Dyad: The tale of a man and his machine

Cobbling together a device like The Machine from scratch with no prior experience and managing not to kill anyone in the process might sound like a crazy feat, but McGrath's inquisitive nature and rebellious DIY attitude have served him well from the get-go.

Spurred by an instant obsession with Tetris for the NES, he picked up his first bits of coding knowledge by getting into trouble in middle school, sort of. "I had an extremely generous teacher in sixth or seventh grade that noticed I knew how to operate a computer," he says. In truth, the teacher caught him messing around on the school's computer when he wasn't supposed to be. "Instead of punishing me he taught me how to program in QBasic and later taught me C." That, it turns out, was a decision that would ultimately serve him well much later down the road.

McGrath left high school early and tried getting work with several big game companies like id, Valve, and Blizzard. That didn't pan out. "They didn't want some idiot kid without a proper high school diploma," he recalls. Dismayed and uninterested in pursuing school any further, he shelved his plans to make games and took up working as a computer programmer for a few years. However, that too quickly ran its course.

"I realized it was as bad as school, so I looked up an old high school rival, Jon Mak," says McGrath. "He showed me a game he was working on, Gate88, and showed me N, Kenta Cho games, Soldat, and a bunch of others. I was pretty amazed — these were all made by one or two people. It was like playing Tetris again."

"I get bored by games pretty easily; I rarely finish them. I play a lot, but end up quitting a few hours in because once I'm doing something I've already done I get bored," McGrath explains. To ensure that he wouldn't easily tire of playing Dyad, he decided to keep everything changing all the time. "I wanted to make sure I explored the core game design ideas as thoroughly as possible. Presenting a deep, mechanically-complex game in a coherent way is surprisingly, to me at least, very difficult. Eventually it was found through play testing that the most efficient way to present all the ideas is through lots of short levels that vary a lot."

Adding and subtracting ideas was a natural, fluid process, he says. McGrath would play the game, constantly to testing out mechanics, keeping what worked, and scrapping anything that didn't. As such, the game drove itself in the direction it wound up heading, taking on a life of its own, though other contributing team members would also play an important role in working on Dyad at different stages of its progress, coming and going as-needed to help shape the project.

An audiophile's delight

For the first two years of its existence, Dyad didn't have any music in it at all. No big shocker, considering the game was early in development. Then Jason DeGroot, who makes electronic tunes under the name 6955, contributed two tracks that held down the fort for a period of time around the PAX demo sessions. Like most games, the musical soundtrack was initially planned as a background component in Dyad — something to help set the right vibe to complement gameplay. But things changed when David Kanaga came on board. The music became an important component of the project linked the gameplay itself.

"I showed David the game at GDC 2011, and he asked to try doing the music, I said 'Sure, what the hell,'" McGrath recalls. "A few weeks later he sends me like 50 wav files and was like: 'Here ya go.' I had no idea what to do with them … they were the raw unmixed tracks that would go into a mixer to produce a song."

Some of the files sported names like "bass_iv.wave" and "bass_VII.wave." McGrath didn't have a clue, so he asked about them. "[David] was like, 'Oh, that's standard notation for minor forth and major seventh' or something," he says, "and I'm like 'Yeah ... I don't know what any of those words mean.'"

It took four months of working collaboratively on a single level to figure out a rule system for how the different pieces of the musical puzzle would be mixed within the game, since the on-screen actions shape chord changes and trigger melodic sound effects that weave together into a soundtrack that shifts as you play. Eventually the duo came up with the first track it was happy with, the music for level seven, but it was clear that McGrath didn't have that kind of time to devote to putting the music together for each level. It was up to Kanaga, who tackled each of the game's 27 musical tracks and 26 additional trophy levels that used different music.

All of the musical elements for each track are broken down into branching sounds and sound effects that are mixed dynamically by the game depending on the way you play. "The insane part is I thought we had the rule system for the music figured out after the first four months," says McGrath. "Turns out since each level has different gameplay rules, each level needs different music rules too. The music was a stupid amount of work for both of us."

For McGrath, the last two years were a steady run of 14-hour work days and seven-day work weeks. It was a grueling schedule, but he says the freedom of creative control and the ability to shape his own destiny was worth the sacrifice.

"I will never complain about it," he says. "I get to make video games. I get to make the video games that I want to make without anyone telling me what to do. I have zero complaints about the effort and time commitment."

Dyad is finished and available now on PSN in the U.S. McGrath says the European release is taking longer than expected to finalize, and he's not quite set to close the book on that one just yet. Getting the proper translations down has been a challenging and time consuming process. He put a lot of work into making the text in Dyad as concise and easy-to-understand as possible, and prepping it for other countries means a extra time and legwork. "It's also a very big leap of faith for me to put something in the game that I am not 100% responsible for," he says. "I didn't make the music, but I put it in the game, and if I didn't think it was the greatest music possible it wouldn't be there. I can't do that for the translations, and it's very scary to me, so it's taking a little longer than I expected."

Though McGrath still has a ways to go to finish up on the European version of Dyad, he's already working on some of the tech and programming for his next project. And just like with Dyad, he's not ready to pin it down just yet, preferring to see what bizarre pathways the game leads him down over time. "As of right now it's an RPG with no text, no hit points, one life, and no solid shapes or coherent environment," he teases. "We'll see what it actually ends up being in five years or however long it'll take me to finish it."