Bee Nix and royb0t send fan notes to the moon
"I didn't realize how sweet the idea was"
Before their set at GLITCH'N'GAMES this month, Bee Nix left slips of paper on a table beside some markers, an empty bag, and a sign reading "Please write a message to the Moon for a secret thing later ... " Thirty-one people wrote one. When the set reached its finale, someone pulled a slip from the bag, and that message got typed into a terminal inside the game. Sending it is the whole premise: you collect what you need to switch the terminal on, and the Moon gets a letter. Nix scanned all 31 and shared them, along with video of the final scene.
Luna Prima is the game. Nix builds it and plays it; royb0t, the Chicago producer whose whole bio is "I create glitches and breaks," scores it; and the two of them perform it onstage in real time, the way a band plays a song rather than the way a developer demos a build.
They have been working this seam for a while. Light Sleeper, Heavy Dreamer, a live game performance Nix created in 2020, already had royb0t scoring it live. And the venue is no accident: GLITCH'N'GAMES is Nix's own event, the Chicago glitch-and-games weekend we covered last week. The audience gets written into the game's ending before the set starts, so the crowd is a component, not a witness. "I didn't realize how sweet the idea was when I came up with it," Nix wrote.
A public beta and the soundtrack album are due in a couple of months. Nix built the current version alone, and a rebuilt version with original models and an adversary is at least a year out. Worth watching now anyway: this is a game whose credits should list 31 strangers with markers.
A game played like an instrument, with the crowd written into its ending, is exactly the kind of work Killscreen exists to catch early. The free KS Radar letter brings you the next one before the beta drops.
