On our Patreon Page, we publish Indie Dev Interviews for our Patrons. The last one published is our interview with Matthew Taranto, co-founder with his brother Michael of Bitfinity Games. Bitfinity Games are the developers of Tadpole Treble Encore which I had the pleasure of reviewing as you can read here.
Infinite Bitfinity
Can you tell us a little about yourselves and Bitfinity games studio!
Sure! We’re a couple of Louisiana-based brothers who’ve always enjoyed playing games and playing music, and wanted to combine those aspects in a fun way.
What’s behind the name of your studio?
We wanted to convey the infinite potential of games, alongside our upbringing on systems like the NES and SNES (where the term “bit” was much more common as a sort of abstract unit of power). Thus, “BitFinity”!
Starting Out
How did you start out as game developers?
I (Matthew) started a gamer webcomic in 2008 called Brawl in the Family that quickly gained a following. After a few years, I thought it’d be feasible to branch off into developing games, so I enlisted the help of my brother Michael and a handful of programmers to help make the game a reality. In 2013, our Tadpole Treble Kickstarter campaign succeeded in hitting its goal, paving the way for a 2016 launch on PC and Wii U and a 2021 rerelease on Nintendo Switch.
Inspiration Strikes
What was the inspiration for developing Tadpole Treble Encore?
I got the idea for this game when I was a teenager. My dad’s a composer himself and would write out various parts of songs using programs like Finale. I remember thinking when I watched the little playback line scroll across automatically, the right-to-left action reminded me of a platformer! From there, the idea of a game using its own soundtrack’s notes as the level design began to take shape.
Since I wanted to take advantage of the full staff and not being dragged down by gravity, that’s how I decided to have swimming be the main mechanic for moving through the stages. And the humble tadpole was picked as the star solely because I couldn’t think of any well-known tadpole characters!
Lastly, Composition Mode was heavily inspired by the music maker mode in Mario Paint (with a few extra bells and whistles), which is something I spent a lot of time with as a kid.
Early Versions or Prototype
What is the biggest challenge in making the game? How did you overcome it?
The largest, most pervasive difficulty through the process was timing everything correctly: timing notes to their corresponding beats, timing creatures and events to the song, and even timing things like Baton’s swim speed and tempo changes. If anything was even a little off, the illusion of “playing the music” would be broken, so this aspect took a ton of time to smooth out. There was no real magic formula for fixing it; we basically just had to test it over and over again and keep scooting things around.
Want to read more?
Would you like to read more about the early versions/prototypes, composition mode, and what kind of cool game Bitfinity Games are developing next?
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