Welcome back to the Chime designer blog. In this installment, you’ll learn about Chime’s formative adventures through Zoёland, the magical world where all of us game elves live and work.

To recap, Chime had started life as Cascade, a fun musical puzzler on the PSP. It was the first project of the Lab, Zoë Mode’s experimental, top secret, hush-hush development team (shhh… don’t tell anyone I told you).

The thing with the Lab is it’s in a constant state of flux – it takes loads of different ideas, tests them out, tweaks them, then moves on to another idea. The projects change, the people change, and that’s why it’s so successful and exciting. But this meant that after spending a few months in the Lab, Cascade was put on the backburner to make way for other experiments. But it was never forgotten. Those of us who’d seen it could never forget…

And so it wasn’t long before it was dusted off and brought back out to play, this time on the PC as a Flash game. While it was refined and polished, converting it to Flash brought with it its own difficulties, especially getting the audio timings spot on, but nevertheless it worked out pretty darn well, and convinced everyone that this was in fact still a great game.

So we come full circle back to the Lab, but this time with a whole new team and a goal of getting the game running on XNA, with an eye on the Xbox 360. It was during this time some of the biggest changes took place, including the name change – Cascade was reborn as Chime.

The guys who worked on it during this period pretty much refined everything about the game:

• They introduced new game rules, such as building quads and expanding them to score points – a great mechanic
• They made the visuals crisp and beautiful
• They really made it feel like you were driving the music through the gameplay

Chime had come of age. It was time for it to leave the Lab for the last time, never to return. The big wide world was calling…

Next time on Designer Blog…

• OneBigGame and Zoë meet, become instant friends, and decide to release a game
• For the first time ever, Chime is spotted on an Xbox

Mike Movel – Lead Designer