Last week I finally had a chance to go hands-on with Sound Shapes, the upcoming PS Vita platformer-cum-music-studio that left critics reeling in its E3 debut. Coached by co-designer and Everyday Shooter creator Jonathan Mak and co-designer Shaw-Han Liem, I discovered a deceptively simple platformer that gave me the tools to build a series of game levels – and a corresponding song – in seconds flat.

Sound Shapes’ level creation and music composition are inseparable. As you use the PS Vita’s front touchscreen to place objects – platforms, lasers, obstacles – that you’ll interact with during gameplay, you’re simultaneously laying down beats and musical cues that will evolve into a full song when you play. During the creation process, you’ll use PS Vita’s rear touch panel to resize platforms and objects to further tweak your level’s gameplay or musical style. Where you go from there is entirely up to you: the final version of Sound Shapes will enable you to upload and share your creation via PSN for others to enjoy.

Sound Shapes is a strange but eye-opening experience that’s completely unlike any music-creation game — or platformer — I’ve played. After I set down the PS Vita, I was bursting with questions for both Jonathan Mak and Shaw-Han Liem. Read our full conversation below and leave your questions in the comments!

Jonathan Mak, co-designer of Sound Shapes (left); Shaw-Han Liem, co-designer

PlayStation.Blog: Jonathan, we didn’t hear from you for years after Everyday Shooter came out on PSN. What were you up? How long were you working on the Sound Shapes concept?

Jonathan Mak, co-designer, Sound Shapes: Shortly after Everyday Shooter, I met Shaw-Han Liem. I went to one of his shows, and I ended up showing him Everyday Shooter. We were sort of on the same wavelength — not necessarily video games and music, but…

Shaw-Han Liem, co-designer: …interactive music?

Jonathan Mak: That sort of thing. So we ended up collaborating on some stuff. We worked on visuals for shows, and later worked on a few gaming concepts. We spent two years prototyping concepts — I think we prototyped enough stuff to make another Everyday Shooter. But we kept upping the ante. While we had a bunch of cool ideas, we happened upon this prototype [gestures to Sound Shapes sitting unassumingly on the nearby table] and decided to pursue it. We decided to contact PlayStation, they showed us the early development hardware for PS Vita, and that’s how we got started.

PSB: Did you come up with the side-scrolling gameplay first, or the idea of creating a level that played music? What was the genesis of that concept?

Jonathan Mak: I think we came up with it partially out of frustration. We kept making prototypes for ways for people to actually make music, as opposed to games like Everyday Shooter where you can play musical sounds. We wanted players to actually make their own songs, which you can do in Sound Shapes.

I don’t know, I think it all came together at the same time. We chose platforming because it’s a well-known form of gameplay, where a shooter is kind of abstract — “I’m dodging bullets in space, weird!” With a platformer, you know you’re in this world and it makes more sense immediately. It seemed like a natural fit to introduce gamers to this idea of making music.

PSB: How did you work into the process, Shaw?

Shaw-Han Liem: We started collaborating on a pretty casual basis, just trying out different ideas. Some of them weren’t game-related at all, like “what can we project behind a rock show that will look really cool?” We wanted to find ways to use technology as a way to interact with and experience music.

Jonathan Mak: The interesting thing about this collaboration is that it’s not a case of me being the programmer and Shaw being just the music guy. We’re both capable of writing code and creating music….You can’t think of the gameplay first and then cram the music in; it doesn’t work that way.

Shaw-Han Liem: In order to make a game like this, we’ve realized that you need a musician who can make a game and a game person who can write music. Having gone through this process, I think it’s been a key thing. We both have access to the same toolsets and we can work off of each other.

PSB: Did you always plan for Sound Shapes to be a portable game?

Jonathan Mak: Because Everyday Shooter came out on the PS3, so we thought we might have a lead there, though we weren’t really thinking about a platform at the time. The PS Vita was a happy coincidence, because the touchscreen makes it a lot easier to compose and edit in the game.

