While rhythm games are a well-established genre, few games offer the same experience as the upcoming rhythm/adventure game Unbeatable. The game tells the story of Beat, a vocalist in a world where music has been made illegal.
Between its impressive VHS-style aesthetic and animation, its charming character designs, and catchy music, the game has a lot to dissect. Game Rant spoke to D-Cell Games, the development team behind the game, to learn more. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Developers Behind Unbeatable
Jeffrey Chiao: So I’m Jeffrey, I’m Unbeatable’s producer and beat map designer.
Rachel Lake: I’m Rachel, I am the lead vocalist and I’m a character voice artist on this project. I also do social media management and sometimes I do art for promotional materials.
Andrew Tsai: I’m Andrew I’m the lead artist, I’m the lead animator, I do a bit of programming on the project and I also do some direction writing, as well - lots of hands, hands in every pot!
Mireille Arseneault: My name is Mireille. I’m a programmer on the project, my role was to take some of Andrew’s work away and let him focus on other aspects of the project.
TJ Maddux: Hey I’m TJ, I’m one of the composers for the project, and I kind of delve into the more live recording stuff, so a lot of the live guitar, bass, drums stuff, that’s me - sometimes help with other audio stuff, but that’s my main thing.
RJ Lake: I’m RJ, I am one of the writers, the other director, I guess, on the project, I do music supervision, and I’m the narrative designer - I handle all of the non-visual aspects, I guess, of how Unbeatable tells the story stuff - moment-to-moment stuff, I do a lot of that stuff. Basically, me and Andrew share a lot of that work, and I don’t do any of the visual art stuff, at all.
Vasily Nikolaev: All right, and I’m Vasily but you can also call me Vas, I”m also one of the game’s composers, but I focus mainly on the less live stuff, so mostly on the digital audio workstation stuff, also functioning as one of the game’s sounds effects artists, and right now, the mastering engineer and mixer for the music.
Unbeatable Interview
GR: How would you describe Unbeatable in 30 as a broad overview?
Tsai: It’s a rhythm adventure, it’s a rhythm adventure with a really deep narrative and some really fun poppy arcade rhythm set pieces.
GR: So my first question is, I was really struck by the, I think you call it a ‘90s VHS anime aesthetic. How did you decide on that aesthetic? Was that decided at the very beginning of the project, or did that evolve during the course of development?
Tsai: It was born pretty naturally out of the work that we had been doing over the course of the project. It wasn’t the first aesthetic that we decided on, but as we continued digging into the story and thinking about what our influences really were, it was just kind of the natural endpoint, I guess, of where the game was headed.
RJ Lake: Yeah, at the beginning of the project, the aesthetic was much more goth, I think, is a good way to put it. When I came on board at kind of the start of the thing, it was very Madoka, like witch-sequences and that thing. And slowly, slowly, we started leaning more into the Gainax anime side of things, the sort of [aesthetic of Mamoru Hosoda's] Digimon: Our War!
GR: The animation reminded me of [Gainax anime] FLCL.
Tsai: Yeah, yeah! That was a huge touchpoint for us, especially the way that that anime felt so much like a concept album put into anime form. We took a lot of cues from that show, from a lot of 90s and early 2000s anime.
RJ Lake: Yeah, and I feel like it’s important to us that we’re not just slavishly imitating that stuff, [although] all of those things are real touch-points for us, like big, big parts of what we’re trying to do.
GR: Do you have any kind of - and I realize this is on the spot - any kind of list of anime that were particularly influential from the 90s and early 2000s?
Tsai: So off the top of my head, I can think of lots of Hiroyuki Imaishi works, Gurren Lagann, Kill La Kill, I think is pretty obvious in there, but also lots of Mamoru Hosoda films, Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! was the big one. Especially because the 90s VHS aesthetic fits in with Digimon, I think. But also just other touch-points would be - like, lain? We took a lot of cues from serial experiments lain, in terms of how we were trying to tell the narrative, and the way some of the environments were presented.
RJ Lake: I haven’t actually even watched it yet, but I think Andrew here is influenced a little bit by Haibane Renmei.
Tsai: Oh, Haibane Renmei.
RJ Lake: But when you bring up lain, you gotta bring that up too I think.
Tsai: They kind of come as a pair, Haibane Renmei was an influential early 2000s show, it has a very specific kind of lo-fi aesthetic that the game also draws a lot from.
RJ Lake: And then the other big touchpoint for us, although it comes a little later, is [the work of Masaaki] Yuasa, you look at Kaiba, especially, and I guess on Andrew’s side, maybe more Mind Game and Devilman Crybaby, that side of what he does, but both of us are really big into Yuasa.
