Books, Gaming, and the LOUD Crossover

We believe that books can serve a purpose, and for good reason. Crossover between all communication media—online, print, TV—is essential for businesses who hope to truly capture the entire market. The smart, out-of-the-box business people are finding that diversity allows them to access new, untapped markets.

Cue: Pop Sandbox, an award-winning small multimedia production and publishing company based in Toronto.

They have spent the last five years working with a diverse group of filmmakers, artists, journalists, social workers, technologists, playwrights, animators, composers, game designers, activists, and musicians to put together their ground-breaking work which spans videogames, film, and graphic novels. Their most recent project, LOUD on Planet X raised almost $40,000 on Kickstarter and was just released on PS4, Stream, iOS, and Android!

As they put together the game, they realized there was more story to tell. They came up with a ‘Behind-the-Scenes Art Book’ which chronicles the beauty of a plan coming together. We sat down with the creators to learn more about their exciting cross-media project.

Where did the idea for the LOUD videogame project come from?

The initial idea for LOUD sprang out of obsessively playing old arcade classics on a MAME with the audio turned down, listening to my own music or checking out what friends were listening to as a way of chilling out. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking how cool it would be to have the gameplay directly responding to the music. Around the same time, I got pretty into Plants vs Zombies, and we somehow landed with a strange hybrid of classic shooter-meets-rhythm game with tower-defense elements.

Describe the game and how you built it

LOUD on Planet X is an arcade-style indie music game where you have to defend your stage from hordes of quirky aliens by tapping to the beat and using a fun assortment of makeshift weapons like speakers, strobe lights, fog machines, amplifiers, bouncers and custom special attacks. It features a cross-section of top established and emerging artists including Tegan and Sara, Purity Ring, METZ, Metric, Lights, July Talk, F*cked Up, Cadence Weapon, Austra, and more. We’re super excited to be releasing it for PS4, Steam, iOS, and Android this Spring.

How did you get all the bands interested in participating?

We’ve been incredibly lucky getting so many amazing bands involved. The first band to come on board was F*cked Up; Mike Haliechuk and Jonah Falco actually created the original score for our last game Pipe Trouble and also created an awesome original score for LOUD. We approached a bunch of bands we love, starting largely with the vibrant indie music scene here in Toronto. Brendan Canning from Broken Social Scene has been another amazing support and bridged a bunch of intros; he and Justin Peroff also contributed a ridiculously catchy original score to LOUD. In the end we have an incredible roster of 14 artists, and there’s no way we could have done this without FACTOR‘s assistance with licensing a lot of the music (FACTOR is the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings).

Why is it important to extend your videogame content to a print platform?  

I’m a huge fan of all pop culture—comics, film, music, video games. In fact, prior to LOUD, we’d created a couple graphic graphic novels (including the best-selling 300-page journalistic comic book, KENK: A Graphic Portrait, which is currently being developed as a fully animated film). It is incredible to get to make a Behind-the-Scenes Art Book that captures a lot of the process, and also spotlights some of the amazing visual design from Mat den Boer.

How long did it take to create the book?

The actual process of preparing and printing the book with Blurb was incredibly simple and fast, but boy, did we ever agonize and debate over what images to include in the final 24 pages!

How will you promote the book?

The Behind-the-Scenes Art Book is going to be a really nice unexpected surprise for a lot of our Kickstarter backers. We’re also going to be making it a centerpiece of our publicity campaign. It is going to be amazing to put something physical right into the media’s hands that really captures the project.

Have an idea as to how you could use a book in partnership with your project? Tell us in the comments below! For more information about LOUD on Planet X, visit their website.