Sound Shapes’ Level Editor And Trophies Take Centre Stage

Fellows! We are absolutely gagging to get Sound Shapes into your hands. Gagging! We wish it could be with you now, but unfortunately that can’t be the case. We will be bringing it to Europe as soon as we can, and all being well, this will be on 15th August.

But enough of that waffle. Because we’re so excited to get Sound Shapes to you, we thought we’d help kick start your creative imaginations by having one of our studio founders, Jonathan Mak, walk you through creating a level using our level tools. And if you’re the kind of player who is more excited to *play* than create (and that’s fine too) we’re revealing our Trophy mode. Yes, there is a platinum.

So, until this point we’ve been showing you lots of different parts of our campaign mode. Just to recap: we’re providing five different albums with several tracks each, with each album including art and music from a different pair of artists, such as Deadmau5 and Pixeljam; Pyramid Attack and Beck. Beating these levels will unlock their components, and then you’ll be able to mix and match them in your own levels!

In the following video, for example, Jon quickly puts together a level that (among other things) includes Deadmau5 loops paired with Jim Guthrie/Superbrothers hazards, and he throws in some vocals that you might remember from our recent reveal of the Beck album Cities. He even shows off the player’s ability to record timings and change beats-per-minute…and it all sounds (and plays!) pretty good:

We’ve tried to make it not only as fun for you to make songs and levels as possible, but as effortless to upload and share them. We’ve said this before, but seeing what players do with our tools is one of the things we’re all most looking forward to, and we’re certain that you’re going to blow away what Jon did there within a matter of days.

Something that we think (hope?) is going to take more than a matter of days, however, is players claiming our platinum trophy. If you’re a trophy hunter, you’re probably well aware of the pain and glory of trying to beat our pal Shawn McGrath’s Dyad with its intense trophy levels. Here at Queasy Games, we didn’t want players to be distracted by playing albums in a certain way for trophies, or trying to “game” our community. Instead we created two things: Death Mode and Beat School.

Death Mode is an unusual twist in our campaign mode. Once you’ve beaten our albums, you can flip each album over to a b-side and experience intense, single-screen timed challenges to collect notes without dying based on signature moments from each of the album’s tracks. Each win unlocks a trophy, and we hope these will test the skills players have learned in our levels, making each trophy not merely hard-fought, but deeply rewarding.

Beat School is a different sort of challenge: here we challenge all players, even those who consider themselves non-musical, to create beats on a single screen by listening and matching to a rhythm we have created. With luck, these levels will challenge and inspire you to go into the editor and make your own beats – if Jon’s video above hasn’t already convinced you.

Don’t forget: Sound Shapes hits PS3 and PS Vita as a cross-play title on 15th August, and remember, you get both versions for one price! It’s €12.99/£9.99 (20% off for a limited time for PS Plus members) and the trophies are shared between versions too. Did we mention there’s a platinum?