Neon Flicker

As night falls and the city pulses with neon life, a mysterious runner makes their way to the last subway train before it vanishes into the underground. This puzzle game has but one rule: stay in the light. Neon Flicker is set in the heart of a sprawling cyberpunk metropolis.

If I remember correctly, I rooted for a cyberpunk setting during our team’s discussions on this game just because I was in the mood to make a cyberpunk-style soundtrack. And to my luck, our team decided to explore the cyberpunk theme further.

The main menu theme is a classic cyberpunk-style track, combining a steady beat and rythm with synthetic drones and arpeggios. The ingame music is procedurally generated from a large list of parts: drones, noise/rain sounds, swells, strings, and occasional melodic figures. All feature a spacious reverb that is applied in part in the recordings, but also ingame. The ambience sometimes changes between one of two keys for which samples exist. As there is no complete track for the ingame music, the album above includes a short sample recorded from the game. It is not too special as far as procedural music goes, but the time was quite limited and Godot, the game engine we use, can be quite tricky when it comes to handling audio (although improvements are made constantly).

The soundtrack for the game “Neon Flicker” was created within the 48h window of the Mecklenburg Vorpommern easter game jam 2025. The prompt was: “A shadow follows you, silent and clear, yet someday it will disappear.” Optional challenges were as follows:

1. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature
2. Turning the music on/off affects gameplay

The challenge (2) is actually partially implemented. If you turn off the music it changes the mood of the gameplay: it stops the rain.

You can play the game on Itch.io.