Turba. It means “Crowd” in Latin. Whether or not this linkage was intentional, Turba should be a game that pleases crowds with its unique take on freedom equally within the dynamics and mechanics of this puzzle game laced with a user’s music library.
But, you may be wondering “What exactly is Turba?”
In the words of the developers from their site:
Turba is a puzzle game that is influenced by the music the player chooses. The game consists of 4 colors that can be made into combos of 3 or more. Combos can be made anywhere on the board at anytime, but the player is limited to one combo of each color at a time.
Obviously, music has a large role in this colorful puzzler. The most attractive concept of the game, in my opinion, is that it allows the user to use the music they already have. There’s nothing wrong with a handy stock list of music and there are many talented individuals who can generate music for a game (as demonstrated in a previous interview of Jason Wishnov) – sometimes developers just need to let players rely on their own tastes and Turba does this. As most people know, music sets a mood, tone and pace. If players want to get their ‘relax’ on with St. Germain, they can. If players wanted to step it up and get hard and crunchy with Crowbar, they can do that too. Allowing users to use their own stored music files also helps keep the game highly approachable. Not everyone will be into dance beats or heavy metal, so if gran-dad want’s to blow the dust off the Victrola with some Nat King Cole or some Ella Fitzgerald – well then they too, can rock out with their roosters out just as easily as their grand-kids who are stuck on that “Wheels on the bus” sing-a-long. People identify with things based on the music, and become pushed from or pulled to an experience around the musical setting, as an example, play a game with the volume down and there are many facets of the game experience that are missed or greatly eroded. But, within Turba the music also has an affect on the game mechanically.
Currently supported file formats are MP3 (.mp3), FLAC (.flac), Ogg Vorbis (.ogg), Monkey’s Audio (.ape), and Musepack (.mpc).
Playing the game is simple enough. It’s a puzzler in which a player needs to match three or more of a color. The board doesn’t automatically clear when matches are made; rather the player chooses when blocks are cleared. This allows greater control and opens the game to more diverse strategies. Unlike other puzzlers, the game uses the music to determine which block colors appear next for the player.
There are also Special Power items that offer players the ability to build better combos and subsequently higher scores. The Special Power items are as follows:
- Wild Card: Ten random blocks will become “wild cards”, these wildcards can be turned into any of the 4 normal blocks.(Red, Green, Blue, Yellow)
- Roulette:Once activated the Roulette wheel will start to spin. When the wheel stops the color that is selected will be taken off the current board.
- Row Swap (Unique to Freeplay):Upon activation, the player has 10 seconds to swap as many rows as they choose. After the 10 seconds is up, the player will be granted 2 row swaps that can be used at any time.
- Block Bank (Unique to Ascend:When activated, the blocks that would normally spawn on the board are taken and put into a bank. This occurs for 5 seconds. At any point the player may take the topmost block from the bank and place it anywhere on the board. The block can replace another block, or it can be dropped on top of the board.
To go with this, there are three modes of play:
Free Play: In Freeplay Mode, the bottom row of blocks will clear after 5 and 2 beats on Moderate and Intense, respectively. If Casual difficulty is selected, the bottom row will only be cleared if the player chooses, either by pressing Q or scrolling the mouse wheel down. The blocks in this mode are randomly generated and thus are different each time for a specific song.
Ascend: In Ascend mode, blocks will spawn into the board with each beat, 1, 2, or 3 at a time depending on difficulty. If the blocks fill the entire screen, the game will be failed. Two columns can be switched at any point during this game via the Tab key. The blocks in this mode are based off the song, so each specific song will play out the same way each time.
Descend: In Descend mode, blocks will slowly creep from the top of the screen, one row at a time. The rows of blocks move according to the beat. In this mode the player has the ability to move blocks up or down. Once a block is moved it will continue until any of the follow occur:
- The block collides with another block.
- The block falls off the screen.
- Or the block touches another block of the same color.
PAX East just finished up, and attendees Binary Take over, developers of Turba were present. Unfortunately I did not attend PAX for its inaugural launch, but I was fortunate enough to speak with Keith Morgado and Jonathan Delong about their game, indie pragmatism, and the arduous task of a custom beat detector in an email correspondence interview.
Shawn Gordon (SG): You’ve stated that you’re both a graduate of Full Sail University, what were your degrees in?
Morgado & Delong (M&D): The title for our degrees is a Bachelor’s of Science in Game Development. The program lasts around 21 months. The first few months they teach you the very basics of C++ programming as well as some advanced math. After that you start learning every aspect of games, from AI programming, to rendering (both Direct-X and OpenGL), to basic design principles. It is a pretty amazing and fast paced experience, and you certainly have to be prepared to work hard.
SG: Every fan of games has, at some point, an endeavor to create a game of their own. At what point did you guys realize that you could actually do this?