GR: It seems like it has its own distinct style, but it definitely takes from those things in different ways. I just wanted to shift from talking about the aesthetic to talking about tone a little bit. What would you say that the tone of the game is? Would you say it’s just kind of like fun and adventurous [for example], or kind of like dramatic and tense?
Tsai: So, I think RJ can probably do this a little better, but if I were to give a SparkNotes version of it, it’s surface-level, it has a very adventurous pop-punk aesthetic that kind of permeates through the story. When you get into it, you’re going to feel that energy kind of coming out of the game, but it’s not a game that is solely about having fun, and it’s not, you know, a continuously, just perpetually wild ride, it has some real emotional beats that we want to dig into. RJ, if you want to expand...
RJ Lake: Of course. And besides the fact that there’s downtime - you know, there’s a lot of downtime in the game. You see a little bit in the trailer - there’s a lot of exploration, walkaround segments and things, but even moving past the pacing side of things - FLCL is a really good comparison, because while that has a super high-level slick, poppy adventure tone, and there’s a lot of action set pieces in that, the thing that everyone takes away when they come away having seen FLCL is a lot sadder than that. It’s a much more melancholy feeling than you have even when you’re in the moment of watching the thing. And I think a big part of that - like people refer to the "coming-of-age" aspect of these stories, from the early 2000s, as the big phrase to blanket them all together.
RJ Lake (continued): But it’s deeper than just a description of “OK, you’re learning who you are as a person” - it’s more, "you’re learning who you were as a person," that’s really the key thing - and Unbeatable is very much about that. So there is this very strong tinge of melancholy that kind of is an undercurrent to the whole experience, and while we’re not wallowing in it at all, it’s going to make those moments when things kick into high gear hit a little harder, because they actually have something that’s powering them beyond just an adventure.
GR: Would you be able to talk a little about the personalities of Beat and Quaver? I think those were the only two characters who have been introduced so far.
Chiao: There’s quite a few, but there are the only two so far we've begun talking about.
GR: Yeah. I saw there were others on the poster.
Tsai: When the demo comes out, we’ll be introducing you to a few more. Yeah, RJ, if you want to take this one...
RJ Lake: Sure. So Beat is our central character and kind of our audience surrogate, as well, and you’re sort of finding out about stuff around her as she is, in step with her, but it’s important that she’s not a blank slate - so you have the ability to ask questions as Beat, and do dialogue choices as her, but her personality's the thing that’s important, and the way she responds to things. She is a little bit rebellious, she is snarky, you know, all of that is important, but the thing that really grounds her is the fact that, despite all of her willingness to just ignore everything around her, she can’t. So she comes into a narrative, being fully willing to - or thinking she’s fully willing to - or thinking she's fully willing to just say “f--- everyone else,” and she’s just completely unable to actually let herself do that.
RJ Lake (Contined): And then that kind of becomes a more powerful, like, pulling force for her and the narrative as things go further. Quaver is like the complete polar opposite of that. A big part of why Beat falls into the narrative of the game is the fact that Quaver is just sort of almost obliviously pulling Beat along for the ride. She is much younger than Beat is, but she has a head on her shoulders that’s much stronger than Beat did at that age. And [Quaver] is extremely willful and extremely idealistic, and kind of forces Beat into situations she probably wouldn’t be in otherwise.
GR: Okay, and so, shifting a little, story but also gameplay, will the story have a branching narrative? I saw there was a lot of thought put into the dialogue, and that the player has quite a few options to choose from at certain points. I think there was some dialogue about a horse museum in the [teaser].
[Everyone laughs.]
RJ Lake: We’ve gotten a lot of comments about the horse museum.
Tsai: So to be clear - when you play through Unbeatable, the major story beats are going to be the same every time you play through it, no matter how you do it, how you decide to do dialogue choices. So the major story beats are going to be the same. We’ve put a lot of effort into crafting one singular narrative that you’re going to be going through. What changes is some of the context around the events that happen. Characters you meet, characters you talk to, the people that will show up at certain moments; they will change depending on your actions, who you decide to help out in side quests, dialogue choices that you make. So some of the minor details around the story, some of the characters you’ll meet - those will change. But the structure of the story and the major beats, and how the game starts and how the game ends, is going to be the same, regardless of the choices that you make.
GR: I imagine it must have been kind of difficult to actually implement the dialogue system - I read in your developer updates that you had interruptions in conversations.
