I often forget how much music I’ve collected over the years. I’ve got stacks of vinyl (yes, I’m that old), racks of CDs, and a ton of MP3 files stored on my PC. It’s these MP3s that Drive Any Track helped resurrect recently, as I took a crazy, hypnotic drive through my digital music collection thanks to the smarts of a couple of ex-Sony Music guys.
Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon — collectively known as Foam — quit their “cushy day jobs” a year ago to focus on making their own video games. Their latest effort, Drive Any Track, combines their love of music with an admiration for classic racers like Wipeout, F-Zero, and TrackMania. DAT takes any song (in MP3, FLAC, OGG, or AAC formats) and turns it into a race track. You race against the tunes, staying ahead of the beat if you can, while drifting and flipping to help rack up big scores.
And Milborne and Clandillon have bigger plans beyond Drive Any Track, which is currently part of Steam’s Early Access program. The “Mega engine” they’ve created to dissect and gamify songs can be easily applied to other game ideas. And it might even be a way to link gaming with music streaming services like Spotify.
“When we started DAT, the point is you can throw anything into it,” said Milbourne. “Equally, being able to throw anything into on-demand would be amazing. I don’t think were the only people working on that, but I think that’s where the future lies in music gaming.”
Dust off your MP3s
Like most Drive Any Track players, I started out by grabbing random songs from my music collection to see how they’d drive. It felt awesome speeding along futuristic superhighways built from tunes like the little-known (and seriously underappreciated) Theme from BMX and Dntel’s This is the Dream of Evan and Chan. Hypnotic was the best way to describe it.
“The first thing that players do when they get the game is go on a mad journey through their library,” said Clandillon. “Then they settle down and start to compete on a few songs.”
Testament to this sense of musical exploration is the fact that Foam now has 100,000 different track keys stored on its server, each representing a different song (or a different version of a song).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN6-bCeJ-Ow
Feeling goood
The Foam guys say they didn’t actually set out to make a rhythm game. “We wanted to make a game about feeling satisfied,” said Milbourne. “We were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you hit a chorus and something good happens like a loop-the-loop or something.’”
And that’s exactly what Drive Any Track does. It feels extremely satisfying to play, even if some songs make better tracks than others.
“The algorithm’s not going to make every song amazing,” said Milbourne, “but we figured the good ones will rise to the top of the chart.”
“You can see what everyone’s racing, and all the stuff daily, weekly, and monthly rises to the top,” added Clandillon. “That helps people discover what’s good.”
I was curious how the mega engine identified different songs and genres, and apparently it’s down, at least in part, to a combination of ID3 tags and comparisons with LastFM. “It’s a bit like we’ve created our own Shazam in a way,” said Clandillon.
The pair’s algorithm identifies key points in each song, and they can then dictate what happens on every beat, what happens when you hit a chorus, what happens when the volume changes between certain levels, and so on. They can layer those details into Drive Any Track or use them to power a different type of game altogether.
Building a community
Early Access is proving a great testing ground for Drive Any Track, allowing Milbourne and Clandillon to find out which features work and which don’t.
“DAT has a good little community,” said Milbourne. “We chat to them a lot.”
That community helped them realize early on that they made DAT way too hard, incorporating too many aspects that needed memorizing in order to succeed. “The first week we put it on Early Access, tons of people were just like, ‘Oh, I hate those blind barriers. Man, they’re so annoying,’” said Milbourne. “We changed the algorithm so it didn’t make blind barriers any more, and everyone was like, ‘Thanks very much, we really like it now.’”
It is clear demonstration of the power of Early Access when it’s done right. And the Foam guys are making sure they treat their Early Access community with respect as they continue to add features and move towards full launch, which should be early or mid 2016.
“You always get one or two people who are antagonistic just to be antagonistic,” said Milbourne. “But we try to kill them with kindness. I feel that gamers can get a bit disgruntled, but if you’re just really honest about what you’re doing, they just go, ‘OK, fair enough.’ Too many devs try and skirt over problems with their games.”