Taflarium

Studio technology · In every game we make

Bloom

Bloom is our own music engine. It composes each game's soundtrack while you play, so the music does not loop. It is in Dohyō now, and we are adding it to every game we make.

The engine

Composed as you play

Most game soundtracks are recordings: a track a few minutes long that starts again when it ends, so after a while you notice the join. Bloom has no tracks. It composes the music while you play, and keeps going for as long as you do.

Because the music is written as the game goes on, it can stay quiet while you think and build up as a match gets close. It also never cuts a phrase short to start over, because there is no loop point.

Artwork for the Bloom engine: a luminous form in cyan and violet unfolding like a flower against deep charcoal.
Bloom — the music is written as you play

The heritage

Started in 2006

Bloom is older than the studio. It began in 2006 as a Masters research project asking whether software could compose music worth listening to. It was finished and marked, then left on the shelf for twenty years while its author did other things.

When we started making games, we wanted composed soundtracks, so we went back to the 2006 work. We kept the ideas that still held up, rebuilt the rest so it could run inside our games, and named the result Bloom.

The scores

One engine, every game

With recorded music, a game usually gets one soundtrack. Because Bloom composes, a game can have several, and every game we make will use it.

2006The year Bloom was first written
20Years from research project to game engine
8Scores in Dohyō, one per opponent
7Styles to choose from in Dohyō's Music screen
  1. Done

    The research

    Written in 2006 to find out whether software could compose music a person would choose to listen to. Then it sat on a disk for twenty years.

  2. Done

    The revival

    Brought back in 2026 and rebuilt as one engine that can go into any of our games, composing on the phone itself instead of playing back a file.

  3. Done

    Dohyō, scored

    Each of the eight opponents has its own score, and each of the four worlds has its own instruments. The music is calm on the menus and builds in a versus match, and it changes with the theme. Since version 1.0.6, a Music screen lets you pick one of seven styles, set how much repeats, and share a three-word soundtrack code that recreates the same music.

  4. Now

    The other games

    Bloom is being added to our other games in development, each with the same Music screen as Dohyō. In Isle, the music changes at nightfall.

  5. Next

    Every release after

    Every Taflarium game will have its music written by Bloom.

The recipe

How it works

We are keeping the details of how Bloom composes to ourselves, because it is part of what makes our games sound like ours. What you can check by listening: there are no recordings, nothing loops, and the music keeps going as long as you play.