Tsai: Yeah, Mireille ended up doing that, a huge amount of work overhauling the dialogue system that we had beforehand.
GR: What was the impetus for rehauling it?
Arseneault : Just wanting to add a bunch of features that RJ wanted.
RJ Lake: Yeah, it’s my fault, basically, so I was like “there’s one thing I wanted to do that’s very specific in the conversations, and we can’t do that, how do we do that?", and then Mireille would then basically go and make it work.
Arseneault : So RJ would say, like, oh I want to do this, and I would be like, OK.
RJ Lake: Basically, that’s how all of these conversations go, and interruptions [by NPCs during in-game conversations] is a big part of that. I’m so frustrated sometimes with pacing and dialogue in games especially - where, [say] you play Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout: New Vegas has some great dialogue, but the pace of the dialogue is very unnatural. You will talk to a character and you will say a thing, and you will have a chance to respond and then they’ll say another thing. It’s like a stage play. I like the way those have their own rhythm, but that’s not how people talk.
RJ Lake (continued): And I’m very inspired especially by games like Oxenfree and Firewatch, that have more of a focus on “we’re going to give you two characters that are actually talking and you also get to steer the narrative a little bit.” So interruptions are big, characters talking at the same time, so we have side-by-side conversations where you will be able to say a thing, but also the [other] characters’ [are] kind of talking at the same time, maybe [talking] over you a little bit, or just making a snide comment on the side, all of that stuff is really important to just getting the flow of the dialogue to feel more natural, even if it is just text most of the time.
GR: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I guess shifting [from] dialogue to the gameplay - I saw that you focused on creating a battle system that was easy to pick up, based on a two-button system? Can you describe the process of coming up with that?
Tsai: Oh - the gameplay, the battle gameplay was probably the thing in this game that had the most iteration that went into it.
RJ Lake: Two years?
Tsai: Two years! Two full years of just making things, seeing whether or not they worked, and if they didn’t, basically making something else. We experimented a lot with a bunch of different systems, and over the course of two years, we slowly whittled down the gameplay to a two-button system, I think somebody we talked to once described it as “street-style taiko.”
Tsai: So the gameplay used to be a lot more in-line with say, like, One Finger Death Punch. And we were toying around with it, but we felt a little constrained in two areas. One of them was that the system itself was really hard for people to mentally grasp, because the way that the system used to be is that you would have to keep track of enemies coming in from the right and the left simultaneously, and we found that a lot of people had issues, especially on lower difficulties, thinking about a rhythm game where you had to keep track of how far enemies were from you to the beat on both sides of your central character. And we also ran into another issue where it was really hard to expand on this system. Like, it was very up-front complicated, but then there also wasn’t a whole lot of maneuverability in terms of the enemy types we could put in, [or] some of the specific gameplay tweaks that we could do to liven things up during moments.
Chiao: Yeah, the idea was to flip the combat system we were working on for the longest time, the other way around, so instead of being mechanically complex from the start, but then it’s overall very shallow, we wanted to make sure that the game starts out very simple to pick up, but it’s a very visually complex game.
RJ Lake: Right, and the thing that actually really surprised me is that we did a demo last weekend and we had a bunch of feedback from that. Basically everyone who had played the game beforehand said it was harder this time, despite it being pared from 4 buttons to 2. And I think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that we can throw a lot at you if you are only thinking about two buttons.
Chiao: There’s a lot more to flesh out for challenge, because that was a pretty big sort of compliant they had back at the original event, when we showed it at past cons; ironically the game [was] a little bit too easy, once you [got] the hang of that kind of hurdle of figuring out the two sides.
Tsai: Yeah, it wasn’t so much complaints so much as it was us realizing it was way too easy for people to full-combo songs within a few hours of picking the game up.
GR: You mentioned difficulty levels. Have you determined how many there will be?
Tsai: So it’s flexible and I think Jeff can expand on this a little more. But the way we’re approaching difficulty is not so much in terms of difficulty tiers, where people will be cordoned off into, “easy, medium, hard,” but it’s going to be a bit more nuanced, like [with a] sliding scale, so people can find how well they can play, and will be able to have the most fun with the game. And then in addition to that, we also have a lot of accessibility features to make sure that if you are bad at rhythm games, if you’re unable to play rhythm games for whatever reason, you’ll still be able to find something to get something out of the game.
Arseneault : Yeah, to enjoy the story still.