PSB: How would you define Sound Shapes, if you had to? A music creator, a platformer…?

Jonthan Mak: It’s weird, because I had to do that a few weeks ago…and I couldn’t do it. [laughs] Um…it’s equal parts musical instrument and equal parts videogame. Sometimes I pick it up and I pretend it’s just a musical instrument — that there’s no game. It’s cool to sit there and make music, even using it in ways that it’s not intended.

Shaw-Han Liem: It’s sort of two things. If you’re a musician, it is a cool musical composition tool that also allows you to experiment with making these game worlds. If you’re a game player, it’s a platformer that also has this musical element and introduces you to the idea of writing a song. So depending on who you are, you might look at it in slightly different ways. We’ve never come up with a good, one-sentence way of summing it up…but once people try it, they get it.

Jonathan Mak: We’re hoping it’s a bridge for people. If you just play videogames, it would be a bridge for you into making music. If you’re a musician, it would be a bridge into making game levels. I think we really want to empower people to make music, though. As musicians ourselves, we take for granted how awesome it is to be able to write music. But it’s actually not that hard — it’s very simple.

Shaw-Han Liem: Just put a bunch of fingers on the screen [he places three fingers on the PS Vita touchscreen] and you already have a loop. That took three seconds and you have a drum beat. That’s the whole idea — to demystify making music. If someone who never thought of themselves as a musician tries out Sound Shapes and realizes they can do it, and then later picks up a drum machine and sequencer…that would be amazing.

PSB: So if I picked up Sound Shapes loved making music, where would I go next? What would be the next logical step, in terms of music creation?

Shaw-Han Liem: The musical logic, once you figure it out, is very similar to the way a drum machine works. So it’s basically a 16-step sequencer with an eight-note scale. As you’re playing through the levels, each game screen is like an instruction manual for how to make that music. It’s like you’re looking at the sheet music as you play the game, but you’re visualizing it differently. As you play, you’re learning how to write music. And once you grasp that concept, you can take it to other music software, drum machines, sequencers… Those all use the same concepts.

PSB: During E3, a lot of media raved about Sound Shapes; some have even said it’s one of PS Vita’s killer apps. Did you expect that reaction? What does that feel like?

Jonathan Mak: Uh..well, I didn’t think people would get it, or like it, so… [laughter] It was really awesome when it was the exact opposite of what I expected!

Shaw-Han Liem: Going into E3, we both had a certain amount of terror because we couldn’t describe it in a sentence, and because it’s a new idea and so different…

Jonathan Mak: …and it doesn’t have that neat one-liner. Like, “oh, it’s in HD!”

Shaw-Han Liem: What was a surprise was that everyone who has seen it has approached it with an open mind. Once we explain it, people seem to be enthusiastic.

Jonathan Mak: And to be honest, the version we showed at E3 was pretty barebones. It was just about introducing the premise, so we showed a very simplified version of what it’s going to be.

PSB: So if this is the framework, where does Sound Shapes go from here? Where will you focus your attention for the remaining development time?

Shaw-Han Liem: On a general level, the goal is to build out the tool set so that you have enough entities to build a really interesting world with a lot of gameplay. And to also add a lot sounds to allow totally different styles of music from one level to another. Basically, giving the tool more power — which will allow us to create cooler levels, but also giving more options to the players.

Jonathan Mak: From the gameplay point of view, there are some classic platform mechanics that aren’t in the game right now because we haven’t had time. If you like platformers, you’ll know there’s some obvious stuff we could put in there. And every time we add one entity, we exponentially increase the number of levels you can create.

PSB: Do you have a name for the, uh, protagonist?

Shaw-Han Liem: It never even occurred to me that it should have a name, but a lot of people have been asking…

Jonathan Mak: The key is that we didn’t want the avatar to steal the spotlight because the focus should be on the music that’s being created. So we made him a little bit low-key just to allow the music to come to the forefront.

