Pull Shapes: Sound Shapes Community Picks

Hey everyone! Sound Shapes has been out for a few weeks now, and we continue to be blown away by the response to the game. If you’ve been following our official Sound Shapes Twitter (and we hope so!) you’ve probably been kept up-to-date with our news, but just last week we hit over 10,000 community-generated levels (if you’re interested, our ten-thousandth level was ‘Out of the Rain‘ by sunpsyche.)

With so many levels, we’ve been working very hard behind the scenes to make sure that players are able to find the cream of the crop. For example, we’ve been iterating on our search algorithms to ensure that not only is the section of our community that shows you which levels are currently hottest (the star tab, also known as “Greatest Hits” on the website) kept up-to-date and with only the best levels, we also try and make sure if you search you get useful results. Oh, and if you missed it, you can search on the website now too!

However, we would like to ensure we’re interacting with our community and not just setting up SOULESS SEARCH ROBOTS to do that job for us – so we’re going to try and regularly share with you the community levels that pique our interest. Starting… now.

And I to Fire by jordanbuster

“This level sort of blew my mind a bit” said Jon [Mak], at which point I probably mumbled something like “oh, that’s nice” and went back to doing something else entirely. However, when I finally played this level it was worthy of his praise. To be honest, if you follow the Sound Shapes community you are probably already well familiar with this level, so we’re not telling you anything new, but we had to spotlight it because it was the first level we saw that did things that surprised us, and, you know, we made the game. You’d think we’d know it inside out, eh?

Arcade Fireworks by Daftbomb

Here’s a darn tough level with some lovely visual stylings. If you played through our D-cade album you’ll kind of get the theme here – twists on some classic arcade games – but what really sells this one for us is the consistent art (even using a selection of different assets) clever challenges and general fun times.

Intermission by Zoetroupe

This is a nice short level – an intermission, if you will – that mixes things up by not twisting video games but cinema! It’s musically lovely and genuinely artistic visually, and will leave you wanting more (always a good thing.)

Metamorphose by Tabulator_AT

This level is beautiful but also deserves praise for using one of our creatures in a way that we didn’t expect. It would say too much to pick out which one, but levels which challenge our established view of the game are always onto a winner.

Quick, Dinosaurs! by TheAvenged Marin

Strong themes are always good! This level is an adventure across a dinosaur-filled landscape with a cute ending, with well thought out challenges and lots of cute dinosaurs to spot (we remain impressed at to what you’re all able to squeeze out of our ground shapes!) that’s well worth a play.

That’s only a very small selection of the levels we’ve been playing. We really do try and play as many as we can manage and so we do hope to be back soon to share more levels with you. The quality only gets better and better, so we’re sure that there are already new levels that you think we’re foolish to not have included.

Don’t forget that you can queue up any of these levels to play in Sound Shapes from the website: simply log into the site with your PSN ID, hit queue on the level that takes your fancy, and when you load up the community (on PS3 or Vita) you can find them in your “favourites” on your profile (once you’ve played through them once, if you don’t choose to favorite them, they’ll be removed from that list).

Oh! And don’t think we’re just spending all our time playing your levels (as much as we want to.) We’re working hard on getting the first DLC out to you as soon as possible (giving you more to work with!) and we’ll be able to talk about that soon. Happy creating!