Chiao: I'd say as an addendum to that, we still have those difficulty tiers, especially in the game’s kind of arcade mode, we’ll let you decide - beginner, easy, normal, hard, stuff like that. But there’s just so many factors that make a rhythm game more or less [hard for] people? Or I guess really any game, but specifically this genre, and we want to give people as many options as we can, I would say that [we will] give people as many options as we can, and especially in the final version of the game, to really tailor it to make the game something that is the right difficulty for them, so that’s definitely offering the best we can [do].
RJ Lake: Right but there’s a tendency in rhythm games to - you’ll have a medium difficulty that a lot of people can play, and then the second you go from that to the harder difficulty, instead of it being like “okay, this is harder,” it’s like a cliff that is impenetrable to most people.
GR: Yeah, I was playing Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory last year, and changing from playing One-Winged Angel on medium to hard is, you have fifty more notes, and I understand [the concept of the cliff].
Chiao: Yeah, that game has a very big cliff - if you’ve played the Performer mode in that game [especially]- if you have experience playing rhythm games, the Proud difficulty was like butt-easy, but if you turn on the Performer mode, it’s actually unreadable and I just can’t play it.
RJ Lake: So it’s super important that we avoid that problem and make it a little bit more granular.
Tsai: I guess saying there aren’t going to be tiers is a bit [inaccurate] - it’s not as accurate as saying, there’s going to be a better gradation in terms of how we present these options to people.
Arseneault : We’ll still have those tiers, but you’re going to be able to change a few more things to tune it to your ability.
GR: So I wanted to shift gears to talk about the music. So there wasn’t too much music in the trailer, but I really liked the vocal track, and I was wondering, what was the approach for composing that specific piece, as well as just going forward for the entire soundtrack?
Maddux: Oh man, that song was a heck of a ride, I tell you what - so basically the way we composed music - again, like, going off of what Andrew said, what RJ [said] - I don’t remember who it was, but how the story has its moments where it’s super fun and, you know, you’re going through the story and having fun, but you also have those specific story beats where it’s a little more melancholy- and so what we’ll do is, RJ will give us a very specific part in the story, give an overview, and we will compose something that ties into that, because the game being about music, the music should tie into it and not just [be based on the strategy of] “let’s just grab a track from this and just throw it in here.” It should actually go with the story, so, RJ had this specific set piece idea for the track called “Waiting.” It [was] like a year ago or something like that?
RJ Lake: I think it might actually be more than a year ago, that I wrote out the initial treatment.
Maddux: Yeah and it was this wild thing where it was like, "it needs to be punk but it also needs to be acoustic for a while, and then we have to switch gears into a whole big rock chorus," and that’s actually what you hear in the trailer, is that big chorus, that big explosion, but we’ll just kind of start with what influences this song needs and what we’re thinking of for this specific one, it was like, LCD Soundsystem and like, a Smash Mouth song, but I don’t remember which one -
RJ Lake: Right, so the in-progress title of the song was Flow Punk for the longest time. Because it was the drum-filled intro from Flow by Smash Mouth, which - [while] not an amazing [song], I want to be very clear here -
Maddux: I like the song, what are you talking about?
RJ Lake: It has a really good energy, it has great energy to it, and then Punk by Gorillaz, was the other thing, like a stripped down, stupid-on-purpose approach - we’re not making like a real punk track, but we’re going to do something that has a punk attitude to it. That song has a vibe that I was looking for, and then the other thing that was really big on top of it was Movement by LCD Soundsystem, because - yeah, it kicks into a different gear like halfway through, almost like a twist, it’s like the equivalent of a narrative twist in a song, it really hits you out of nowhere if you’re not expecting [it].
GR: What genres would you say the overall soundtrack will cover, if you can categorize it?
Maddux: Let’s see, so as you heard, rock, just straight up rock, like punk rock, like that - we’re going for that early 2000’s/late 90’s rock that you hear a lot in that era, right? It feels like a lot of it has that inherent nostalgic melancholy tinge to it, that we have in our story, that’s the big thing we want to hit in there. And we’ll have other things as well, as the story goes along, I think RJ might have some ideas, or Vasily might have other genres that you’re thinking of.
Nikolaev: I’d say, I think this is a result of the evolving aesthetic of the game. Like as we’d mentioned, it used to be more goth, I would even describe parts of the game kind of being cyberpunk-y - and like, just like as a quick tangent, the game’s story -
Arseneault : Just to interrupt, cyberpunk as a genre, not the game.
