Rhythms It’s a game that sounds as good as it looks.
With its global beats, sci-fi visuals, and clever puzzles, the 2024 Apple Design Award winner for Interaction is both a challenge and an artistic achievement. To solve each level, players must create linear paths on increasingly complex boards, avoiding obstacles and activating buttons along the way. It’s all set against a world music backdrop; The different levels feature genres as diverse as Ethiopian jazz, Hawaiian slack key guitar, and Indonesian gamelan, just to name a few.
And here’s the hook: every time you beat a level, you add an instrument to an ever-growing song.
“The idea is that instead of reacting to the music, you’re creating it,” says Asger Strandby, co-founder of Floppy Club, the Denmark-based studio behind Rhythms. “We do a lot to make sure it doesn’t sound too wild. But the music in Rhythms It is generated entirely by the way you solve the puzzles.”
ADA FACT SHEET
Rhythms
- Winner: Interaction
- Equipment: floppy club
- Available in: iPhone, iPad
- Team size: 5
Download Rytmos from the App Store
This ingenious game is the result of a partnership that goes back decades. In addition to being developers, Strandby and Floppy Club co-founder Niels Böttcher are musicians hailing from the city of Aarhus in Denmark. “It’s a small enough place that if you work in music, you probably know everyone in the community,” Böttcher laughs.
the music in Rhythms It mainly comes from traveling and being curious.
Niels Böttcher, co-founder of the Floppy Club
The pair connected in the early 2000s, bonding more over music than games. “To me, games were something magical that you could never create yourself,” Strandby says. “I was a geeky kid, so I made music and eventually web pages on computers, but I never thought I could make games until I was in my twenties.” Instead, Strandby formed bands like Analogik, which combined a variety of quirky samples (swing music, Eastern European folk, Eurovision-worthy pop) with hip-hop beats. Strandby was the leader, while Böttcher handled the behind-the-scenes work. “I was the manager in all but name,” he says.
The band was a success: Analogik released five studio albums and performed at Glastonbury, Roskilde and other major European festivals. But when their musical adventure ended, the couple returned to separate tech jobs for several years, until it was time to join forces again. “One day we started thinking: ‘Could we combine music and games somehow?’” says Böttcher. “There are funny similarities between the two in terms of structures and patterns. We thought, ‘Well, let’s try it.'”
puzzles in Rhythms – like the one set on the planet “Hateta” – comes with a little history lesson about the music being played.
The duo began working on a rhythm game driven by their stories and travels. “I’ve collected CDs and tapes from all over the world, so the genres in Rhythms “They are chosen very carefully,” says Böttcher. “We really love Ethiopian jazz music, so we included it.” The gamelan music (traditional Indonesian ensemble music with a lot of percussion) is pretty wild, but amazing. And sometimes you just hear an instrument and say, ‘Oh, that tabla has a really nice sound.’ Then the music in Rhythms It mainly comes from traveling and being curious.”
The game took shape early, but the mazes in their initial versions were much more complex. To help bring them down to a more accessible level, the Floppy Club team hired art director Niels Fyrst. “Their goal was to make things cleaner and clearer,” says Böttcher. “Once we saw what he was proposing, and how it strengthened the game, we realized, ‘Okay, maybe we’re right.'”
success in Rhythms It’s not just that you’re passing a level. It’s that you are creating something.
Asger Strandby, co-founder of the Floppy Club
Still, even with a more manageable set of puzzles, a lot of design complexity remained. Building Rytmos levels was like stacking one puzzle on top of another; The team not only had to build the levels, but also create the appropriate music. To do this, Strandby and his brother Bo would sketch out a level and then send it to Böttcher, who would sync it to the music, a process that turned out to be even more difficult than it sounds.
“The sound depends largely on the location of the obstacles in the puzzles,” says Strandby. “That’s what shapes the music that comes out of the game. So we tested and tested again to make sure the sound didn’t break the idea of the puzzle.”
puzzles in Rhythms It’s about getting from point A to point B, but things are never as simple as they seem.
The process, he says, was “quite difficult” to get right. “Usually with something like this, you create a loop and then maybe add another loop and then add layers on top of it,” Böttcher says. “In RhythmsHitting an emitter triggers a tone, percussion sound or chord. One tone hits another tone, and then another, and then another. “In essence, you are creating a pattern as you play.”
We’ve actually gone back to make some of the songs more vague, because we want them to sound human.
Niels Böttcher, co-founder of the Floppy Club
The unorthodox approach leaves room for creativity. “Two different people’s solutions may look different,” says Strandby. And when players win a level, they unlock a “jam mode” where they can play and practice freely. “After all the conundrum, it’s all about no rules,” Strandby laughs.
However, for all the technical wizardry happening behind the scenes, the actual musical results had to have a human feel. “We’re dealing with genres that are analog and organic, so they can’t sound electronic at all,” says Böttcher. “We’ve actually gone back to make some of the songs more vague, because we want them to sound human.”
Best of all, the game is packed with creativity and intelligence, even off-screen. Every letter in the Rhythms The logo represents the solution to a puzzle. The company’s logo is a 3.5-inch floppy disk, a small nod to its first love of software. (“That’s all I wanted for every birthday,” Böttcher laughs.) And both Böttcher and Strandby hope the game will serve as an introduction to both sounds and people they may not be familiar with. “Learning about music is a great way to learn about a culture,” says Strandby.
But above all, Rhythms It is an inspiring experience that fulfills its noble objective. “Success in Rhythms “It’s not just that you’re passing a level,” Strandby says. “You’re creating something.”
Meet the winners of the Apple Design Award 2024
Behind the Design is a series that explores the design practices and philosophies of Apple Design Awards finalists and winners. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their extraordinary creations to life.
