Future Vibe Check

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• Announcements·29 May 2026Official

  Dev Log #9 - Vibe Checks: Turning Music Into an Automation Objective

  Hey Vibers,We’ve been hard at work trying to answer one of the toughest game design questions in Future Vibe Check since starting: How do you make music, something subjective, work inside an automation game, something built around objective outputs?Automation games are built around quantitative pressure. Items per minute. Belt throughput. Jammed outputs. Power usage. Layout efficiency. Players look at a system, find the bottleneck, rebuild it, and make the number go up.Music is not like that. A great song can be dense, simple, strange, aggressive, soft, repetitive, or chaotic. If we just tell players “make good music,” there is nothing concrete to optimize. If we force players to copy exact songs or solve a specific puzzle, we lose the feeling of creative freedom that is core to what makes making music fun. How do we make the music feel like your own but the factory you make feel like it is optimized for it? The Vibe Check system is our answer.It turns music into a performance objective without turning creativity into homework.The Draft: Pick The Vibe Before You Build ItBefore a song section begins, players can draft the musical direction they want to aim for. That draft can shape the section’s key, scale, mode, tempo, chord progression, and contract objective.This matters because we do not want the game to say, “Here is the correct song. Recreate it.”Instead, we want the game to say, “Here is the kind of musical problem you are solving. Now build your own answer.”A draft might push you toward a verse with rising melodic motion, a chorus with call-and-response hooks, a strong bass-focused section, a rock intro, a jazz groove, or a branching network shape that creates a larger musical phrase. The player still decides how to route signals, which nodes to use, how dense the arrangement becomes, and how the performance actually sounds.The draft is the creative brief. Your factory is the composition.The Vibe Check: A Score You Can Optimize AroundOnce you have built the s...
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• Announcements·4 Feb 2026Official

  🌊 Dev Log #8: Conveyor Belts Flow Like Water

  Hey Vibers, Unwise here! 🎧 I’ve been heads-down working on the next FVC playtest, but I wanted to take a break to show you some visual updates that make the game feel more alive.First up: The Belts.In most automation games, conveyor belts are just infrastructure. Utilitarian. Mechanical. Usually the real-world version: rubber loops dragging items from A to B.But Future Vibe Check is also about music. In music, flow is everything. I wanted our belts to reflect that. Instead of a purely mechanical feel, I wanted them to feel organic and synced to the music you make.To achieve this “water-like” motion without melting your GPU, we couldn’t just slap a texture on a cube. We built a custom procedural shader from scratch.1) The Primer: What is a Shader, anyway?If you aren’t a graphics programmer, “shader” might sound like magic. Simply put: a shader is a small program that runs on your graphics card (GPU) that tells pixels what color to be.Vertex Shader: Transforms (and optionally deforms) the object’s mesh — the 3D points — before it’s drawn. Fragment Shader: Computes the final color for each pixel on that mesh.In many games, the fragment shader mostly says: “sample this texture and paste it here.” In FVC, we do something different. We use math to generate the look in real time..2) The Technical Showdown: Texture vs ProceduralWhy go through the trouble of writing a custom shader? Here’s what the genre usually does:Method A: Scrolling Textures (The Standard)Most games use a static arrow texture and slide the UVs over time.The problem: it’s inherently resolution-bound. Zoom in and it can pixelate or just feel “flat.” And changing the look means authoring new textures.Method B: Physical GeometrySome games model real conveyor mechanics: rollers, grooves, physical tracks.The problem: Expensive. Rendering thousands of little geometry details eats performance we’d rather spend on simulation and music systems.Method C: The FVC Procedural ShaderWe generate the visuals using proced...
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• Announcements·1 Jan 2026Official

