Here’s something quirky but cool. Developer Whetstone Games is announcing their debut game Offbeat, to be published by Pantaloon.
In Offbeat, you’ll be living the life of a musician or a music producer, where you’re out here producing beats and music. Clients will be sending you briefs of what they want their songs to sound like and you’ll have to fulfill these requirements to your best of ability. This includes making a ringtone for your uncle
The catch? Your musical instruments are rather unconventional. It’s not called Offbeat for nothing. You’ll be plugging everyday objects like toys, kitchen utensils and… garden ornaments to a synthesizer to produce music. Ever wonder what beat a garden gnome can produce?
There is a proper sequencer in Offbeat, maybe not fully feature-rich as a typical DAW, but enough that you can have a workflow going and export your creations as .wav files for you to use as you see fit. For example, use your own beat for the soundtrack of the beat-’em-up-to-the-beat Dead As Disco.
To demonstrate the power of Offbeat’s music producing capabilities, Whetstone “front-man” and Creative Director Ed Sibley produced a song, “Not Your Uncle’s Ringtone,” which its music video doubles as the game’s reveal trailer.
“Well, we needed some music for the announcement trailer.” said Ed Sibley, Creative Director at Whetstone, “The game is literally about making music, so naturally I wanted to experiment with making the track using the game. So I fired it up, plugged the Tiger-01 into a delay pedal, and got to work. And now Pantaloon are releasing it as a single! Funny old world.”
What’s even more interesting is that Pantaloon has set up Pantaloon Records as a music label, which “Not Your Uncle’s Ringtone” will be the first song to be published under it.
“‘Not Your Uncle’s Ringtone’ is the first track to be published under the new Offbeat Radio banner.” added Pantaloon’s Jamin Smith, “We’ve set up Pantaloon Records as a music label to publish the tracks Offbeat players might make in game. It’s all terribly exciting!”
Offbeat promises “a tycoon game with deep progression and an evolving studio of synthesisers” but the fact that you can legitimately learn how to make music and even have them published to a record label, all by utilising silly instruments on a game that happens to have a sequencer, is really amazing. It’s nice that there are efforts to make the music process more accessible, without resorting to the sloppy use of generative AI.
If the idea of producing songs like those made with the Delay Lama plugin sounds enticing (no really, folks can make cool beats with that whimsy, punny plugin), Offbeat is set to launch into Early Access later this year on PC (Steam), with a demo currently in production.