Wandersong’s Greg Lobanov digs into the game’s intriguing color wheel of song,, why he crafted an aesthetic around a ‘rainbow of sound’, and how he de
A few weeks ago, the humble little music adventure Wandersong snuck out onto Steam and the Nintendo Switch. It caught our attention not only because of its vibrant tone, but also because its primary mechanic stuck out as a genuinely inventive idea that fueled some really interesting gameplay.
So a couple weeks ago we invited Wandersong lead developer Greg Lobanov onto our Twitch channel for a chat about the nuts-and-bolts development process of this melodious game.
For your convenience, we’ve excised and edited together some colorful highlights from that conversation for your perusal below.
The rainbow wheel was actually the very first thing that I did for this game; it was kind of the starting point.
It kind of came… I was just kind of wondering if there was a way to make a game controller into a musical instrument. And I thought like, using this… I really like the way the sticks feel and I thought that there was something there, like some fun to make them feel really like expressive and flowy.
And that wheel was my first little idea. And so the very first thing for this game was just like a circle, a rainbow circle, and a gray screen. And I just could use the controller to play like little GarageBand flute sounds out of it. And right away it was super fun, I thought. The rest of the game kind of grew from there.
Once I saw “ok like playing music with this little wheel is really fun” I kinda started to wonder what would happen if I built… How far could I go with this? What would a game that was built around this look like? And I started to have all these character ideas, and story ideas, and I just kind of like built and built and built on it.
Why does it feel so good? I think one thing that distinguishes Wandersong from a lot of other games that I look at is that the animation and the kind of the character of the game is really specific and directed, so you don’t have like a silent protagonist; the protagonist has a really strong personality. And the way that they move and the way they animate in response to the player’s controls is like really evocative of their personality so I think no matter what you do with it or how you play with it, you always feel really in character and that gives the game a really nice cohesive feeling. Like you’re always really stepping into the shoes of that character.
I definitely think that we really emphasized the music wheel. We made that really fun and juicy and reactive, and have all these little animations and tunes and stuff and it just feels like really gooey and reactive to play with. And everything in the world reacts to the music. Everything is just kind of like connected with each other and reacting to each other, and whe ever you do anything you feel really like…you have a big impact on the game I guess. Your choices are really valid and you really shape the way the game looks and the way the screen moves.
So a lot of that stuff kind of all came together. There was like, I think right at the start, even before I had that music wheel idea, I was really interested in exploring… like i wanted to make a game that was about like positivity and optimism and I wanted to spread like really good values and messages. That was something I was getting really interested in trying to find a way to do.
That was just a big idea floating in my head but I didn’t like have any specific idea for, but then once I came up with the music wheel I kind of was like “Oh, I really feel like this big thing that I want to do can really fit into this little thing I just found.” And that gave me a really strong direction early on. A lot of those early decisions about design and art and layout and whatever all came through that filter, which was a really like clear filter. It was like “ok this is what I want the game to feel like, this is what I want the game to be about, how do I do that?” And this was the best I could come up with
Generally thinking, the entire game is kinda this museum of different props and things that interact with your singing in different ways. So whenever you see something new you just kinda of sing at it, and you see how it reacts to your music and everything works a little bit different.
You’re always singing to something, but different things go in different ways. This is a good example where there’s the bird where you repeat its sequence and it gives you a big jump and then there’s the vine, when you sing to it grows in the direction you sing.
I hadn’t actually seen any game like this before either, so I kinda was like figuring out as I went. I will say that like when I had that first idea with the little rainbow wheel on the screen just playing with it I felt like just making up songs is really fun so I wanted to try to find ways to emphasize that aspect of it and encourage the player to make stuff up and play with it.
That did create a lot of restrictions for puzzle design stuff because we didn’t want to create situations that were really challenging or specific. A lot of it we tried to think about ways to make it feel really cool and let you sing and play with the game and see how things reacts to your music and then the puzzles will be things where like you can do lots of things with this thing and there’s kind of like one thing that it wants you to do, and you kind of play with it until it does the thing that you want it to do if that kind of… It’s very broad, but it’s supposed to feel really playful.
And sometimes it’s not just like you walk in a straight line until the end, but it kind of gives you this really fun little like thing to do to get to the end if that makes sense? It’s a really fine line that we walk, because we want it to be really interesting but we don’t want it to be punishing.
The rainbow actually is usually the last thing we do for every color palette. So that very first test I was doing, I knew there was going to be that rainbow wheel to it but for every area of the game, like… This is actually probably the first game that I feel really proud about how it looks and I didn’t do pixel art or anything, I really tried to take color seriously.
We have a level editor for this game where I can of like just draw shapes and that’s where all the shapes and the platforms in the game come from. And then colors are built into that as well. So every level in the game there’s like a small list of colors that everything picks from, like indexes, so there’s like color 1 2 3 4 5, and every shape is either one of those 5 colors.
The reason we did that is because I could make levels and I could go in and work on the colors and all the levels would change color with whatever I decided the colors would be. So I could kind of iterate on the color palette as a separate project from doing the design and the art and I could fix and work on colors and improve colors without losing any art asset work in other areas.
I’m not a really confident artist but I do feel confident in my ability to really hone in on colors that look really nice. Just out of my iterative process, I know this can be better I know this can be better and keep working on it. So by kind of letting that drive the visuals of the game I was able to work on the colors a lot basically. How I picked them is a hard-to-answer question because it’s really like “oh I wanted this part of the game to feel like this and I really felt like yellow and purple was what did it.”
I’ve been slowly growing on [color in game design.] It wasn’t like a passion that I was really into when I came into games. Like I like Nintendo games, I appreciate color in games, but I didn’t take it seriously as an aspect of my art or game design until probably 2 or 3 years ago.
I met other artists who I really respected and I really like their work and I found consistently that color was a big thing that excited me. I have this theory that like basically any piece of art is just colors that are arranged in a certain way. And like learning how to make a really good drawing or a good composition or render something in a really interesting way, that takes a lot of time and practice and effort.
