https://twitter.com/llamasoft_ox/status/885540862024986624
Minter confirmed to Ars Technica that the project began with a cold call from NIN’s Trent Reznor via Twitter direct message.
“[Trent] mentioned that he’d enjoyed Llamasoft’s stuff and he had an idea to discuss,” Minter says. “Of course I was super chuffed to hear he’d liked our work, as I’ve enjoyed his a lot over the years too!”
The idea: Trent wanted to show off Polybius exactly as it looks and plays, only with song lyrics and other visual effects overlaid to the beat of NIN’s latest single. However, the game is currently a PlayStation 4 exclusive, so in order to give Reznor what he needed to direct the gameplay in a video, Minter forwarded the musician something pretty exclusive: one of the only copies of the game’s PC version, which still doesn’t have a release date.
Minter says the customized code in Reznor’s copy of the game is “simple stuff, really.” It calls a script for every frame of the game as synced to the music, and its primary purpose is to display text at whatever timestamp its user desires. The script can also accept field-of-view and shader modifications, and the game itself had extra button inputs added so that a player could fine-tune some visual effects with nothing more than button taps. Minter was kind enough to send us some sample code:
>START_TRANSITION,4
# Track energy increases
>[1:07.5]FOV 4.0,2.0,0.5
>ROLL -0.5,0.3,12.0
>POSTPROC 3,3,0.1,0.05,ff7f00ff,ff00ffff
>TETHER 1.0,0.3,2.0
>THROTTLE 0.5,0.7,1.0
>[1:08.80]PRINT"SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?",1
Minter says he was under a time crunch with “only a few days” to finish the build, and he didn’t see NIN’s results until the video went live to the public. “Of course I was a bit anxious, since when you’re doing your own creative work and it needs to mesh with the work of an artist, it’s not entirely a given that your work will agree with what he had in mind,” Minter says. “I just did stuff that I felt went well with the energy of the music, and I was really pleased when Trent liked what we’d done.” (Minter is clearly excited, adding, “Did we mention we’re chuffed?”)