game ships, and hey, maybe even a deluxe game version that includes the music for download? To see how things are going, we checked in with him for an official…

I am assured that the blur in the portrait is a deliberate artistic choice.

INTERVIEW

Hi Michael.

Ahoy.

What has been the most fun/interesting part of working on a video game soundtrack, versus a film or your own music?

I’m not much of a video game guy (vive la SkiFree), so from the very beginning this project felt like being invited into a whole new world of creative design.

Having scored a couple of short films, the biggest difference I found with GO PHISH was that the music needed to be fluid and responsive, not just to what the player was doing, but also to the pieces of music it might come from or transition into.

Instead of writing something linear, I had to write music that could exist in layers, with different elements overlapping and recombining without feeling jarring.

In practical terms, that meant focusing on loops and musical fragments that could stand on their own, then take on a completely different feeling depending on what they were paired with.

As development went on, I realised my job wasn’t really to tell a story through the music. It was to support a mood that could shift on a dime. That challenge was surprisingly addictive, and probably the most enjoyable part of the whole process.

What’s been the most difficult challenge?

Writing those damn win/lose stings.

Both listening to and making music, I’m naturally drawn to things that unfold gradually. Music that meanders a bit, like going for a walk with no destination.

Writing five-second musical stabs with a clear emotional purpose felt like trying to tell The Odyssey as an elevator pitch.

I’m used to letting ideas slowly reveal themselves. These cues had to arrive, make their point, and get out of the way before you even had time to think about them.

I need time to effervesce, baby. I need room to breathe.

This concludes the official interview.

Thank god.

Michael uses Ableton Live 12.4, while Beethoven only had Ableton Live 3.

HIDDEN DEPTHS

For a small game, we actually have a surprising breadth of music. GO PHISH is rogue-ish, which means you’ll be doing lots of runs with lots of hacks. We have a metagame for replayability, and know from even our first small private playtest that players were spending multiple hours in the game (and expecting to spend many more). Hearing the same tune over and over again just wasn’t going to be enough.

We decided to tackle this in a few different ways. First, we have a dozen unique tracks that appear in different parts of the game. There’s the main theme, credits theme, and game over tune. There’s a morning atmosphere for the apartment, an evening one, a sleeping variant, and even a special shopping song when the merchant is at the door.

Then there’s the gameplay themes. We have a kickass phishing tune for our dialogue system that nails the feeling of “tense x morally questionable”. We have a hacking tune for all those beautiful card battles AND a special boss battle hacking variant for the Big Phish targets. Plus jingles for winning or losing, of course.

So that’s our bases covered... but we’re also building in some variability. Michael’s busily preparing alternate layers for many of these tracks, and we’ll gently randomise which ones get turned on every time you play. That means you shouldn’t hear the exact same version of the exact same track every time you attempt a hack. Hopefully this goes some way to keep the game feeling as fresh on the tenth run as it did on the first.

Speaking of metagame… next month, it’s probably about time we talked about the “rogue” in “rogue-ish”.

Goodbye.