PSB: In terms of a single-player experience, what’s your philosophy? Will I sit down with a campaign of sorts, or just a big, hot mess of levels to play?

Shaw-Han Liem: The metaphor that we’re using is that you’re sitting down with your record collection and you’ve got a bunch of levels – tracks – to leaf through. As you progress, you’re unlocking tunes, a new record… I guess people don’t sit down to listen to records anymore, but I still do! In terms of a “narrative,” that’s what we’re thinking. It’s about creating the atmosphere and interacting with music in a cool way.

PSB: What’s your vision for the online sharing element? Can I pass a level along to a bunch of friends and have them all leave their mark on it?

Jonathan Mak: Right now, it’s simple because we’re focusing on the core game. But you’ll be able to share levels with the community and download other people’s levels. There are a lot of good ideas kicking around…that we probably shouldn’t even talk about!

Shaw-Han Liem: The high-level goal is to capture the fun of making music — playing it for people, sharing it, making a record and sending it into the world to see what happens to it. If you can share your work and be proud of it, that’s going to encourage you to make more cool stuff.

Jonathan Mak: On the internet, people are like, “check out this song I found!” Once we get enough community-created levels, it would be cool if that happened to Sound Shapes. There might be a niche audience who really likes one guy’s levels.

PSB: Are you guys gamers?

Shaw-Han Liem: Five years ago, when I started this collaboration with Jon, I wouldn’t have considered myself a gamer. Around that time, people like Jon and some others introduced me to games that interacted with music in a cool way, like Rez. That’s what got me interested, and now I love Call of Duty. I don’t know what it was, but about a year ago I became a fiend.

Jonathan Mak: I play a lot of Tetris. I’ve always played Tetris. I hope to turn pro one day. Maybe…

PSB: What draws you to Tetris, Jonathan?

Jonathan Mak: I guess it’s a game that grew with me. I started playing it at eight years old, and I thought it was a piece of crap. But then I watched my brother’s friend play it like a speed run, so I started playing it that way. As I grew older, I started reading deeper meaning into Tetris: it only gave you certain shapes, so it’s kinda like life — you have to deal with what you’re given. Then came the poker craze in the 2000s, and I started applying that to Tetris: Even if you’re given crap, you can rearrange it in a way that’s fruitful, grab onto an opportunity. So it was all about probability and playing the odds .

Shaw-Han Liem: You should watch him play Tetris sometime, he’s like Rain Man.

Jonathan Mak: The funny thing with Sound Shapes is, I’ve never played platformers. It’s not a genre that I like and I was never good at them. But having worked on a platformer now, I can finally play and appreciate those games now. They used to be way too hard for me.

But yeah, it’s mostly Tetris. [laughter] There are a lot of games I want to play…I really want to play Journey when it comes out. I broke down and played a little Portal 2.

It is with immense pleasure that we are announcing our involvement with a video game project known as Sound Shapes. We are extra excited to be contributing alongside sworcery maestro Jim Guthrie. This represents the latest in a series of Superbrothers X Jim Guthrie a/v collaborations dating back to 2005′s musical film Children of the Clone and 2008′s Dot Matrix Revolution, but this will be our first a/v collaboration since 2011′s cult classic videogame Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.

Much like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Sound Shapes is a made-in-Toronto DIY videogame that is unusually collaborative and has a heavy emphasis on synesthetic audiovisual style. What’s more, the people making Sound Shapes are all basically our very best pals – they’re the folks with whom we play board games, drink the beers, go skating and play hockey. On every level it’s an honor and a thrill to be involved.

The Superbrothers + Jim Guthrie collaboration will take the form of a Sound Shapes ‘album’ – a series of thematically connected & musically-linked levels known as CORPOREAL.

Sound Shapes is coming to PlayStation Vita, and it’ll be available before too long. Get psyched!!!

