Dyad: The Lost Interview

Getting a little esoteric, what do you think it is about some games that makes them more conducive to what we'd call "getting in the zone?" Playing Dyad, I immediately started to get that feeling; it's hard to describe, but you know what I mean.

When something is right, you get in the zone, and that's it. I was talking to David, the musician who did this, and I kept hearing all these comparisons to music games. Kotaku did a thing on it, and it was billed as a music game, because it was in their Kotaku Melodic thing, and it was like, "Oh, it's a music game," and it's not a music game by sort of traditional definitions. By my definition, every game is a music game, but… what was the question?

Getting in the zone.

What David was saying, was—wow, that was bad.

[Lying] I'll edit that part out.

Thanks. I was like, "Dave, look, everyone thinks it's a music game, and there's no beat-matching and everyone hates it." This was a purposely open conversation on Twitter. David was like, "No, it's not a music game; it's a game in a tube that breathes and feels right." I think that if something breathes properly and feels right, then you're going to be able to get in the zone with it.

When you mention people thinking it's a music game, it reminds me of Rez; people called Rez a music game, but the music evolves out of how you're playing, rather than—

—It totally is a music game, way more of a music game than Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is just memorizing things and pressing buttons at certain times and getting the beat or whatever. That's not music, it's just the most superficial definition of music… it's not even notes, it's just a series of quick time events. I call Rez a music game very much, as much as I call Dyad a music game, but it's not a music game by traditional definitions.

The central mechanic, where you sort of "pincer" onto enemies to draw yourself forward: how did you arrive at that? What was the inspiration for it?

There was no inspiration for it. You just play it, right? So when we make it… you make a tube, and then you need a way to go through the tube, so you try to think of an interesting way to do it. "Accelerate" and "brake," in my opinion, are not interesting things. They're usually convoluted by physics and inertia and all this dumb shit, so I wasn't interested in using those. So, I was searching for alternate interaction methods in order to get through the tube—things that were more decision-based rather than an automatic response to what you see.

There was no overarching "Oh, I want to do this, so I'm going to do this…"

It came out of the design process? Like, "I don't want to have speed pads…"

We had speed pads for a while, and that was a big thing. The first time we did it, we had speed pads and things that you collected for energy, and you had a weapon… You know N2O: Nitrous Oxide for the PlayStation One? I took the energy collection and created a ring shot like in N2O, and that was the game for a little while, and it sucked, so we figured out what would be a fun thing to do instead of that. Eventually we came up with a thing where hooking enemies dropped speed pads behind them; we went through a lot of revisions, but it all came out of actually playing the game—

—Rather than waking up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea?

There were moments like that, but it was usually on a much smaller scale; we'd have a big problem that we were trying to solve. You'd think about it for a week or whatever, and it's not working out, so you leave it and work on something else, and then in the middle of the night, it would happen, like, "I know exactly what I'm going to do." Sometimes it would happen as I'm falling asleep, because I guess that's when my mind is most active.

Tell me about the guy who did the music.

David Kanaga did the music. He DJed at the Wild Rumpus party last night; apparently he was wearing a frog mask. He did the music for Proteus, too, which was up for a Nuovo award, and it should have won, but whatever.

How did you guys hook up?

I met him at GDC five or six years ago, and we've been friends ever since; I see him at GDC every year. I showed him the game last year, and he's like, "I want to do music for this," and I was like, "Alright." And then he did the music for it, and then it kicked ass.

Is Dyad platform exclusive?

Yeah, it's not coming out for anything else for at least a year—on PC it could come out in six months, but I'm pretty burnt out; this week has killed me, and I haven't slept for more than three hours a night, and I eat—I inhale—my food while running from thing to thing. It's been pretty rough for me this week.

It might be nice to take a break for a while.

Yeah, we'll see where that goes.

And now you can see it in action right here: