Out of This Reality

Cleveland-based game developer Dr. Bloc released its first virtual reality video game Straylight earlier this year. Rob Kovacs composed its soundtrack.

ENTER THE WORLD OF STRAYLIGHT , a bejeweled tour of unseen galaxies in which the player acts as a cyberpunk Spider-Man. Four and a half years ago in a hotel in Rocky River, two programmers, two film creators and a composer met for Global Game Jam 2018. “They had just bought a VR headset right when they first came out, and we all fell in love with it,” says Benjamin Barr, Straylight creative lead. With dazzling energy and Rob “88bit” Kovacs’ hypnotizing soundtrack performed on a Sequential Prophet 5 synthesizer — plus two GDEX Columbus gaming expo Best in Show trophies later — Dr. Bloc’s Straylight released Jan. 31. The award-winning soundtrack (you can pledge for a dark purple vinyl) released Jan. 27. In the first week, Dr. Bloc saw Straylight downloaded nearly 2,000 times across disparate platforms. The soundtrack has seen about 20,000 streams on Spotify alone. Straylight ($19.99) is available for order on Steam, PSVR, Meta App Lab and SideQuest. It’s compatible with most virtual reality headsets. Cleveland Magazine probes the creative process with Barr and Kovacs.

Cleveland Magazine: What inspired Straylight’s aesthetic?

Benjamin Barr: The name comes from a pretty famous William Gibson novel called Neuromancer. At the beginning, we were going for this cyberpunk, retro-futuristic aesthetic. We ended up for some technical reasons going more abstract, but we still kept that purply, spacy, cybery look, which was also underlined by Rob’s score. We took inspiration from old-school Nintendo games — Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers — all that old stuff that we love.

CM: How does writing music for a video game differ from writing music for film? Rob Kovacs: Movie scores always have characters in front and the music almost is always supporting that. In video games you are the main character, you are creating the experience, so the music supports you. There’s two main ways you can think of writing video game music. One is that the music changes and adapts to what the player does. That often requires it to loop for a certain while and then something new happens and you add a layer.

Kovacs was inspired by a weightless chord in Stravinsky's Petrushka when writing Straylight's first track.

CM: What’s the biggest challenge of designing a VR game?

BB: We sort of side-stepped that nausea issue. We figured out early on if we removed all the references and make everything abstract your brain doesn’t know where it is and it doesn’t get car sick. It presented a lot of really interesting design challenges because you can’t have boundaries around you in any normal sense. We had to figure out ways of keeping the player on the track that we want. How do we keep the game engaging and visually interesting when you can’t get too near anything that would feel like a wall or a floor? Finding a fun game within those constraints was a lot of fun, but it was also difficult.

CM: Is VR the future of gaming?

BB: There’s a lot of itches video games scratch, and VR only takes care of a very narrow band of that. I don’t think it will ever replace traditional video games. But I think VR will always be a really cool boutique thing.

RK: VR is like the Wild West of video games right now. In that sense, it’s very new and cutting edge, but VR has a lot of limitations. Video games outside of VR, there’s not really any technical limitations anymore like we had in the 8-bit and 16-bit era.