The collaborative process

After some initial discussion with Queasy, we chose to explore some of the concepts in prior Superbrothers films including Children of the Clone and Dot Matrix Revolution, so our levels are populated by computers, mainframes, office workers and water coolers. My mom was one of the first female computer programmers in Canada and my father worked as a mainframe computer salesman for decades, so it was nice to set aside the skeletons & space babies of sworcey and get to work on 20th century visual concepts. Meanwhile, the video game design takes the friendly platforming mechanics of Sound Shapes and stretches them in the direction of something like Impossible Mission for C-64 & Spectrum.

With this new collaboration the configuration is quite different. The game design, level design and sound integration are being handled by the Sound Shapes experts at Queasy. The order of operations was a little different this time around too. On S:S&S EP, many of the songs predated the project and I was able to create the world & concepts by listening to specific songs, many of them pre-existing compositions from Jim. In this case, the art assets were created without a specific soundtrack, and then it was up to Jim to craft his sounds to fit the look and concept.

Of course, the real work took place at Queasy & Capy, where a wide-ranging assortment of designers & creators – the Sound Shapes experts – put all the pieces together. Thanks so much for all your hard work folks, it has been a pleasure contributing to your efforts!

So, super excited to share this collaboration and can’t wait for you folks to check it out yourselves. If you’re going to be at E3, be sure to swing by the PlayStation booth for some hands-on time!

Sound Shapes is out on PSN today! It’s the culmination of a long journey for our boss-men Jonathan Mak and Shaw-Han Liem, who worked on the concept for… more years than they probably want me to say before the reveal at E3 2011, and having worked on the game for a year myself now I think I can speak for the whole team when I say we just want you to play it. Like… we don’t want you to finish reading this blog post, or even probably watch the launch trailer we made. We made Sound Shapes for you to play! So when today’s update goes live, get yourself over to the PlayStation Store on your PS3 or PS Vita and pick it up!

The title is $14.99 ($11.99 for PlayStation Plus members this week only) and part of the PSN Play promotion, so if you buy one or more other of the games in the promotion you’ll get an increasing amount of money back. Most importantly, however — Sound Shapes is a cross-play title. Whether you buy it on PS3 or PS Vita, you receive both versions for one price. We cannot stress this enough. We’ve definitely tried to stress this enough. Both versions are yours when you buy it, and all trophies and community levels are shared between them, whether you own a PS3 or a PS Vita, or both.

If you’re looking for more of a general overview of what Sound Shapes is, why not watch our brand-spanking new launch trailer?

If you’re still here, I guess I should recap the information you really need to know, to be sure you’re making the right purchase when you finally dawdle over to the PlayStation Store. So: Sound Shapes is a 2D musical platformer in which every level is a song. You pick up the notes placed in the level to construct the music, but at the same time the creatures (friend or foe) and interactive objects are instruments too. We’ve worked with different graphic and musical artists on each album of level-songs, with the likes of Shaw-Han in his I am Robot and Proud guise, Deadmau5, Jim Guthrie and Beck working with graphic artists like Vic Ngyuen of Capy, Pyramid Attack, PixelJam and Superbrothers. If the game stopped there that would probably have been more than enough work for us but we also decided that players should be able to use these notes, creatures and so on to make their own songs and levels. Therefore we’ve included a full level editor and online community which will allow you to share your creations across the entire world, reaching players on both PS3 and PS Vita no matter which version you’re using.

Oh, and on top of that we’ve also included Trophies (yes, there’s a Platinum). They’re unlocked by conquering Death Mode, which consists of intense platforming challenges based on our main campaign, and Beat School, which hopes to inspire players in the fine art of beat-making by challenging them to recreate a piece of music in our level editor.

So, we hope that’s rather a worthy offering for your $14.99, if you’re still dilly-dallying. One of the nicest things for us is that although we’re super excited to have you play Sound Shapes, we’re even more excited to play the levels you create in the community. To be honest, this could be a total win-win. We get to make the game we wanted to make, share it with PlayStation’s community of gamers, and then have them make levels that we get to play? Amazing! (And don’t worry, we do plan to support the community beyond launch with DLC. Not that we’re going to say any more than that for now!)

