Planck

Explore the cosmic genius of music!

 

Shadegrown Games

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Joystiq

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The Escapist

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Unnwinnable

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Joystiq

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“Planck is beautiful. Half Audiosurf, half Rez, Plank is a music-generating shooter less concerned with killing everything, sticking to a rhythm or perfectly replicating someone else’s song, and is more concerned with taking some sounds and beats and making them your own.”
-Brendan Keogh (Unwinnable)

Shadegrown Games Unveils New Level, Video for Music Shooter Planck

 

REDMOND, WA – June 15, 2011 – Shadegrown Games, the studio behind critically-acclaimed music game Planck , has created a new video showcasing the latest additions to the highly-anticipated indie title. The new gameplay video focuses on a brand new level with fresh art, music and another look at the game’s core gameplay mechanic: making beautiful music by shooting everything in sight.

Planck’s new level features a faster-paced, harder-edged sound and clearly demonstrates the game’s unprecedented integration of music and gameplay — where each piece of music gets its own unique visualization designed to precisely match the aural component on the screen.

While Planck is a “music game,” it does not depend on timing like many of the other staples of the genre. Instead, it lets players interact with original music through arcade-proven shooting mechanics. In the world of Planck, players release waveforms contained in various creatures by hitting them with energy, essentially creating music from scratch by playing the game like a traditional shooter. Planck offers players of all ages — musically gifted or not — a rewarding experience via sharp, colorful graphics and booming sound.

“I think Planck makes a meaningful contribution to the future of music games. We see it as the natural follow-up to titles that rely solely on timed button presses meant to match pre-recorded, licensed music content,” says Matthew Burns, founder of Shadegrown Games and project lead for Planck. “There’s so much yet to explore where music and gameplay meet; it’s one of the most exciting areas you could be working in as a developer right now. We can’t wait to see what gamers make of it.”

For more information — including regularly updated developer diaries and an upcoming opportunity to playtest a beta version of Planck — please visit http://www.shadegrowngames.com/

 

Assets:
Video (YouTube) http://www.youtube.com/user/Planckv1#p/u/0/aWPbzpTNax4
Screenshots (web) http://www.flickr.com/photos/63559818@N06/sets/72157626956514846/

Social media:
Twitter:  @Planckdevteam &  @shadegrowngames
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Planck/180561406075

Planck YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Planckv1

 

About Shadegrown Games
Shadegrown Games was founded in 2009 and is based in Redmond, Washington.  The studio is headed by Matthew Burns, an industry veteran with stints on both Call of Duty and Halo franchises, and staffed by a talented group of developers willing to make games a whole new way.

The Shadegrown Games vision for game development:

Coffee growers know that while production can be boosted by using sun-tolerant crop varieties tightly packed into an open field, plants can also grow in an environment that more closely resembles coffee’s original habitat – in the shade and beneath a canopy of trees. In the video game industry, too, we often cut down the forest in order to reap the maximum possible yield. But this process can also exhaust the soil from which new things grow and drive away the diverse species of our invention. Shadegrown Games believes in a sustainable form of game development that nurtures and encourages original gameplay for more “organic,” meaningful experiences.

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