Wireframe - #34 - 2020

Early Access

Attract Mode

10 / wfmag.cc

Early Access

Attract Mode

Bad Dream Games’ Thomas Wilson wants to cure

your fear of singing with One Hand Clapping

inging isn’t for everyone, and

even if you fancy yourself as quite

the warbler, doing so in public

takes courage. Singing, or simply

making noise with the abandon

we did as children, presents a hurdle to many

of us as adults. Bad Dream Games’ One Hand

Clapping looks to change that. In this platformer,

your voice can’t move mountains, but create

them – you sing or hum into a microphone in

order to build platforms for your character to

walk on or overcome obstacles with. Over the

course of their character’s journey, players get

to know their own voice and also learn to better

appreciate musical theory.

One Hand Clapping began life as a student

project at the University of Southern California –

a short game made freely available on

itch.io. The initial idea was inspired by Jonathan

Blow’s puzzle games The Witness and Braid,

which had a strong impact on developer Thomas

Wilson. “I really wanted to make a game that felt

visceral, so that whatever you were doing in the

game was actually something you were doing

in real life. Maybe the skills you used in-game

could somehow be transitioned back into reality,”

he says. After a prototype that involved steering

a rowboat didn’t pan out, Wilson turned to his

own life for inspiration. As a music lover and

former member of his high school’s choir, he

wanted to find a way to keep his love of singing

alive, as he had stopped attending choirs once

in college. “It was a bit like my youthful curiosity

had been replaced with the reality of having to

find a job and become an adult,” he says, “but

I enjoy singing a lot, and my research shows

that humanity at large does, too. Humans have

always bonded over making music, but recently

we’ve become reluctant to do so. I knew there

was something in there worth looking into.”

What followed were various prototypes

for games you could control with your voice,

including one where your pitch changed colours

on screen. This would eventually culminate in

the first version of One Hand Clapping, a short

game Wilson made with a sound design student.

That iteration, which you can find on YouTube,

had you use your voice to overcome the kinds of

challenges you’d expect to find in a platformer,

including opening doors, lowering platforms,

and avoiding enemies.

The version on itch.io is the game’s second

iteration, made from scratch by Wilson and

20 fellow students with various degrees

of involvement over the course of a year.

When asked why he put it online, Wilson

cheerfully admits everyone involved just wanted

Sailing the high Cs

S

GENRE

Puzzle platformer

FORMAT

PC

DEVELOPER

Bad Dream Games

PUBLISHER

HandyGames

RELEASE

2021

Info

 Here, your singing creates

soundwaves that let you walk

from platform to platform.