If you do find you want to know even more about Sound Shapes, check out our website here! But we wish you’d just pick up the game and get to making levels. Come on, it’s your turn, we’ve been making them for ages!

Sound Shapes has been out (in North America, at least) a little under a month now, and we continue to be blown away by the response the game has been getting. If you’ve been following our official Sound Shapes twitter (and we hope you have!) you’ve probably been kept up-to-date with our news, but just last week we hit over ten thousand levels in our community (if you’re interested, our ten-thousandth level was Out of the Rain by sunpsyche.)

With so many levels, we’ve been working very hard behind the scenes to make sure that players are able to best find the cream of the crop. For example, not only have we been iterating our search algorithms to ensure the star tab (“Greatest Hits” on the website) is kept up-to-date with the best levels, we also try to make sure if you search you get useful results—oh, and if you missed it, you can search on the website now too! However, we would like to ensure we’re interacting with our community and not just setting up SOULESS SEARCH ROBOTS to do that job for us—so we’re going to try and regularly share with you the community levels that pique our interest. Starting… now.

And I to Fire by jordanbuster

“This level sort of blew my mind a bit” said Jon [Mak], at which point I probably mumbled something like “oh, that’s nice” and went back to doing something else entirely. However, when I finally played this level it was worthy of his praise. To be honest, if you follow the Sound Shapes community you are probably already familiar with this level, so we’re not telling you anything new, but we had to spotlight it because it was the first level we saw that did things that surprised us — and, you know, we made the game. You’d think we’d know it inside out, eh?

Arcade Fireworks by Daftbomb

Here’s a darn tough level with some lovely visual stylings. If you played through our D-cade album you’ll kind of get the theme here—twists on some classic arcade games—but what really sells this one for us is the consistent art (even using a selection of different assets), clever challenges, and general fun times.

Intermission by Zoetroupe

This is a nice short level—an intermission, if we will—that mixes things up by not twisting video games but cinema! It’s musically lovely and genuinely artistic visually, and will leave you wanting more (always a good thing.)

Metamorphose by Tabulator_AT

This level is beautiful but also deserves praise for using one of our creatures in a way that we didn’t expect. It would say too much to pick out which one, but levels which challenge our established view of the game are always winners.

Quick, Dinosaurs! by TheAvengedMarin

Strong themes are always good! This level is an adventure across a dinosaur-filled landscape with a cute ending, with well thought out challenges and lots of cute dinosaurs to spot (we remain impressed at to what you’re all able to squeeze out of our ground shapes!) — it’s well worth a play.

That’s only a very small selection of the levels we’ve been playing—we really do try and play as many as we can manage—and so we do hope to be back soon to share more levels with you (the quality only gets better and better, so we’re sure that there are already new levels that you think we’re foolish to not have included.)

Don’t forget that you can queue up any of these levels to play in Sound Shapes from the website. Simply log in to the site with your PSN ID, hit queue on the level that takes your fancy, and when you load up the community (on PS3 or PS Vita) you can find them in your “favorites” on your profile (once you’ve played through them once, if you don’t choose to favorite them, they’ll be removed from that list.)

Oh! And don’t think we’re just spending all our time playing your levels (as much as we want to.) We’re working hard on getting the first DLC out to you as soon as possible (giving you more to work with!) — we’ll be able to talk about that soon. Happy creating!

This week also saw the announcement of the highly amusing PSN party game Lights Camera Party! and the PAYDAY: The Heist Wolfpack DLC; the PSN launch of The Expendables 2: The Video Game, Escape Plan’s new DLC Underground, and the first wave of Disney Princess costumes for LittleBigPlanet; a look at Papo & Yo’s realistic graffiti and Darksiders II’s cast of creatures; and the Trophy list for Metal Gear Solid 4′s long-awaited Trophy update.

What are you playing this weekend?

