Music Video Games Take on Songwriting with Sentris

When it comes to the current rhythm and music video game offerings, it’s more or less all about jamming on plastic guitars to other people’s songs. You can’t claim to be a musician by being really good at Rock Band. The musical puzzle game Sentris, however, will change everything by having the player create original songs—if it gets finished.

It’s a game that indie designer Samantha Kalman has been working slowly on for more than two years, and is currently raising funds for on Kickstarter. “Making music is a feeling unlike any other,” she says in the Kickstarter video. “It’s euphoric. Powerful. Sacred. The first time I experienced it I knew I needed to find a way to share it with everybody.”

The game works by generating a circular rotating canvas populated by colored blocks that you fill with different instruments with a click of the mouse. There are currently only four instruments available—synth, bass, drums, and guitar—but Kalman wants to add a lot more in the future. The puzzle aspect of the game comes in by having the player fill in blocks on lower levels of the canvas, which can only be done by pushing down blocks from the top layer. Timing is important to solve the puzzle, and while you solve it, you make a song one note at a time.

Kalman was kind enough to send over the current prototype with four puzzles, and while the first musical puzzle was easy, the rest were not. Making songs, even via a video game, is harder than it looks. To be honest, the first song I made was actually quite terrible. My second try was a little better, but not by much.

In Kalman’s Kickstarter video she says some of her mistakes yielded beautiful music, but I ended up making some pretty terrible and annoying songs until I developed a strategy for pushing down the appropriate blocks. In this way, the unfinished game is cool because it made me appreciate my favorite music even more. I also assume one will be able to download the songs they create on Sentris—Kalman says she was inspired to make the game because she wanted something to “show for the time I invest in games, something tangible to share with my friends.”

So far Kalman has raised nearly $34,000 of her $50,000 goal, and she’s had “a bunch of game industry people take notice, including the CEO of Harmonix (creators of Rock Band/Dance Central),” Kalman wrote in an email. “It's been encouraging to see an audience growing and believing in the vision, even though I'm a relatively unknown creator in the industry.”

No one cares about kill-to-death ratio in the real world, but a song you made that you can listen to while cruising in your car or out for a jog? That's pretty rad.