Full game metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Steam app type | game |
| Steam App ID | 2860290 |
| Live current players | 0 |
| SteamPulse tracked peak | 1 |
| Live count (today's peak floor) | 0 |
| Price | Free to play |
| Free to play | Yes |
| Discount | 0% |
| Original price USD | — |
| Current price USD | Free |
| Release date | Jun 25, 2024 |
| Developer | Patrick Hart |
| Publisher | tapes club |
| Owners estimated | Not available |
| SteamSpy owner estimate minimum | Not available |
| SteamSpy owner estimate maximum | Not available |
| Review type | 9 user reviews |
| Positive review percent | 100% |
| Positive reviews | 9 |
| Negative reviews | 0 |
| Total reviews | 9 |
| Steam recommendations | Not available |
| Achievements | Not available |
| Average playtime forever | Not available |
| Windows support | Yes |
| macOS support | Yes |
| Linux support | No |
| Parent game | Not available |
| Store URL | https://store.steampowered.com/app/2860290/ |
Short description
Cycles is a procedural music composition about appreciating a forest through all parts of its life cycle. Experience billions of unique generations of the piece.
About this game
Cycles is a procedural music composition about appreciating a forest through all parts of its life cycle. What Is This? Cycles is an audiovisual composition. When you launch Cycles, you can view a performance of the piece. If you let it run, it will create a new performance, then another, infinitely; these are completely different generations of the piece. This is because Cycles is procedurally generated, every time (like a Minecraft world). Each generation is related, and may sound kind of similar, but might sound totally different. There are billions of possible generations—you don't have to watch every one, of course, but it's nice to think that the one you're watching has probably never been seen by anyone else. You can even share a nice one with a friend if you'd like. What Is This not? Cycles is non-interactive—there are hotkeys, if you'd like to view a specific generation, or ensure a specific visual mode, but the piece generates automatically. You can watch the performance, but you won't perform it yourself. Why Does It Exist? Two reasons—one practical, one philosophical. First, I am a composer, and suddenly game engines have become an extremely legitimate tool for composing music. Not just writing music for games—actually composing with the procedural tools inside an engine (in this case, Unreal Engine 5). Despite this, few composers are doing so. The second reason goes back to what the piece is about . Having lived in California for about a decade, I've found it challenging to see places I love burn in wildfires. I was excited to have the opportunity to create a work touching on this for Big Basin Redwood State Park (much of which burned in the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fire), and immediately I thought that a procedural composition would be well-suited for this topic. Cycles continually generates new compositions, one after another—each iteration of the piece derives from the same source material and compositional rules, but the generation incorporates enough environmental chance that no two renderings are the same (and some are in fact very different). Surprisingly, this algorithmic, "digital" feature represents the natural world quite closely. A fo…
Supported languages
English