A Light in Chorus is a unique particle-based adventure

We recently caught up with A Light in Chorus' Designer Elliot Johnson and Programmer Matthew Warshaw who are working on the eerie looking adventure that imagines what Earth would look like through the eyes of someone who only had access to the 1977 Voyager records.

A Light In Chorus is a first person adventure game about experiencing the world through data sent back from the Voyager records, which is displayed as particles. Players explore this submerged future Earth via the contents of a crash-landed time capsule.

"You play an alien who finds the Nasa Voyager records," says Johnson, "which contain all these images and sounds of Earth and also a map back to Earth."

As a concept, the game is quite interesting, allowing players to fast forward and rewind this particle-based data, giving the game an almost musical quality. We asked Designer Elliot Johnson how he came up with this idea.

"So we've been developing it for a few years and it started off from looking at sonar scans of ship wrecks because they come in this point cloud style which has this really haunting quality, so it's really nice. We've kind of returned to the underwater setting. Over the last year we've kind of changed directions for this more sci-fi thing. It was previously kind of magic, fantasy but yeah I think this works." said Johnson.

Broken Fence Games' artistic adventure game allows players to explore this record of Earth through the lens of the Voyager data you find using a proprietary engine, allowing an art style entirely made up of particles. Programmer Matthew Warshaw spoke about how difficult this unique art style has been to program and optimise in the game engine.

"We have a process of converting into point cloud representations and then trying to show that on screen. It's quite difficult to optimise to get everything running at a nice frame rate, but as we've kept going and iterated Elliot's art style has increasingly given us more subtle forms of lighting and really utilising that point cloud style in a very sort of subtle and beautiful style," said Warshaw.

It seems that currently the central goal of the game is just to explore, but Johnson did hint that you may have to figure out what happened on Earth, although they have not finalised the story yet. With the game recently receiving funding from the UK Games Fund we should hopefully be seeing the game sometime next year, as Johnson added;

"We would like to release next year but we just don't know, when it's ready."

Does this particle-based adventure grab your attention?