Nikolaev: Well that was before the [Cyberpunk 2077] game even came out, right, it didn’t even have hype [at that point], but - yeah, it's the genre. The game used to go under a genre-specific chapter [structure]- like each chapter would be a specific genre, but I don’t think we held on to that very long, but as a result -
Chiao: It lasted half a year
Nikolaev: Yeah, lasted a half-year, but as a result of it, there are some leftovers that makes some songs feel more fusion-esque, because of that. Because we’re focusing more on rock, but we have leftovers of stuff like plunderphonics, funk, EDM, breakbeat, that type of stuff.
RJ Lake: A lot of electronic genres.
Maddux: Yeah, so I think we’ll still have an essence of those more electronic songs, it’s gonna be just big blowout rock at this point, this is kind of what we figured out.
Tsai: To be clear, the reason for the musical styling of the game has sort of shifted from trying to fit the theme of the story to trying to fit the characters in the story. Over the course of development, we’ve developed the main cast into what is ostensibly like a garage punk rock band, and so the aesthetic of the music sort of fell in line with that pretty quickly, after we finally figured out what we were doing, basically.
Chiao: That was the third draft of the game’s narrative, [and that] was that point when it began to click in.
Maddux: Yeah, it was like late 2019 when we finished [the song] “Empty Diary,” and it felt like that was, like, “OK, this is where this game is going.” I don’t know about y’all, but that’s how I perceived it.
Tsai: Yeah, “Empty Diary,” which is-
Nikolaev: Definitely the turning point.
Tsai: Yeah, that was sort of the song we ended up rallying around in terms of our music feel.
RJ Lake: Yeah, for sure.
Arseneault : And it’s also the one that plays on the main menu, I believe.
RJ Lake: Right now, yeah.
GR: I realize this is rewinding quite a bit, but what was the initial idea for the game, how did it come into being?
Tsai: So way back into 2018, the game started as a project between Jeff and myself, and we were basically just working on it in our free time, and I think we developed a short treatment that was just - it was a weird story about a Japanese pop idol rebelling against her producer. And with that in mind, we kind of built out a cyberpunk-ish world, and we sent it around to people, trying to get composers to come onto the game; this is where we met RJ and TJ and Vas. There was a brief period of experimentation with this, and over time the story soft of shifted to another treatment we had, where it was more of an Alice in Wonderland, you were going through very bespoke different areas, different worlds, kind of like a Mario platformer -
RJ Lake: More, I feel, like a Mario RPG -
Tsai: Very Paper Mario-esque.
GR; It sounds almost like Sayonara Wild Hearts.
Tsai: Oh, yeah, it was surprisingly similar to how Sayonara Wild Hearts ended up being, especially because I think over the course of development, at least one time, RJ brought up the point of trying to make [Unbeatable] a seamless musical experience, like Sayonara Wild Hearts ended up being. All of this was way before Sayonara Wild Hearts was even announced.
RJ Lake: Which was funny, because after that game came out, they did an interview where they said they cut a bunch of stuff that we ending up doing - they had a whole open-world with walkaround stuff, walk and talk segments, but they just cut [them] from their game. And it’s just fascinating to see kind of the opposite direction for them as it ended up with us.
Tsai: And to be clear, the way that Sayonara Wild Hearts pulled off that idea was really exceptional, I think everybody on the team was kind of relieved that we didn’t [follow that path] when the game came out because that game is a really exceptional rhythm game.
GR: I wanted to wrap up with a couple of questions about the Kickstarter, but first, I wanted to ask, what is the process of tuning the gameplay to the music? I know that you describe it as arcade perfect, and I was wondering what that was like in terms of which comes first - the gameplay experience or the music around which that will be based?
Tsai: So many moving parts in that one, for sure. So the music, the music is generally made first, and what Jeff will do, is they’ll take the music and they will map out where the enemies should be over the top of that music they get.
Chiao: It’s a very classic beatmap-like kind of style design, very similar to what you’d see in a lot of like modern and traditional rhythm games.
Tsai: So the same way someone might make a custom map in StepMania or whatever, that’s very much the same process that we go through and try to map out where the enemies come in, which type of enemy will be, and lining all of that up with the music. When you play the game, it’ll feel much more like, as we said, “taiko,” than it will feel like your Crypt of the Necrodancer, where we are explicitly hand-mapping out where every enemy is going to come in, what type of enemy it is, stuff happening in the background.
RJ Lake: The other thing that I do want to bring in here is, while the music does come first, sometimes, especially when it comes to story sequences, rather than just arcade stuff, because we’re mapping what’s going to be happening in the scene, and we’re often creating music to that scene, with in the example of “Waiting," there are going to be times where gameplay moments will be thought out way in advance of that, because we have them timed to certain things, or that we need the music to do a certain thing here because we’re going to have a certain gameplay element in this spot.
