Most game soundtracks are recordings. Someone composed and produced a set of tracks, and the game picks which one to play and when. Generative music works differently: the game has rules and musical material, and it puts the music together live, often from what is happening on screen. Play twice and you won’t hear exactly the same thing twice.
We care about this because our incremental game, One Mote, builds its soundtrack live from what you do. Before getting to it, here’s a short guide to the idea and to some well-known games that did it first.
Generative, procedural, adaptive: what’s the difference?
The words get used loosely, so here’s how we use them:
- Adaptive music is recorded music that reacts. Layers fade in during combat, the track switches when you enter a new area. Most big games do this.
- Procedural or generative music is music the game assembles itself from rules: which notes, which chords, which rhythm, decided at runtime. Pieces can be short recorded fragments or notes from a software synthesizer.
- Generative AI music is something else again: audio produced by a trained AI model, usually ahead of time. None of the five games below are examples of that.
1. Spore: Brian Eno’s endless soundtrack
Maxis’s Spore (2008) brought in Brian Eno, the musician who coined the term “ambient music”, to work on its generative score. Instead of looping tracks, much of the music is built on the fly from small pieces, so it keeps evolving as you play through the stages, and the creature and building editors get music that never quite repeats. For a lot of players, this was the first time they noticed a game soundtrack that wasn’t a loop.
2. Proteus: an island that plays itself
Proteus (2013), by Ed Key and David Kanaga, has almost no “game” in it: you walk around a generated island. The music is the point. Trees, animals, weather and the time of day all contribute sounds, and the soundtrack shifts with where you stand and what’s near you. Walking up a hill or into a cluster of creatures is, in effect, how you play the music.
3. Mini Metro: a subway map you can hear
Mini Metro (2015) by Dinosaur Polo Club is a minimalist game about drawing subway lines. Its audio, by Disasterpeace, is generated from the network you build: stations, lines and trains each feed rhythm and pitch into a soundscape that never loops. Disasterpeace has talked about it in terms of serialism and sonification, turning the game’s data into sound. It’s a great example of music that tells you something about the state of your game.
4. No Man’s Sky: 65daysofstatic and Pulse
No Man’s Sky (2016) has a near-infinite universe, so a fixed soundtrack would never have been enough. The band 65daysofstatic recorded an album plus a large library of musical pieces, and the game’s audio system (called Pulse) combines those pieces in real time based on where you are and what you’re doing. It sits between adaptive and generative: the parts are recorded, but the arrangement you hear is assembled live.
5. Electroplankton: the toy that is all music
Electroplankton (2005), by media artist Toshio Iwai for the Nintendo DS, isn’t really a game with music. It’s a set of musical toys. You touch, drag and talk to little creatures and they make sound, and the result is different every time. If you want to see how far “the player makes the music by playing” can go, it’s still one of the purest examples.
What these games have in common
Looking at them side by side, a few patterns stand out:
- The music describes the game. In Mini Metro and Proteus you can close your eyes and still hear roughly what’s going on.
- It has to be pleasant for a long time. Games that run for hours can’t rely on a three-minute hook, so the music is built from material that sounds good in many combinations.
- Players rarely notice it at first, and then can’t stop noticing it.
That second point matters a lot for one genre in particular: incremental and idle games, which people leave open for hours.
One Mote (ours): an incremental game where progress becomes a song
This is the one we’re making, so treat it as a pitch.
One Mote is an incremental game about a single mote of light. You click crystals around it and their light flows home; you build Collectors, stretch Relays toward the outer rings and bend light through Prisms until your network fills the dark. Then you collapse it into a star and start again, and later fill constellations and wake whole galaxies.
There is no pre-recorded soundtrack. The light reaching your core is turned into notes by a small synthesizer in the game, played live in parts: bass, a pad, a melody and inner voices. A small network plays a sparse tune; a busy late-game network fills the room. Each run picks its key from a seed, each star field’s traits choose the chord movement, and Resonators make crystals chime together on the beat. Because idle games stay open for hours, we spent real time on the boring parts: fading every note out so nothing clicks, making loops complete before they repeat, and limiting the output so a huge network never distorts.
The visuals work the same way: everything on screen is drawn by code from the state of your network. The long version is in One Mote: an incremental game drawn and scored entirely by code.
One Mote isn’t out yet, and we haven’t announced a date or price. The game page has the trailer and gameplay clips, each recorded from the game itself, so you can hear it for yourself.
Want to go further?
If this kind of music interests you, it’s worth listening for in any game you play: does it loop, or does it change with what you do? Many sound designers and composers have given talks on how they built these systems, and they’re a great way to learn how music and game rules can talk to each other.