• I’m playing: Borderlands, Silent Hill, Dark Souls
• I’m watching: X-Men: First Class on Blu-ray
• I’m reading: Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget by David Wessel
• I’m listening to: PlayStation Blogcast 036: The Best Games of 2012 (So Far)

Most-Watched Video of the Week: Sound Shapes Level Editor

The 10 Most-Viewed Posts of the Week

Fellows! We’ve are absolutely gagging here to get Sound Shapes into your hands. Gagging! We wish it could be in your hands right now! But unfortunately that can’t be, as this week saw the release of The Expendables 2 as part of the PSN Play promotion, not us. However! If you’re popping into PlayStation Store to pick it up at any point this week you can also pre-order Sound Shapes and get an exclusive PS3 theme. That’s not to forget PSN Play’s money-saving promotion: the more games you pick up, the more money you save. So if you’ve already picked up The Expendables 2, you’ll get a cool three bucks back if you pick up Sound Shapes.

But enough of that waffle. Because we’re excited to get Sound Shapes into your hands, we wanted to kick start your imaginations by having one of our founders, Jonathan Mak, walk you through level creation using our level tools. And if you’re the kind of player who is more excited to *play* than create (and that’s fine, too) we’re revealing our Trophy mode. And yes, there is a Platinum.

So, until this point we’ve been showing you lots of different parts of our campaign mode. Just to recap: we’re providing five different albums with several tracks each, with each album including art and music from a different pair of artists, such as deadmau5 and Pixeljam or Pyramid Attack and Beck. Beating these levels will unlock their components, and then you’ll be able to mix and match them in your own levels!

In the following video, for example, Jon quickly puts together a level that (among other things) includes deadmau5 loops paired with Jim Guthrie/Superbrothers hazards, and he throws in some vocals that you might remember from our recent reveal of the Beck album Cities. He even shows off the player’s ability to record timings and change beats per minute… and it all sounds (and plays!) pretty good:

We’ve tried to make creating a song and level as fun as possible, but also effortless to upload and share. We’ve said this before, but seeing what players do with our tools is one of the things we’re *most* looking forward to. We’re certain that, after a couple of days, you’re going to blow away what Jon did here.

Something that we think (hope?) is going to take you more than a matter of days, however, is claiming our Platinum Trophy. If you’re a Trophy hunter, you’re probably well aware of the pain and glory of trying to conquer the intense Trophy levels in our pal Shawn McGrath’s new PSN exclusive Dyad. Here at Queasy Games, we didn’t want players to be distracted by playing albums in a certain way for Trophies, or trying to “game” our community. Instead we created two things: Death Mode and Beat School.

Death Mode is an unusual twist in our campaign mode. Once you’ve beaten our albums, you can flip each album over to a b-side and experience intense, single-screen timed challenges to collect notes without dying based on signature moments from each of the album’s tracks. Each win unlocks a Trophy, and it’s our hope that these will test the skills players have learned in our levels, making each Trophy win hard fought but deeply rewarding. Beat School is a different sort of challenge: here we challenge all players, even (if not especially) those who consider themselves “non musical,” to create beats on a single screen by listening and matching to a beat we have created. With luck, these levels will challenge and inspire you to go into the editor and make your own beats—if Jon’s video above hasn’t already convinced you.

Don’t forget: Sound Shapes hits PS3 and PS Vita as a cross-play title August 7th, but you can pre-order it now, receiving a lovely Cory Schmitz-designed PS3 theme and the ability to play the game on PS3 or PS Vita no matter which system you buy it on. You get both versions for one price! It’s $14.99 (20% off for a limited time for PS Plus members). And oh yeah, the Trophies are shared between both versions, too. Did we mention there’s a Platinum?

Look, E3 is here, and we know there’s all kinds of hot news coming at you from everywhere. So over here at Queasy HQ, we’ve decided to kick things off a little early with pretty much the biggest announcement we’re allowed to give you right now: Sound Shapes is coming to PSN on August 7th. That’s… like… a few weeks away! Are you breathing into a paper bag right now to avoid hyperventilating? We are, which is making it kind of hard to type. And if you’re not, you should be, because we’re also taking this opportunity to sneak out the fact that Sound Shapes is, day-and-date, also coming to PS3.