M&D: Well like most people, it’s safe to say we’ve wanted to make a game our whole lives. We have pretty good creative minds, so from a design standpoint, there wasn’t really much that could really hold us back. As far as actually making the game from a technical standpoint, we really couldn’t have imagined doing that until we went to Full Sail, seeing as we had little to no experience in the technical aspects it takes to make a game until we started there. Our education provided us the technical prowess we needed to call ourselves game developers. I don’t think either of us would even consider ourselves amazing programmers (we couldn’t seem to get any jobs, which is why we started our own company to begin with), but passion and determination can help carry you anywhere you want to go.
SG: For you, what does it mean to be ‘indie’?
M&D: Well unfortunately for us, right now it means to be poor 
. But besides that, indie is a lot of different things to different people. Indie is waking up every day and deciding what you want to work on next, and when you want to start doing it. Indie is everyone on your team having a say in every aspect of what you’re doing. Indie is likened to Burger King, two places where you are free to have it your way. 
SG: If you could change anything about the mainstream development climate, what would you change?
M&D: The obvious answer here is probably: to steer the industry away from the safe habit of making the same games over and over again. How many more Rock Bands or generic FPS games do we really need? It is just unrealistic to think that this habit will be broken anytime soon, though. As long as something keeps selling, the suits have no reason to want to do anything experimental. It is far too risky of a business venture. The indie game scene is awesome because we can afford to try zany new ideas. Some of them don’t work, but some of them go on to be a ‘Braid’ or ‘World of Goo’.
SG: You guys named your studio “Binary Takeover”, but two words thrown together are meaningless. Where does “Binary Takeover” come from, does it have significant meaning?
M&D: The name Binary Takeover is an idiom for eventual takeover of technology. You really see it every day; most of us nowadays would be lost without our mobile devices attached to our hips. We were really hoping that the name would make people sit back and notice the non tech things in life. It annoys me sometimes that people expect almost instant responses to a text message. We may be a tech/video game company but we are huge advocates of going outside and enjoying the little things.
SG: On your Kickstarter project page I noticed you mention building upon the feedback from early alpha and beta release participants. In development, how has player feedback been essential to the overall production of the game?
M&D: To be honest, most feedback you try to get is about bugs or problems people may be encountering. Just playing the game yourself makes it impossible to find every issue. But we also encouraged people to give us their thoughts on the game itself. If our users aren’t having fun, we aren’t doing our jobs as game developers. Thankfully almost everyone who had emailed us way back when we had public releases really enjoyed the game. You also get suggestions for changes from people that you might have never thought of otherwise, and they can turn out being better than what you had. Feedback also helps encourage you to hammer away on a feature until it is finally good. The main example of this is our beat detection. Back in August and October of last year when we had playable builds for people, our beat detection was, suffice it to say, pretty bad. People had no problem telling us this. We knew it wasn’t that great at that point, but if people don’t constantly tell us so, maybe we don’t continue to try and make it better? I think we’re on like, the 6th iteration of code for it >_< . I’ve gone through a ton of my music library the last few days and I can honestly sit here and say I think it is pretty damn exceptional in most cases. I hope everyone else thinks so too, and realizes how hard it actually really is, considering the wealth of different types of music in existence.
SG: Turba seems like a mixture of concepts compiled skillfully into something that stands on merits unique to the title while remaining simple and approachable, what were the inspirations for Turba?
M&D: Most color matching games give you limited control over what you can do. You try to maneuver pieces next to each other, and then the game will clear them away for you. We wanted to give the player full control over the game board, letting them select which blocks they wanted, and clear them from the board when they wanted. We wanted to reward forward thinking, by letting the player clear as few or as many blocks they needed to set bigger combos. We thought using music to make each game a different experience would be an awesome thing to do, because we love music and because everyones’ experience would be totally unique, since we all enjoy different types of music.
SG: A game you guys made previously, “Lost Marbles” was a final project for college. It felt like a reminiscent mixture of the classic NES “Marble Madness” with a more recent title “Cuboid” (to me). What is Turba most like that players could associate with?
M&D: Hmm well actually we all equated ‘Lost Marbles’ to ‘The Lost Vikings’ (one of Blizzard’s first games) and ‘Marble Blast Ultra’. I believe it actually stated in our design doc that the game was meant to be a hybrid of the two . But anyway, I suppose it is easy to associate our game to any “match-3″ game, such as Bejeweled. Matching 3 or more of the same color is the very core aspect of the game. We also draw associations with ‘Audiosurf’, which will likely happen to any game that comes out now that lets the player use their own music. Even if the core gameplay is completely different but uses music to determine what happens, everyone likes to immediately equate it to ‘Audiosurf’ . That is certainly a great game they we enjoy though. It set the bar pretty high. We hope we can earn a (small) spot in peoples’ hearts alongside it.
