The fusion of music and gameplay is becoming increasingly exciting as developers further explore how to wrap level design around beats, vibes, crashes and glitches. Just look at the trailer for 140 for instance – that’s a minimalist platformer, but that hasn’t stopped it from being nominated for awards, and it’s easy to see why. It’s the use of synchronization between the game world and the audio, and for some reason, that’s just so incredibly exciting to watch. And when you’re playing this kind of game that is driven by music in such a way, it feels great when you can match all of the rhythms. There’s still a lot of potential in this area of game development.

Enter Rekcahdam – a guy who tours with the likes of Disasterpeace, performing game music to live audiences. Not only does he make great music, but he also finds time to develop games as well, with Celestial Mechanica and rComplex probably being the ones you’ll know him for most. It’s been a little while since he’s mentioned anything more about a game development project, but yesterday he released a teaser for exactly that – an upcoming game called Band Saga. The teaser itself is a fine watch and seems to promise something rather great. We’ve managed to grab a few details about the game, but first you need to spend a minute watching this:

So what is that all that about?! It’s definitely a fascinating watch regarding both the audio and the visuals, and it could certainly stand on its on two feet as an impressive piece of media. But it serves a grander purpose, as said – it’s a teaser for Rekcahdam’s upcoming game. He tells us that it will be a music-driven game and that the teaser does allude to how it will play. “In fact,” he says, “one of the devices that it will be released on is featured in the video.” That would be smartphones, then.

Among The Warbles Of Space

So, as we’re supposed to take it that the teaser is a reflection of how Band Saga will play out, it seems that it will be some kind of rhythmic space shooter. The teaser seems to demonstrate that it may come in parts too with similar, but varying gameplay. We can see at one point that you’re playing as a man shooting triangles with weapons protruding from the sleeves on his shirt. The later we see the same character aboard a spaceship using that same device to control a mounted gun with his arms.

Rekcahdam has been working on Band Saga for the past two years, on and off. He says that other projects kept getting in the way that prevented him from working on it more; otherwise it would have been released already.

“Band Saga is an idea I came up with and started developing by myself but now I have lots of help. The core development team for this project consists of me and three other people, but there are so many other people who are also helping out bit by bit. I don’t really want to name these people yet because that’s part of the surprise, although you might already be able to guess some of them already.”

Guess some of them indeed. Over on Twitter, where we first caught word of the game and its teaser, Rekcahdam Cc’d in a number of people to the tweet that linked to the teaser. Those people include a mix of developers and artists that we’re guessing are involved with Band Saga. They are Aivi Tran, Stemage, Disasterpeace, Laura Shigihara, Surasshu, Beau Blyth (Teknopants) and Connor Ullman.

We Need Your Help!

As you might expect, Rekcahdam wasn’t willing to part with any more details on the game. However, he did outline how you might be able to find further teasers, potentially more information and even a screenshot, but you do have to work for it. But you people love this sort of thing.

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but next week, around the same time, I hope to release a song. This song will have nothing to do with Band Saga ….. except for the fact that the artwork in the video will show an image of the other three core developers. Also, Josh Mattingly reviewed a game I wrote the soundtrack for called Seedling. I actually hid a screenshot of the game somewhere inside that soundtrack way back in July. As far as I know, no one picked up on it. There are a ton of tidbits around this project that people can probably find if the search through my stuff. And the more publicity this project gets, the more I’ll release open up about it. “

People! You clever and wonderful people, you need to go out there and find this stuff, and do it sharpish! We’d do it ourselves, but we’re pretty terrible at this kind of thing, so if you’ve got the skill and the know-how, go find that Seedling soundtrack and get us that screenshot. Make sure to poke around all of Rekcahdam’s stuff, as well as ask him lots of questions – we’ll get it out of him! And when this new song comes out next week, you better make sure you look at for the artwork.

When can we expect Band Saga to drop? We’re told that it’s going to be pretty soon, and in the teaser you’ll notice it says Q1 2013, so that indicates that there’s not much time to wait. Rekcahdam says the release of this teaser is him telling himself that he can’t slack off for the next month now. So perhaps March or April will see Band Saga fall on to whatever platforms it’s coming to.