Yes. That thing you have under your TV, or maybe beside it (or possibly on top, but that sounds kind of dangerous, man!). And no, we haven’t been looking in your windows; we’ve been too busy making Sound Shapes and pricing it at $14.99 for BOTH VERSIONS. Buy it on PS Vita or PS3, and enjoy it on either system! We know. We’re freaking out too!

Through the magic of crossplay, you’ll be able to share content between the two systems without even having to really think about it. It’s all thanks to the “cloud” which floats above us like a benevolent data god. Save your campaign data up in the cloud, and download and resume on either platform. Maybe you’ll start creating a song at home on the PS3, but then decide that it’s not really the place to compose your latest masterpiece! Just download it to your PS Vita and make some beats on the bus. Then get off the bus several stops late, in a part of town you don’t know that well, and make some beats there! Then get another bus home, probably.

Oh, and the community is completely shared, so if a friend only has a PS3, or you only have a PS Vita (or any permutation of that) they can still see the levels you’ve made on the other system. And you can therefore see ALL the levels everyone has made and uploaded. Which will hopefully be a ton of levels. We’re really looking forward to what you guys do.

In fact, let’s talk about this a bit: You might be aware that we’ve been collaborating with visual artists and musicians for our campaign levels, and most recently revealed that our pals Superbrothers and Jim Guthrie provided the art and music for Corporeal, a four-song concept album that explores the way in which music can free us from the corporate machine… if it doesn’t crush us first.

It’s been a lot of fun working with those guys and we’re really happy with the way the levels have turned out. They mix up the gameplay and offer a classic Jim Guthrie soundscape that’s a fun contrast to other campaigns. And while the levels themselves are cool, it’s super fun to play with all of the music and graphics in the editor–everything, and we mean everything, from the campaign records can be mixed and mashed up with other records to create your own tunes and levels.

Anyway, here’s a video we made in Jim’s basement where he attempts to clear the levels in his own album (spoiler: he dies). There is also a demo of how the loop-based music system works for remixing campaign tracks in the editor mode. Also featured: One of Jim’s, like, 18 cats. He likes cats.

Is it too late to change the album title to “Chicken Dinner?” The answer is yes. Yes, it is too late.

If you’re coming to E3, we hope you come by and check out Sound Shapes. We’ll have both PS Vita and PS3 on the floor with content from four of our campaign records and we’ll be showing the cross functionality between the two versions. If you can’t make it to E3, that’s okay because if you didn’t notice the game is out on August 7th. Just spend that time regulating your breathing with a paper bag and you’ll be fine.

Alright, back to it. ALMOST DONE! (Seriously, we are almost done making the game.)

Want to see the PS3 version of Sound Shapes in action? Be sure to tune into our E3 2012 livestream — we’ll be showing it off live at 5:30pm Pacific Time during the countdown to PlayStation’s E3 press conference!

It’s worth noting that deadmau5’s album tracks, such as the pop cut “Ghosts ‘n Stuff,” won’t be appearing in Sound Shapes. And that’s by design: the game’s interactive soundtrack synthesizes with your platforming progress, making each “performance” a unique arrangement. But deadmau5’s sounds, loops, and rhythms are showcased in a dedicated set of levels. Better yet, his library will be available when it comes time to construct custom levels, so you’ll be free to cobble together a Girl Talk-esque composition or build a custom remix using your favorite sounds.

Though deadmau5 and PixelJam are the first publicly announced contributors to Sound Shapes, they definitely won’t be the last. Other designers and artists will also be contributing to Sound Shapes, with further details to be announced leading up to the game’s upcoming launch. “Each world is a different experience from the last in terms of art, music, and gameplay,” DeGroot explained. “It’s like putting on a Daft Punk record and then putting on a Black Sabbath record. They’re very different vibes.”