Article: A Marbelous Coincidence!
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## A Marbelous Coincidence
During a marketing session about the platformer "Glyph", Bolverk Games realized they had probably also created a weird marble game.
While exploring a fitting genre for their game, coming to Nintendo Switch, Bolverk's marketing and programming teams found resemblances to Glyph in Marble Games. That genre started with Marc Cerny (now busy leading the work on PS5) and the game Marble Madness from 1984.
## Glyph Madness
Bolverk is launching the game in January21: Glyph for Nintendo Switch. It was originally published as a VR title on Steam, now ported to Switch, and expanded with more levels, skins, unlocks, challenges, and a new musical score.
Back in the Indian summer of 2020, the people at Bolverk are talking about how to create awareness about their upcoming release, Glyph. One of the programmers chimes in when the perpetual marketing-question of "uniqueness" comes up: To him, the game is a throwback to early versions of the Super Monkey Ball series. This train of thought is picked up by marketing guy, Rasmus Stouby:
"I started looking into SMB and the genre and that took me to Marble Blast and Marble it Up and eventually to Marble Madness. I was surprised to see how much resemblance Glyph has with these games if you consider it on an evolutionary trajectory. It turns out, we have unknowingly made a marble game."
## Mario's Marbles
In Marble Madness, the very first game from 1984, the in-game enemy is a black marble that follows you around. It's a total coincidence, Bolverk Games claim, but one of the enemies in Glyph for Switch is exactly a black sphere that chases you around. With Marble Blast, you get the possibility to take shortcuts on the tracks and in Marble it Up the marble gains the ability to jump. All of these features are in Glyph for Switch but expanded even further. It can roll, jump, double jump, glide, and perform a "smash" ability where it slams downwards.
The game is thought up as a traditional platformer but almost totally non-linear, inspired by Mario64. The team wanted to create a world to explore and understand, with lots of free movement and expanding player choices as the player learns to master the movements of the glyph.
## Homemade music
So, the vast landscapes in Glyph own homage to the legendary SuperMario64 game, with an open world that breaks the classic platform setting.
Lead designer Jesper Halfter explains:
"The gameplay of Glyph takes the basic concept of marble games to a new level. It gives the player a lot of freedom to explore a wide range of environments full of challenges, and a set of awesome moves and abilities for the Glyph character. Once mastered, it will have the player feel like they can go anywhere. A lot of the inspiration for Glyph comes from games like Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, and Crash Bandicoot."
The beautiful worlds are accompanied by a wonderful musical score composed by the studio's sound designer, Frederik Keglberg.
There is likely more effort put into the audio-side of the game than in any other marble game before it. Both the musical score and the sound effects are created in the Bolverk Games in-house sound studio, and the result in terms of quality adds extra depth to immersion and emotion when playing the game.
"Glyph is, in a lot of ways a game we designed to enable players to take on as a hardcore challenge demanding speed, control, and precision, but also as an almost zen-like experience of peacefully roaming through the environments while collecting things at your own pace," says Jesper Halfter.
## Chill out and speedrun
Having the game music react to player input makes the game well suited for chill-out game styles as well as intensive speedruns in the VR-game. But in the Nintendo Switch version, the music is updated to fit the tweaked gameplay. Without musical reactions to player input the audio is based more on level progression and not so much on the player. Instead, the Nintendo Switch version has exploration levels with slow and evolving ambient music and time trial levels with dramatic and dynamic drum breaks.
The studio's catchphrase for Glyph on Switch is "Easy to learn, hard to master", so try it if you are ready to pop your marble with steroids and think you can handle it.