K Project was a testbed for the game that would eventually become REZ. The developers United Game Artists came from the now defunct Team Andromeda, which produced the Panzer Dragoon games, and it was from this pedigree that K Project would draw its basic gameplay style of an on-rails shooter. Playing the game consists of guiding a cursor around the screen and locking on to enemies (up so several at once) by holding down a button and releasing it to deliver attacks. However whereas both the Panzer Dragoon series and K Project are both on-rails, K Project lacks certain abilities found in those games; namely being able to change your view at will and branching paths.

Heavily influenced by the works of surrealist painter Wassily Kadinsky, K Project’s unique visual style was an attempt by the developers to invoke synesthesia; or seeing sound. In order to achieve this the only soundtrack in the game consisted of a looping beat playing in the background, and the sounds made by the player as he shoots items and enemies. At the start of a level there is only a basic beat but as the player progresses different layers get added to the beats and by the end of a level there is a complete song playing in the background. Nearly all of the music in each level is of the techno or trance variety. Indeed those two genres are so ingrained in the games design philosophy that the final title of the game was said to be inspired by an Underworld song of the same name.

The final version contains tracks that were not in the beta, all of them custom made for the game as opposed to original artist made tracks in the beta. Also visually the finished game has a greater emphasis on a wireframe aesthetic and several different avatars.

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Tags: rez, shmup, shoot 'em up

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Dreamcast, MICROSOFT, Playstation 2, SEGA, SONY, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.