The Music is the Level

Astral Planes is a playable system where music is not background, reward, or score. It is the terrain.

Players pilot small vehicles through a dynamic field of sound, energy, and time. Movement shapes music. Restraint preserves it. Survival and expression are inseparable. There is no fixed performance to master, only a system to inhabit.

At its core, Astral Planes asks a single design question:

What if the level is the music?

Music as Space

Astral Planes draws lineage from works like Rez HD, where play and music merge into a single embodied act, and Björk and Scott Snibbe’s Biophilia, which treated songs as explorable systems.

Where those works invite players into authored musical spaces, Astral Planes asks what happens when music itself becomes a persistent, stateful environment. One that is shaped less by performance and more by survival, restraint, and time.

Composition

What might traditionally be called "levels" are authored as motifs. Each motif is constructed from up to four possible musical roles (Lead, Bass, Groove, and Harmony) represented as shards of a star embedded within a maze of cosmic dust. When a star is struck, a shard is ejected. The player must capture it.

Capturing a shard releases a burst of notes scattered throughout the maze. These notes must be freed and collected, becoming part of a musical structure that persists across time. The musical material for a motif can be authored in two complementary ways.

Riffs as Atomic Musical Objects

Discrete MIDI clips can be authored and assigned a root note. These riffs define specific melodic and rhythmic gestures.

When notes derived from a riff are collected, they are first heard in the order and timing of the player's actions. Once the collection is complete, the material resolves into its authored form, looping as part of the ongoing composition. This approach foregrounds gesture and contour, allowing specific musical ideas to surface within the system.

Generative Rulesets as Musical Potential

Motifs can also be defined using RuleSets rather than fixed clips. A ruleset specifies a root note, possible scales, pattern and rhythm logic, and behavorial modifiers. At runtime, notes are instantiated from these constraints rather than pulled from a predefined sequence. Here, the musical identity resides in relationships and tendencies, not in any single authored phase.

Chord Progression and Expansion

Each track begins confined to a single temporal bin. When a player captures a shard for a bin that is already full, the loop expands into the next bin. Loops can expand up to four bins in total.

Bins are mapped to a chord progression. As the loop expands, the same musical material—whether riff-based or rule-based—is transposed to the corresponding chord. For example, given a progression of I–V–IV–I and an original root of C, material in the second bin is transposed to G. Expansion does not add new songs, it reshapes the harmonic context in which existing material unfolds.

Ascension

Collected musical material does not persist indefinitely. Each set of notes has a finite amount of loops that it will play before ascending. When ascension occurs, those notes are removed, opening space within the composition for new material to emerge. Loss isn't failure, it's part of the system's ongoing rebalancing.

Drums

Each motif includes a set of drum loops with escalating intensity.

Drum intensity is not directly controlled by the player. Instead, it emerges from the player’s energy usage and rate of collection. Aggressive play increases intensity; restraint allows it to recede.

Rhythm, like harmony, is a consequence of behavior rather than a fixed backdrop.