About Pixeltronica
Hello there! We’re a UK-based technical and creative studio making playable, visual music experiences for artists, labels, festivals, agencies and brands.
We bring together music, game mechanics, cutting-edge technology and art to turn a release, campaign, concert or festival into something fans can take part in. They can play along, simply watch the performance, or put it on a big screen and dance themselves!
Our experiences blend danceable music visualisation with rhythm game mechanics that gives the feel of a digital concert. They are made to be as enjoyable to watch as they are to play. A fan can open a link and join in immediately, or simply enjoy the choreography, cameras, lights and crowds move with the track.
The music's rhythm, structure, energy and emotional changes shape what happens on the screen, so the experience feels like part of the track rather than something placed beside it.
The creator
Pixeltronica's technical creator has spent decades making software and digital products. There is still plenty to learn, but Pixeltronica is built with the care you would expect from production software.
Music made playable
Tap the screen, click the mouse or press almost any key in time with the music. Better timing gives good players a score to chase and brings more Pixmin onto the floor. People who don't want to play games can simply watch the performance.
It is simple on purpose. There are also no blockers; no account to create or tutorial to study.
Choreographed performance
Each track is mapped by hand. We work with the artist on this and mark more than just the beats: we mark the entrances, breaks, builds, drops, transitions, outro and moments that give the music its character. Those decisions drive the dance challenge, but also the camera direction, lighting, pixmin movement and environment animation.
A quiet passage can pull the camera back and create space. A build can gather movement and light. A drop can bring the crowd, environment and viewpoint together. The experience follows the musical story rather than laying an unrelated effect over it.
A new campaign format for the music industry
For the music industry, we've created a flexible new campaign format. A single track can become a shareable playable release. An EP or album can become a track-selectable dance concert. A festival, venue or brand can create a themed world for an audience to enter before, during or after an event. End-of-experience calls to action can then continue the journey to a stream, ticket page, shop, mailing list or other campaign destination.
The Pixeltronica art style
Pixeltronica has an intentionally distinctive, simple playful default look. The Pixmins are the inhabitants of Pixeltronica - they dance in a 3D space with a lively dance floor and environment lighting. It feels familiar, but still current. We call it retro-game-modern. It is efficient too. Small textures load quickly and leave room for thousands of dancers reacting to the music in real-time on an everyday phone. However, we can swap the pixmins out or mix them in with highly detailed character artwork to suit any client need.
Pixeltropica is their world, full of stages and odd places, many of which we have yet to build. Each project can visit somewhere different. Familiar pixmin may return and an artist can combine their own visual world vision. We are building this idea slowly.
Technology
Pixeltronica runs on our in-house built real-time visualisation engine. It is compiled to optimised WebAssembly which handles the drawing of the 3D world and loading compressed music tracks when needed. It also handles synchronisation, scoring, state, cameras and many other details.
We chose to build our own engine because timing needs to be accurate and the world needs to perform on a broad range of devices. Crowds can be large (50,000 pixmins have been tested dancing at 60 frames per second), and the whole thing must open from a normal link instantly for a great use experience even in low-bandwidth environments. JavaScript and commercial engines offer far more tools but also come with extra weight and a workflow shaped around large teams and big games.
The web build uses aggressive size and link-time optimisation. Music stays outside the main program, so the visuals start while music track download. Owning the playback clock gives us direct control over the event timeline, including an essential latency setting for different Bluetooth equipment that can run a little late.
Each client build can change the music, event maps, colours, characters, patterns, environment, choreography and CTAs while the tested engine core stays the same. Our technology choices also give clients a route to native apps. It is a lean stack and we chose it because it fits the experience and gives us room to tune the small details that listeners actually feel.
Technology evolves and so we're not standing still. Pixeltronica will just get better and more flexible over time.
Overall, we are all about respecting the music, make participation easy, rewarding attention and giving audiences a memorable new way to spend time with a track or playlist. While marketers get ways to measure engagement and promote their broader offerings.
Make music playable
Pixeltronica can create a single-track experience, an album-scale digital concert, an event installation or a branded campaign that lives on the web and can grow into a downloadable application.