When we caught up with Dylan Fitterer, creator of Audiosurf while he was tending his PAX 10 booth. Even above the roar of the PAX exhibition floor, Audiosurf was throbbing with heavy bass, so it’s a miracle we managed to have a conversation at all.

That’s to be expected, though, since music is so integral to Audiosurf. The game takes audio tracks in pretty much any common format and analyzes them to make playable levels. Playing those levels consists of piloting a vehicle down a road that’s been crowded with colored blocks, and the music controls just how crowded and how fast you barrel down the road. You spend much of your time ducking and weaving through traffic, though collisions are good too. You collect the color-coded blocks you hit, and chaining blocks of the same color together on a collection grid scores points, and those points end up on a separate leaderboard for each song you play. It’s a little bit Rez, a little bit Tetris Attack, and a little bit Burnout.

The game and demo are presently being hosted on Steam, but read on for Dylan’s under-the-hood explanation of the game mechanics and his thoughts on Steam and digital distribution in general.

Pixelsocks: Where’d you come up with the idea?

Dylan: I’m not really sure. One thing it might have been is, have you ever been driving down the highway and you’ve got the radio on, and something fast is on and you’re speeding? So I guess it comes from that: reckless driving skills.

Pixelsocks: One game that I’ve seen that’s somewhat similar was Vib Ribbon, though it only saw the light of day in Japan. Had you ever heard of it before?

Dylan: I have seen it now, but recently. It’s a cool game.

Pixelsocks: Is there any relationship between the two, or was it convergent but independent evolution?

Dylan: Well, I guess that [second one], because I didn’t know of [Vib Ribbon]. They’re definitely built on the same idea.

Pixelsocks: I was watching the traffic go by, and it looks like the patterns are generated from something that’s related to the rhythm, but not exactly. How does the game come up with the traffic patterns?

Dylan: Well, it’s looking for spikes in intensity. If there is an intensity spike, that’s gonna make a block. Any block that the game pulls out of the song gets an intensity rating. The higher it is, the hotter in color it is. The reds are the rarest, and they’re worth the most points. They’re the sharpest intensity spikes.

Pixelsocks: They’re also pretty infrequent because of that. It seems like if you had constant intensity spikes, it would make the overall intensity baseline go up.

Dylan: It does actually recognize held out intensity, which it renders as a line. Everything on the line is part of the spike, and it takes the sharpest point and puts the block there. Similar to the sound of like a trumpet, you hear a slide downhill, and that would all be part of the line.

Pixelsocks: So, you’re currently releasing this game on Steam. What made you decide to use it?

Dylan: Um, it’s Steam.

Both laugh.

Pixelsocks: Yeah, I suppose it’s everywhere.

Dylan: One of the reasons Steam is so popular is that it’s full of gamers.

Pixelsocks: Have they actually been pretty good to you throughout the entire process?

Dylan: Yeah.

Pixelsocks: That’s great. So, this is one of the few games in the PAX 10 that’s actually completed and released and the whole nine yards. And the price point’s actually pretty low. Did the digital distribution play a role in the price point, or did it go the other way?

Dylan: I was really indecisive about that. I was like “It should be $20, because that’s what most downloadable games are.” “It should be $60, it took me a long time!” But the guys at Valve said I’d make the most money at $10, and eventually I decided just to listen to them. I think they were right.

Pixelsocks: Yeah, you sell a whole bunch of $10 games. Although, one thing that’s pretty different about this game as opposed to other rhythm-based games, like say Guitar Hero, is that you’re letting users make procedural content themselves, so you’re not going to be able to release downloadable song packs or anything like that to micropay your way to glory.

Dylan: Well, maybe.

Pixelsocks: Oh, do you have plans to that effect?

Dylan: Well, it already has Audiosurf radio built into it, where we highlight a band every week, and you could go get them elsewhere, but you can get them right in the game. Right now it’s free, just a good way to promote bands, but eventually, who knows, it might become a pay service. I don’t know, there’s no plans or anything.

Pixelsocks: Is Audiosurf pretty much cut and dried and done then, or is going to continue being developed in the future?

Dylan: Oh, I’ve never stopped. I keep adding new features to it. Lots of small things. Added mod abilities, for other programmers, I added more achievements just this week.

Pixelsocks: Anything else you’d like to mention?

Dylan: I’m hoping to add Unicode support for song tags, so you can have Russian characters or Japanese characters for song tags. I’m not sure that’s going to work out, but hopefully it will.

Pixelsocks: Since you have a lot of experience with the digital distribution model, what do you think its place is in gaming right now, and where do you think it’s going in the future.

Dylan: Well, I think it’s clear that’s going to be the entire market after some amount of time.

Pixelsocks: So, you think games that right now are being distributed on optical media, for example, are huge, will take forever to download. Do you think we’ll have the infrastructure to make that work?

Dylan: I think so. Also, what I’d like to see is for huge games to go away. I don’t like any of them.

Pixelsocks: Yeah? A lot of them end up being boilerplate because you have to invest so much in making them happen in the first place.

Dylan: Exactly.

Pixelsocks: So, if you had to nail down one design decision or one design element for your game that really defines it and distinguishes it, and makes it fun, what would it be?

Dylan: Oh, the reckless driving.

Pixelsocks: The reckless driving.

Dylan: The more intense the song is the faster it goes.

Pixelsocks: All right, thank you very much for your time.

Dylan: A pleasure.

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