SG: People are going to play Turba and have a list of things that they find important and unique – from the Descend Mode to the previously touched on, use of players’ stored music. As the creator though, what do you think is the most creative feature – the personal ‘baby’ – that one thing added to the game that you personally find most interesting?
M&D: At the end of the day it is what we talked about earlier, that being the fact that the player has full control over the blocks on the game board. How well you score in a particular song will be all up to you. You can just coast and clear a few combos while you enjoy your music. You can play a song over and over, memorizing the block spawns and frantically clearing combos in hopes of squeezing out just a few more points to move up on those online leader boards 
. We hope the player feels the freedom we wanted to give them.
SG: One of the features of Turba that handily sets itself apart from other music based games is that it draws music from what the player already has on their computer. To me it would seem that a huge obstacle would be beat mapping. How did you overcome this challenge?
M&D: Oh lord. Okay just so you know, I’m (Jonathan) the one who did all the music stuff, so I’ll be able to explain the hell that is beat detection ;D . This was far and away our biggest challenge, and it was also the most important part of the game, so it had to be worked on as hard as possible. It has changed so many times over the last year. Just when you think you start to get it right, you play different songs and it just completely fails. I knew from the beginning (thankfully) that it could never be perfect, so that wasn’t the goal. I just had to come up with something that would work most of the time, and that would spawn enough blocks to make the game playable with any music. If anyone out there remembers how it was last year during the last beta, and they play the game now, I would have to say they would be blown away with how much better it is. I just recently started going through my library of music to test out the game before release, and I hadn’t realized how well I had actually done. I would just wait for my code to fail, but on almost every song I played it shocked me just how good it was. My fear is that anyone who plays the demo (coming soon) will play like, 1 song, and it will happen to be a song that just doesn’t work (I know they have to exist right?) and they will hate the game because of it. I’ll always feel proud of how far along I was able to take it though, and I’m sure a lot of people will appreciate it.
SG: The blogosphere is all a twitter with the whispers of PC platform being dead for games. Personally, I disagree and apparently to some degree you do as well. Where do you see the games platform going (or staying) and what made you choose the PC as a platform for Turba?
M&D: Buying PC games at retail may very well be dead. Buying games digitally through sites such as Steam is very much alive though. Steam has what, 25,000,000 users now? New digital distribution sites seem to be cropping up all the time (Desura is a new one in beta right now). Sites like these are making it easier than ever for indie games to be released to the masses. Our main reasoning to develop for the PC initially was simply because that’s what we know how to develop on. That and the costs to develop are extremely low, which is important when you have basically no funds.
SG: Do you intend to release the title for other platforms, like XBLIG (XBox Live Indie Games), Android, PSN and Apple’s App Store?
M&D: Well, Turba actually started as an Android game back in October of 2008. This fell apart in a matter of weeks though because as I alluded to above, we were only really comfortable with PC development then. I think if we ever got the opportunity our game would be perfect for the platform though, as well as the iPhone. We got a few business cards from people at PAX and we’ll be contacting them soon (among which was someone from XBLA). Who knows? Maybe something will come from that.
SG: You recently went to PAX East and walked away a happy team. You were selected as one of the showcase winners.In another interview you stated you were not surprised because you knew it was good enough to win based on success in other places such as 2beegames.com.You also stated that in lieu of surprise you had excitement. What is the philosophy espoused by Binary Takeover to guage a crossing of the line that takes something from “good enough” to “good period”?
M&D: Well you can tell something is good when you (the person making it) are excited and enthusiastic about it, and everyone you hear from on the outside expresses that they enjoy what you have made. This has been the case for us thus far. If we’re making a game, we don’t want to stop until we feel it is genuinely fun to play. Control and responsiveness are also two big factors that just have to feel right to make something better than “good enough”. You really need to have these qualities to make it into competitions like the one on 2Bee or expos like PAX, and it appears people think we indeed possess them .
SG: What do you think it the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from developing Turba and how will it apply to future endeavors?
M&D: Very simple and very blunt: FINISH THE DAMN GAME! This game has been in development since March of 2009. Now this obviously wasn’t full time development, far from it. In fact there were times where we stopped working on the game for weeks at a time. We were also dooming ourselves by continuing to add new features. There has to be a point where you need to say ENOUGH, and just finish out what you have. If you don’t you may never get done. Thankfully, we came full circle and were able to put together a final product. It would be a nightmare to spend so much time on something and not see it through to the end.
Now the good stuff – I know what you’re thinking – “When and where can I get a copy of Turba?”
Turba goes on sale at the Turba website for the wallet friendly price of $10 on Saturday, April 3, 2010
Their site states:
To those of you who were awesome enough to buy a copy at PAX, we will also be releasing a standalone update, which will bring you up to the current release level. We hope you’re enjoying the game right now! Thank you for your support.
There will also be a demo to go alongside the release of the full version, so get ready!
