On the importance of Harmonium's music and hand-made ASL animation

The three projects we saw at Netflix's booth at Summer Game Fest last month were quite moving. Inclusive social sim Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit, beautifully unique Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, and above all music adventure Harmoinium: The Musical. The last one has been created by mostly deaf developers for both deaf and non-deaf players, and it seemed to us it'll become something very special when it releases later this year.

In the also special interview below with "the Matts", co-creator Matt Daigle, and creative director Matt Korba, we learn all about Melody's adventure and what went into the creation of such a peculiar experience.

"The entire goal of making the musical was that it [would] be a visual experience as well", explains Daigle, who is a deaf musician himself. "So you do see there are colours and vibrations and expressions that explode from things when they're touched to represent the music. Handshapes are the greatest part of communicating with a deaf person in American Sign Language. We wanted to include all of those things as well. It's visually accessible for Melody to see the enjoyment of the music around her. And for the gamer, deaf gamers, they can enjoy it visually and they're learning about music at the same time."

"We have kind of a crazy animation pipeline", later adds Korba about the way the game has been animated almost like an old-school cartoon. "We opted at the beginning, instead of going with motion capture, to do it all by hand, which is rare to see ASL animated for the whole game like this. We wanted to do that so we can keep it stylistic. And our pipeline is basically we write the script together in English and ASL at the same time. We go back and forth with ASL, and then Matt is our ASL master. He will shoot reference videos. Our character is Filipina. So we also have two deaf Filipina actresses that will then take the ASL and act it out for our animators. And then we have an animation team with two deaf animators on it and they'll kind of lead the charge and animate it all in ASL. Matt will do the final check and then it goes into the game. So it's a pretty wild, long process, but this is the result that we end up with."

As if destiny had it, our full interview with The Odd Gentlemen was accidentally muted for a brief while, but worry not, as we have both subtitles and ASL interpretation for the whole video. Harmonium: The Musical releases on Netflix, PC, and Xbox in 2024.