I'm making a game about making music

Hi all, I'm Samantha and I've been GB reader & viewer for a long time. Some of you may remember me from my interview with Patrick (beep beep!) about games for everyone. Well, I've been working on a game called Sentris which is a musical puzzle game and enables everyone to make their own music. I want to tell all of you about the game, but I want to be mindful of etiquette! I am not here to advertise or be shamelessly self-promotional. I just think the Giant Bomb community would be interested in the game. It's really experimental, and doing something new with music games. I launched a kickstarter for it yesterday and it's doing really well. Do you want me to share that link, or is that going too far? Should I create my own wiki page for Sentris, or is that also too self-promotional? Please help me play nicely in the community! Thanks!

Sentris Kickstarter page

Mods do tend to frown on self-promotion, but they might make an exception seeing as your a friend of the site, and were interviewed by Patrick.

I had a look at your kickstarter, though. From the video, it was a little hard to tell how the game would actually be played. It might be something that you have to experience to understand, but I think you would get more donations if people understood how to play the game, and they wanted to eventually be able to do so.

I also found myself wondering about the game's eventual art direction. Would it be safe to assume something close to Lumines or Tetrisphere? That's kind of the vibe I was getting from the video. I was also wondering if you'll mostly be focusing on electronic music, or do you have plans for rock, classical, etc?

Anyhow, best of luck with the project.

Need to discuss this with the rest of the team.

Until then, @hamst3r?

Oh you mean Sentris? Sounds interesting.

Are you intending to explore/teach music theory with this, or is the emphasis more on the puzzle side?

I'm pretty sure you supposed to add Kickstarter projects to the wiki only after they've been kickstarted, else the wiki be filled with any game that hardly made it past an idea.

I suppose there's not much to add while the mods discuss this amongst themselves, so good luck with your Kickstarter!

That's the one! Down the road I would love to teach music theory and help people cross the bridge to becoming real-life musicians. First, I need to make sure Sentris is a great game that lets people create unique songs. Nobody has made a game that enables people to make their own music before. There are plenty of tools that do this, but I don't want to make a tool! I feel really good about where it's landed by now, the design is solid and play-tested with good results. Just need to keep building on what I have and making it even better.

It's your game, so you should be able to make the wiki page better than anyone! But I'd say the general rule is to not fill out too much information until it's released. Even though it looks like you're pretty far in development, the goal of any wiki edits is to only have info that will be perpetually accurate. So you could probably still fill out things like general gameplay, but maybe just don't get to detailed yet. (as I'm sure you know more than most people here, how parts of a game can change right up 'till the end) ;)

Good Luck!

@samanthazero: We're going to allow this, thanks for wording the topic carefully. As far as your wiki page, when your project gets funded and has a distribution model in place go ahead and go for it.

So is it safe to assume the author can add a link to her kickstarter in her original post? I'm only asking because you didn't say, and because I think she would want to do that.

Thanks, I went ahead and edited the first post to include the link (which was already farther down the thread anyway)

Oh wow, thank you guys! Really, I'm just happy to talk about what I'm doing with people who love games. Everyone has such a different perspective from me, I want to engage with everyone and learn. I want to be totally open about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

Anyone who has a question for me about the game, or anything really, feel free to ask and I'll chime in :-)