Tsai: One of the reasons why “Waiting” took so long to make was because there was last of going back and forth and iterating on the song in order to make it match the pacing of the gameplay that we wanted. That took a while - I made like 4 different versions based on different cuts of the song, over time.
GR: So, I also saw that on the teaser for the Kickstarter, it mentions something called Unbeatable [white label].
Chiao: Unbeatable [white label]. is basically our demo.
Tsai: So It’ll be a demo but it’s a demo in the same way that, say, The Adventures of Captain Spirit is a demo for Life is Strange 2.
GR: So it’s a separate game.
Tsai: It’s a separate game, it’s a standalone game that we’re going to be updating weekly, with new story content up until the Kickstarter ends. We have four planned updates, each of them will bring new songs, new story content, in an episodic manner. And when all is said and done, that game is going to have its own little bespoke narrative that digs into the lives of some of the characters that you’ll see come back in Unbeatable proper.
GR: Is it canon to the main game?
Tsai: It is canon.
GR: That’s really cool. As far as the Kickstarter goes, do you have any stretch goals you’d want to especially emphasize? Any rewards you’re particularly excited about?
Chiao: So in terms of stretch goals, we’re probably not going to reveal what they are until we get full funding, until we reach our goal, but...
Tsai: But I will say we do have one that I think people will really want.
Chiao: I think people really like making their own levels, that’s something that if we get additional funding, we’ll be able to make a standalone beatmap editor for people to start messing around with their own music.
Chiao: In terms of rewards...
Tsai: If you pay 10,000 dollars to us, we can put a restraining order on ourselves so that you never have to look at our faces.
RJ Lake: We are always looking at those stretch goals that have people say “Oh, we'll fly out to meet you, or we’ll fly you out to meet us” and personally, just personally speaking, that has always seemed like something that - I just feel like maybe, especially now with COVID - not great.
GR: I think of the Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter.
RJ Lake: Oh boy.
Chiao: Dinner with Keiji Inafune, I don't know how that went...
RJ Lake: Oh boy, I can’t even image
Chiao: But yeah…
RJ Lake: We look at - one of our favorite ones in recent memory is “you’ll get blocked by Hideki Kamiya personally” - really good.
Chiao: It’s basically on that level. But we do actually have a lot of rewards down the line, especially when the Kickstarter's set up and people are seeing this
Tsai: If you want art books, We’ve got art books.
Chiao: Digital soundtrack and physicals, we’re looking to do physical production for soundtracks and art books.
GR: Are you planning to integrate Kickstarter [backers] into the game, I know a lot of different games take approaches to how they integrate -
Chiao: We don’t have any plans...
Tsai: In terms of concrete plans, we don’t have anything yet. But we do have some things in mind, that we’re thinking about. All of that stuff, we’re going to be constantly working on polishing up and thinking about what it is that we really think will help the game in the long run, in terms of not just like Kickstarter stretch goals, but also, like, in-game backer rewards, things like maybe unique outfits for the main characters.
Chiao: That hasn’t been locked down. I will say though that we’re doing the achievement goals thing the way you’ve seen in other Kickstarters, where they encourage backers to help follow the account, spread tweets around, stuff like that, so we have goals like that set up and they’re going towards upgrading [white label] with new levels.
Tsai: So the more [white label] you play, the more [white label] there will be to play.
GR: That is very cool. One other question I had was the animated intro for that trailer is really incredible; is that used as the game’s intro, or are these just scenes taken from throughout the game?
RJ Lake: That’s taken from within the game
Tsai: Yeah, well, so basically, all of the animation is done in-house, mostly by me, we did hire another animator, she has just started working on the game, so you’ll see some of her work in [white label] as well. As of right now, the majority of the animation work has mostly been done by me and then that’ll be like the key frames, all of the line art, and after that’s done, we send that out - or I send that out to the rest of the team, and they make sure it’s all colored in and the lines don’t look terrible.
RJ Lake: So yeah, every single person on the team acts as an artist.
Arseneault: Until last summer, Andrew was also the only programmer on the team. That’s also part of the reason I was brought in. If Andrew does all the animation, that’s really time consuming and then no one’s doing the programming.
RJ Lake: Yeah, we need to have all that stuff - as the funding increases, if we can get enough money for it - the big goal, for us, is to just have as much animation in this as 1 or 2 episodes of a full thing.
