Fuser

A music festival game where players DJ live mixes on stages built to feel like the world's biggest festivals.

Studio

Harmonix

Publisher

NCSoft

Year

2020

Platforms

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC

Role

Art lead

Partners

Liquid Development, Lakshya Digital, Mindwalk Studios

The art had to read as a real festival at night: towering stage builds, light rigs and huge crowds, all reacting to whatever the player mixed.

The core idea I set for the art was a never-ending outdoor music festival. I built the lookbook, took it through preproduction into an in-engine look, and wrote the pre-production and production style guides that onboarded the team and our outsource partners. The style guide was a key deliverable in the deal with NCSoft.

The shell and the venues were built around your rise as a DJ in the world of Fuser. You start on midday sets and impress a series of mentors to earn better timeslots as you go. We drew on festivals like Coachella and Tomorrowland for scope and scale, and gave each stage its own personality, tied directly to the mentor you were trying to win over.

Custom tech connected those stages to the music live, so the player drove the look and feel of the show through audio, inside the direction they set. Beat timing and musical density mapped to visual density. As the mix filled out, we enabled, disabled and triggered more systems on stage.

Every stage was built to be customized within its theme. Video content, lighting, VFX, crowd toys, even time of day were in the player's hands, so they could dress up the stage like another character.

The character builder leaned into festival culture and the world around it, then pushed further with audio-reactive pieces that responded to the mix in real time as you evolved it.

UI and UX were a huge focus. We blended the function of real audio tools into a fluid, futuristic look. That rounded style ran through everything: how we showed music in motion, screen transitions, UI animation and the modeling itself. We built the visual language slowly and carried it through every part of the design.

The hardest part was showing musical timing: when to drop or change each track for the most musical and gameplay value. Hover over a song and markers show where the chorus or vocals come in, which teaches the player to look ahead on a track. Easy to pick up, with real musical depth for experienced players. That balance was a core tenet of the game, and we put a lot of effort into making it serve both.

The bet that paid off most was the turntable: making it feel magical to pick up a disc and drop it into the mix. I also designed the visual side of the mix export, so players could share a track as their own branded creation.