  2025 Recap: The Foundation is Built. Let's make 2026 LOUDER.

  2025 was a great year for Future Vibe Check. We went from a quiet project to finally turning the speakers on to share what we've been working on. If you’ve been with us since the start or just joined the recent Playtest in December, I want to give you a big thank you. You are the rhythm section of this development that keeps me going. 2025 RECAP: The Year We Built the FoundationWe patched bugs, built key features, and started to better understand what makes FVC special. Here are the highlights:The Alpha Launch: We kicked things off with a Alpha demo and joined a series of festivals which helped us get started on the journey. Thank you to the Six One Showcase, Orbital Potato, Secret Sauce, Humble Games, and others who helped us spread the vibe this past year.The MIDI Revolution: We ripped out the old sound engine and replaced it with full MIDI support and Soundfonts. Now we have >300 instruments and real musical expression. Pretty soon we will have the BEST node based composition and procedural music system ever made :) Creative Mode and Sharing: We launched v1 of our creative sandbox mode where you can make music with all our tools available and share them to the community. I'm still amazed at some of the things the community has built.Sessions and Procedural Everything: Terrain, resources, and threats are now procedurally generated. No two runs will sound (or play) the same.Quality of Life: Reworked belt logistics, HUD, menus, tooltips, indicators, and more. We cleaned up a lot of UX/UI noise to allow you to better enjoy the music. Still much more to do here in 2026.THE PLAN FOR 2026The hard foundational systems (automation logistics, object placement, save/load architecture, MIDI integration, composition systems, procedural music) are largely done. We have the ingredients, now we need to make a tasty meal. 2026 is all about game design iteration, progression, and polish.Hybrid Design Iteration: FVC is taking a lot of risks being a hybrid game, so expect more updat...
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• Patch Notes·12 Dec 2025Official

  Major Update - Playtesting Live!

  Hey Vibers! I’ve finally emerged from cooking in the development cave with the largest FVC update yet now accessible via a Steam Playtest on our store page. Playtest Access (here). The playtest update lays the foundation for the game to evolve to find the perfect Vibe!NOTE: This is separate from our previous Demo which will be released again in the new year. Use the playtest to play the latest!Music Making Improvements>300 new instruments to use! All backed by MIDI and Soundfonts for better sound!Real Music Expression: Now, you can control the duration of a note and how hard it is hit. You can even set it to sustain until the next node as well Explore 20+ new scales and use improved generation of leads, melodies, and chord progressions!Multi-Node Control: Now, you can multiselect nodes (shift + click) to modify duration, velocity, and travel time using curves. Also included is support for saving sequences and using them to speed up your builds.Chords: Improved tools like the ability to custom set your own chords on a chord node alongside strumming, arpeggiation, reverse strumming and more! Game Loop Improvements:Sessions and Generation: Implemented a new system for players to choose modifiers and goals for each session.Procedurally generated terrain, resource placement, and threats! Want the world to be majority water? Want to branch your signals at no cost? Now you can with session based modifiers.Multiple Scenarios: Included 3 scenarios to test (item crafting, node shooting, and music upgrades). Your feedback on these scenarios will really help us tighten up the game loop for the next iteration of the game. Each plays a bit differently with mechanics around crafting, gathering, and defense.Defense Loops: Improved projectile infrastructure and vibe stealer game loop. We now have 4 types of stealers. Stealers that steal karma, items, power, or reduce the value on a node. This includes all new systems for spawning and movement for vibe stealers. Defend to the Beat!QO...
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• Announcements·2 Oct 2025Official

  Dev Log #6 - MIDI Part 1: A Musical Revolution Coming to Future Vibe Check

  Hey DJs, Future Vibe Check has been a little bit quiet this month. However, that doesn’t mean the developer isn’t hard at work on the automation music game! I talked with Unwise on what they have been working on this month! Hey DJs—Unwise here. We’ve been hinting at it for a while, and now it’s time to pull back the curtain: Future Vibe Check is adding full MIDI support with Soundfonts in the next major iteration of the game (dropping soon in Discord for our playtesters and soon after in our Steam Demo). This post kicks off a short series covering what MIDI is, why it matters, and how it unlocks more expressive music-building inside the game.A Brief History of MIDI: Making the Sound of the Future, UniversalBack in the early 1980s, electronic music was exploding with synthesizers from companies like Roland, Sequential Circuits, and Yamaha. The problem? These instruments couldn't "talk" to each other. Each instrument had its own proprietary system for triggering sounds. No one spoke the same “language” when trying to jam together!Enter Dave Smith (of Sequential Circuits) and Ikutaro Kakehashi (of Roland), who rallied manufacturers at the 1981 Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention to create a unified protocol. By 1983, MIDI 1.0 was born: the Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It debuted connecting a Prophet-600 synth to a Jupiter-6, proving instruments could sync notes, tempos, and controls seamlessly. (THE BIRTH OF MIDI: At the NAMM Show in 1983 )Fast-forward to today, and MIDI (2.0 introduced in 2020) is the backbone of all studio productions and live performances. Almost all modern music includes some form of MIDI!Ok, so what is MIDI exactly? Audio File = a recording in some format like MP3 or WAV.MIDI File = a set of machine readable instructions telling instruments what to play, how loud, and for how long. Think of it as super-lightweight sheet music that any instrument can read in real time.Pitch (0 -127, which note to play)Velocity (0 - 127, how hard you...
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