Tsai: So what we have in the trailer is a little sneak preview of what we’ve been working on throughout the game, it’s a little preview of some of the cutscenes, like, the aesthetic of some of the fully-animated sequences in the game, all of the artwork is hand-drawn 2D, there’s no “flashtweening,” there’s no puppet animation, there’s no 3D animation, all of it’s hand drawn.
RJ Lake: I wouldn’t see there’s no 3D animation, but there’s no 3D animation on the characters.
Tsai: There’s no 3D character animation, but there’s some fun little compositing tricks that we're doing in terms of making sure that we can blend these 2d assets into our 3d in-game backgrounds.
RJ Lake: We’re very into like the way that especially early-2000’s anime - you’ll see a lot of times when they’ll have 3D-composited background elements in scenes, for big camera moves especially, and we want to do that but in real time.
Tsai: But to give an example, all of the in-game character platforming animation is all hand-drawn 2D animation, and that means that for every single angle that we can walk, jump, run, wall slide, idle, for every single one of those angles, that is a unique animation that gets made and put into the game.
RJ Lake: It’s like in a PS1 RPG, when you have the characters that have like isometric angles but they’re in like a 3D environment, it's the same type of work except scaled up with actual cel animation style drawing.
GR: I realize that - like, is there anything that anyone wanted to mention in this interview that I haven’t asked a question that would trigger it? In other words, if there’s anything which you want to mention before the end of the interview, please feel free to do so now, it doesn’t have to be strictly to any of the questions that have been brought up.
RJ Lake: Do you want to talk like the vocal work, for the process for that?
GR: Absolutely.
RJ Lake: Yeah, I think Rachel hasn’t really had a chance to cut in about how [that works].
Rachel Lake: Oh, I don’t know what I would say! [laughs]
RJ Lake: I just felt like we should give you space to talk!
GR: In terms of the vocals, are you taking the perspective of specific characters? Are these songs from the perspective of Beat or [not]?
Rachel Lake: Yes. I’m singing as Beat, so she is singing the songs, yes. Actually, it’s interesting because I haven’t really done a lot of voice line work yet. There is going to be some light voice acting in this game, if that’s okay for me to say guys, I don’t know if that’s OK.
RJ Lake: Yes, you’re all right.
Rachel Lake: And over time, it’s given me an opportunity - we’ve done a lot of re-recordings of the songs, because I’ve kind of changed her voice over time, and it’s kind of allowed me to flesh out how she is going to sound.
GR: I know that set pieces are a big part of writing the songs, but in terms of the way that you actually vocalize them- this might sound kind of silly, but if there’s a very tense battle scene, are you trying to make Beat’s voice sound like she’s in a tense battle, or is it something where [it's not related]?
Rachel Lake: Yeah. There will definitely be those kinds of elements, and [the rest of the team] actually had a really good idea if I’m allowed to say this, guys, about the vocals; if you mess up, sometimes I might sing not-so-great, or sound like I got hit or something - we’re looking to integrate that kind of thing.
Tsai: I will say that when I first listened to the little mistake track we’re thinking about blending into the combat, I burst out laughing.
Rachel Lake: It’s really fun, it is really fun to do for sure.
Tsai: Yeah - I remember over the course of “Waiting,” because “Waiting” is a song where Beat is basically screaming the whole time, I remember when Rachel got off of her first pass for the song, and she just like -
Rachel Lake: I couldn’t talk.
Tsai: She just couldn’t talk.
Rachel Lake: I felt like I’d just been to a concert, which is kind of the point, but, you know - I had to recover for a day.
GR: If I understand right, Beat singing is illegal?
Chiao: It’s pretty illegal.
RJ Lake: It’s very illegal.
Tsai: There is a reason for this that we’re putting in.
GR: Does it influence the way that you voice Beat? Or are there certain aspects to the songs that are kind of [influenced]?
Rachel Lake: I mean, for sure.
RJ Lake: I think that as far as the songwriting process goes, we definitely keep that in mind, although I think the actual songs themselves are less about that than they are about other things personal to the characters.
Chiao: They’re more tied to characters than they are to the world, again, like we said before.
Tsai: As far as the extent of the illegality of the music, that ties into the narrative definitely, and it also kind of influences the rebellious streak, the strand of rebellion that goes through all of the music in the game. But in terms of specifics, a lot of them are tied to whatever specific story beat is happening, what the characters are going through.
RJ Lake: That’s more lyrics though. I think as far as Rachel’s performance, she’s modulating that based on the moment in the story.
