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Our very first interview at DevGAMM Lisbon 2025 was with Ribcage Games' Emil Lager, who told us about this rhythm-based hack and slash rogulike.
"Hi friends, this is the first day at DevGAMM in Lisbon, 2025, and I'm here joined by Emil, and we're taking a look and a listen at a game which is called Alpha Nomos, which is a rhythm-based hack and slash. What was the elevator pitch for this game?
So, the elevator pitch is, this is a rhythm-based hack and slash roguelike."
"Roguelike, I missed that part.
Yes, that's like the gist in, let's say, two words, and we're trying to bring things like Crypt of the Necrodancer and Devil May Cry together.
And a little bit of Hi-Fi Rush as well?
Yes, Hi-Fi Rush was in this direction, and we like the direction that it went in, but we think that you could take the seam between action and music further than they did, and that's exactly what we're doing."
"Okay, tell me a little bit more about the Devil May Cry mechanics that you're trying to absorb or to implement here.
So, you have a very complex combo system for each and every one of the weapons that we have in the game.
Right now in the demo we're demonstrating one of those, but we've purposefully made the game system in such a way that it's discoverable."
"So, I am still discovering new ways of using certain things in the weapon to be more effective, but these weren't things I planned for, and I really like to make an analogy between this and using musical instruments.
When learning a musical instrument, you need to learn the rules in order to start freestyling and breaking the rules."
"So, I see that like that, and I really like having people in the community find ways to break my system, and it's really fun to explore the system over time.
There's not one person that has played the game more than me, and I still find new things I can do inside of it on a regular basis."
"Okay, and in this game we play Telo.
What can you tell me about her, about the background and the story that's going on here?
So, Alphanomos is set in a kind of mysterious setting somewhere in the future.
There are no humans."
"Toys and puppets and stuff like that are alive.
You don't know why.
You find Telo completely lost in this new world with this sort of like magical force that she doesn't understand, which is called music, and this all ties back to why the puppets and toys in this area are basically going crazy and trying to kill you."
"And Telo is just there looking for her lost friends and trying to get out.
Whether she can do it, whether her friends are going to be on her side when she finds them finally, what's going to happen to them, all of that is going to be revealed in the game, so I don't want to talk about that too much because it's part of the mystery."
"But yeah, it's a post-apocalyptic magical world based on toy characters come to life.
Okay, and tell me a little bit more about the musical background to this.
I overheard that some of the team that usually works with Hans Zimmer are helping you out, guys, with this one.
Yeah, so a while ago, a guy called Juan Garcia-Herreros, love you Juan, met us at Gamescom and saw the project and was like, I want to make music for you guys."
"And we went, okay, who are you?
And then we started talking to him and he started describing to us what he does, even before his work with Han, and he described a lot of things that were like, he could solve musical problems that we didn't know how to solve, even like in a brief conversation."
"So we started working together and he's the musical mastermind behind the music and the sound effects, and he is on tour with Hans right now.
And in between events on the tour, he's helping us make more music for the game, leading Totem Warriors, which are fantastically talented people who do everything musical in our game."
"Okay, what can you tell me about the status of the project?
Because you guys are releasing on March already?
Yeah, so...
Do you have a publisher?
We don't have a publisher, we're self-publishing."
"Okay.
We do have some backing that we found quite recently, that was very exciting.
And we have Vicarious PR doing our marketing.
Yes."
"Because tiny team, we need someone else to market for us.
Someone's got to make the game itself, right?
And we're going to have a demo out on Steam in the next couple of days.
I don't know when exactly, it's in Steam review."
"And the full version is going to be out March.
March 2026 is version 1.0.
PC?
PC.
We're going to start for PC and we'll see how easy it is for us to find ways to ship to other platforms."
"The first thing we're going to look at is Switch, but given the size of the team, we first want to nail the PC release, make it as polished and as good as we can, and then we're going to look into consoles later.
And of course, this event just started, so not much time of playtime with players here, but what's the feedback you're getting from players that get their hands and their ears on this game?
So, people fall in love with the characters straight off the bat."
"I think every single person who sat down and played the game said something about the characters, and I love hearing that, even though it's none of my work.
But that's the team that I worked with were extremely talented individuals, and people seem to really enjoy the approach we have of putting music and action together."
"We've seen both music lovers and action lovers find different routes of connecting with the project in a way that I found really inspiring.
Hearing someone who's a musical engineer, for instance, taking the mechanics to heart and really getting inspired himself by how we do things with music has been a great experience, even though the event just started, as you said."
"How hardcore do you go in terms of accuracy with the beats, and how demanding or how challenging is it going to be for players to follow the beat, to play to the beat?
You know, some games have different settings, some games really ask you to be in sync with the music.
That's a great question. This is something that we're still kind of exploring."
"On the basis of it, because the musical effects we have for the attacks themselves are also musical, we have this relatively small window, musically speaking, where we need the sound to be in order to sound good.
Beyond that, I do a bunch of magic behind the scenes to make that more palatable.
This is still a question, but one thing I found out while seeing people play the game, especially when they play more than for just 10 minutes, let's say when we had streamers try out the demo, you improve at a really, really palatable rate."
"You can see people from run to run, because this is a roguelike, getting better at following the beat.
I almost feel like the system improves people's sense of rhythm.
I'm saying that from seeing people have that effect, and also from myself, because my sense of rhythm has for sure improved while working on this project."
"Okay, and final one. It is a roguelike, as you just mentioned, and it's music-based.
How much, or if at all, are you randomizing the music itself, and which genres can we look forward to listen to here?
We're not exactly randomizing the music, but we do have this selection process.
When you get into different combat scenarios, we pick the music in accordance, we pick different parts of the soundtrack, and we have this very complex system that selects the sound effects for your attacks in a way that would match the backing track."
"Whether it's the tutorial track you get at the start, whether it's the music you get later, we have this system that selects between a bunch of different variations of the moves.
There is some randomization there, just for the moves that you encounter the most, to make it more fresh every time, and so it doesn't weigh on you hearing-wise, but it's almost no randomness beyond that."
"And the roguelikeness comes into effect because the power-ups you get during the run actually affect the sounds musically.
So they are based on actual musical effects, like reverb, delay, flanger, and others, and when you pick up one of those power-ups, you get that same musical effect applied to your attacks."
"And that's been something that we focused on, because we think it's a really nice way of making you feel like it's more musical.
I found myself dying in a run, and then getting a bit bummed, because I really like how the combination of power-ups I had affected the sound of the attacks that I made in the run."
"Yeah, the first thing you said, I think it reminded me of how Donkey Kong Bonanza actually had the music effects and the music within the combos, you know, in sync with the music.
Alright, I'm looking forward to checking it out, to playing it a little bit later today, and to seeing the full version in March."
