The inspiration for Sentris, a music game by designer Samantha Kalman, came out of her experiences with playing in a band. In

“I had never thought about it in those terms before, because my core mission was always to smash these ideas together into a game in which you have to do both to finish the game. But since he said that, I’ve noticed that people’s attention would shift back and forth between, ‘I’m gonna start out just pushing the button and make something and see how it sounds,’ and ‘Oh, there are some targets here, I’ll try to solve the puzzle.'” Kalman says that the different types of puzzles in the game encourage different kinds of play. “The pitch-based puzzles are the game part, you have to solve the puzzles, but the rhythm puzzles are the other part of it.” These, she said, give players the opportunity to focus more on what sounds good to them.

I think that Sentris’ emphasis on player freedom and creativity could make it an important entry in the world of music-focused games. Kalman is eager to see how players respond to it when it becomes available on Steam Early Access in August. This release is just the next step for Sentris, though; there’s still more work to be done. “Depending on how large the community becomes,” she said, “I’m expecting to be in Early Access for about six to eight months, and be finishing features, adding many more levels and more music, high-quality recordings of all these analog instruments, and figuring out the right shape for the game, before launching it early next year.”