Released in 2022 by developer Half Asleep, Melatonin is a rhythm game about what happens when dreams and reality merge together. The definition of aesthetic, the lavender-hued color palette, and art reminiscent of series like Adventure Time and Melatonin are visually striking. But more importantly, it uses those beautiful and chill hand-drawn animations with sound cues to keep you on the beat. Without an overlay or extensive UI, the game is designed to immerse you in the dream, the soundscape, and the animations.
To commemorate the game, iam8bit has partnered with indie game studio Half Asleep to create Melatonin’s vinyl soundtrack. With the lavender vinyl, Cade Phillips’ original soundtrack (featuring additional songs by Yotam Perel, Mothense, and Filippo Vicarelli) comes to life. The vinyl also features are from Elvin Budiman that captures the spirit of the game.
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We spoke with developer David Huynh about developing Melatonin, matching mechanics to the score, and the impact of having his indie game made into a vinyl.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BUT WHY THO: What inspired melatonin? I got the chance to play it right before its release at PAX West that year, and it was unique and immersive. I’ve always wondered what prompted its creation.
DAVID HUYNH: I’ve always been a big fan of rhythm games, and there’s a pretty clear inspiration for this one—the Rhythm Heaven games by Nintendo. I feel like for for a Nintendo franchise, it’s one of the more obscure ones. Not a lot of people have experienced that type of game before, and I’ve always been a huge fan, so it was a pretty big inspiration in terms of gameplay.
Obviously, I didn’t want to just make an invitation one-to-one, so I put in some other inspirations I had from some shows I was watching at the time, some anime series and stuff—like Mob Psycho 100, when I was watching it at the time, there’s a movie called Paprika and even Adventure Time was an inspiration for how some of the art looks. But I [also wanted to make] the gameplay a little more accessible. It’s still a really hard game, but I feel like Rhythm Heaven is even harder. I added little modern gameplay elements, like having little stars to unlock other chapters…
BUT WHY THO: When we consider the sound of the game, each level has a unique soundscape, but there’s an overarching theme. I wanted to ask how you construct the score and keep it in line with the mechanics and the immersion of players.
DAVID HUYNH: I originally had the idea to make each chapter of the game have its own style and sound. The way that resulted in the final game is the first chapter is kind of a mid-tempo, just a kind of relaxed set of songs. And then the second chapter was meant to be a little more fast-paced and kind of fit with the theme of that chapter as well. The third one is a bit more laid back and meditative and just chill. Then the last few chapters just kind of mash everything together.
Overall, the sound was meant to be kind of playful and easy to follow along with because it’s a rhythm game. Overall, when I was working with the different artists, I gave them technical requirements, like I just wanted this tempo and this length, but I didn’t give that much in terms of artistic direction. We kind of just played it by ear and tried some different things out—or we just exchanged songs and just came out with it and iterated over and over. Luckily, we found a sound that people liked.
BUT WHY THO: So did the score come first and then the mechanics, the mechanics come first? Or was it kind of just made in tandem, then all the mechanics came first?
DAVID HUYNH: I made all the levels with the kind of placeholder songs and songs I found off YouTube and tried to get it to feel right first—trying to get the gameplay going and make sure things had the right speed. Then that’s when I would either find other [licensed songs] or have an artist compose a song for the specific level. Every level kind of has a different approach to it. I think about four different people who made songs for it. There wasn’t one specific process.
BUT WHY THO: How does it feel to have a vinyl coming out now for the game? It seems pretty exciting.
DAVID HUYNH: It’s awesome. It’s felt like a dream come true. I’ve always had a dream of being a musician instead of a person in tech and developer and stuff. Still, I don’t really have the skills to make music on my own, so this feels like the next best thing. It does feel like it’s coming from me, but obviously, all the songs came from other people, but it all fits within something [that we made and that] makes me feel like I contributed to it in a way. So yeah, it feels amazing. I’m really happy I got to do this.
BUT WHY THO: What did making melatonin teach you about yourself as a developer and as a creator?
DAVID HUYNH: Well, it was the first game that I ever made seriously. I took it seriously, and I had to kind of learn just everything from scratch because I wasn’t in game development before this. I was more graphic design and UX design—other forms of design. I pretty much had to understand how much time and effort it takes to make a game even feel harder than any other thing I’ve ever worked on.
I just respect game development so much now and I understand how many sacrifices you had to put into to get a game finished…I just have to put on so many different hats and meet people. I had to learn about how much collaboration it takes, too. So I tried to do just everything about myself at first, and then I had to get some help for publishing stuff and music and some animation work—I couldn’t do it on my own. So, yeah, just learning what the whole process.
BUT WHY THO: Was there anything about the creation of the vinyl and the design of it that you knew had to be there? What was that kind of design and collaboration process like for creating the vinyl?
DAVID HUYNH: I knew the artist that I wanted to work with on it, which is, she goes by snow lattes on Instagram (Elvin Budiman). It’s her alias. She did the art for the game. So if you see, like the steam capsules or just the main title artwork, she did that for me pretty early on. I wanted to give her a chance to also do something kind of similar for for the record. I gave her general direction like that I wanted to have it show off the the Night and Day theme that’s in the game… It’ll be fun for people when they get to see the outside in the dark, cool, dark night and open it up and have very bright, bright, colorful inside the daytime.
BUT WHY THO: My last question is really thinking about what you hope people who played Melatonin took away from it. What do you hope people take away once they put that vinyl on and give it a listen? What do you hope they feel?
DAVID HUYNH: Some people say the game is a little too short, but that’s kind of the intention. I did want something very short and sweet that people can experience. You can even play [Melatonin] in one session, pretty much. I want people to see the intentionality behind how each chapter flows together, like an album, because that was the thought process… The last song in the game, I wanted people to just come away with it feeling like they really had not only a complete sense of story, but the sense of the finality behind the sequencing of everything and different themes and musical styles. For the [vinyl], it’s a similar thing. We did add four bonus tracks to it, so I wanted people to be able to be surprised a little bit by each of the bonus songs on each side of the record.
Melatonin is available to play now on PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox with the vinyl for sale on iam8bit.