Rachel Lake: It’s just like voice acting, you just have to get into the mindset, and step into the shoes of the character, and consider how they would feel in the moment, because I’m not just recording vocals for a song, technically I'm voice acting when I’m singing, so…
RJ Lake: Right. That’s actually a good point too because when we are doing a set piece, we’re not just making a music video. It has to feel synchronous with the world itself - it can’t just be like, “oh, okay, this is a song we’re playing as an insert track as other things were going on.”
Chiao: Time for the AMV! [laughs]
RJ Lake: It’s not an AMV, it’s just these characters are actually playing the music, and while we can fudge that a little bit, we want to make sure that all of the beats and elements of those set pieces actually work with that conceit, so you’re going to have moments where characters have to struggle with plugging in an instrument while things are happening. It’s an important part of how we construct these sequences.
RJ Lake: The songs are really their songs, and when they play the song, they’re really trying to play their songs, and I think that’s the big running thing throughout all of the way that the music blends with the game.
Maddux: The songs themselves aren’t about music being illegal necessarily, it’s more about “hey, these are songs we’ve written that we want to play.” So the songs come from the characters themselves, and that’s where the lyrics come from, the characters and talking about their own internal struggles.
Chiao: The legality of the music plays into the challenge of them actually being able to perform that. But the performance of the songs is where that whole side of things come in.
GR: You mentioned earlier that it would be open world. Is there side content? Or is the idea that it would be just a linear shot but the events would change based on who you talked to or how you did things, or side quests?
Tsai: So it’s not so much open world as it is open areas. So - there’s going to be a handful of locations in the game, and they’re going to have a lot of different places you can go to; if you think about how Tokyo in Persona 5 is structured, it’s going to kind of feel like that, where there are lot of different places that you can go to, shops that you can enter, people you can talk to, side quests you can do, and all of this will happen on a day-night cycle that progresses, not in real time, but according to the actions that you decide to do. Basically, throughout the story you’re going to be on a time-limit and you’re going to have to prioritize certain side quests over others. And certain side content over other things, depending on whatever it is that you really want to do in a video game.
RJ Lake: On a given play through, you can’t see every single piece of side content, you can’t see all the side quests. Open world is accurate, but it’s accurate in the way that it's accurate to call Yakuza open-world, we’re not making a Skyrim thing. Density is very, very important, there’s a lot of stuff in those small areas, and you can do a lot of things in that space, but it’s not like giant, wide - you’re not exploring a Breath of the Wild - type huge open area.
GR: Does Beat have stats? A big part of Persona 5's day-night cycle is you’re constantly trying to grow stronger so you can take on the Palaces.
Tsai: So Beat does have stats, but they’re more associated with the narrative side of things than the rhythm game side of things. So what it'll be is, depending on what you do, you’ll have different dialogue options that you’ll be able to choose and this is all dependent on the kind of the side content that you decide to do. And then going further than that, there will be an element of this where we have this thing called setlists, where basically you go and you put on a performance, and sometimes how well you do in that performance does depend on some of the side content that you decide to tackle. We can’t really go into depth on that system yet, because it’s still in the works, and it’s all subject to change -
RJ Lake: A good example here that we can talk about - in one of the areas, for example, the characters aren’t really as comfortable at being a band yet, so they’re new at the whole thing. And you can devote some of the time that you’re spending in these areas to finding a practice area that’s good for them to just buckle down and practice. And if you don’t do that, the songs that you end up playing later on in that whole set list, they will have much sloppier instrumentation, and the characters will be slightly out of time and slightly out of practice, and so there’s things like that, that will be affected by how you are interacting with the story and what things you’re prioritizing.
GR: Thank you so much for your time, it’s about an hour so I think I’ll wrap up. Is there anything anyone wants to say as a closing remark? Anything of that nature, please feel free.
Tsai: I’m just proud of everybody on this team and what they’ve done, and I hope you’ll go check out our Kickstarter April 6th; also, play [white label]!
Arseneault : I’m also really happy with the work of everyone on the team,
Chiao: It’s been a long time coming for all of us with this project.
Tsai: We’ve all been working for years on this.
Rachel Lake: Can I say, we’ve had a small community of people who have been excited for this game that’s been developing over the past few years and we’re really thankful for everybody for their feedback, and their continued support of the game, I just wanted to shout out everybody there, we’ve had a few regulars over the years that have just stayed with us and we appreciate it.
Chiao: Shoutout to our Discord, and also a lot of people who have visited us both MAGFests that we attended, we returned again to hang out with all of us and see how our game was doing.
Tsai: [Including] everyone who checked us out during IMS, which just happened last weekend, our little early build of the game.
Unbeatable is currently in development. A standalone demo, known as Unbeatable [white label], will be available on April 10th.