As Gamescom kicks off in Cologne, Germany, we got to sit down with Wan Hazmer, co-founder of Metronomik, and talk about the upcoming sequel to No Straight Roads. The second game aims to continue the rock-and-roll rhythms by taking the music adventure to new heights and new locales.
Read on to find out about the sequel's soundtrack, new additions, and how the team's backgrounds helped form what No Straight Roads 2 looks like. You can look forward to the game releasing on Steam and Steam Deck in 2026, with more consoles to be confirmed.
Pocket Tactics: You've got a background in music, you're a musician, and you're creating music - this game is almost like a second album, if you will, a sophomore album. What's it like revisiting this world and approaching it in that way, as if it were a new album?
Wan Hazmer: I think I like that term, reinventing ourselves sort of, you know. So we're trying to get a lot of fan feedback from the last time we tried to reflect that in the game. As you can see, the battle is way smoother as well. I think the visual clarity is also better.
That's one way of how we want to thank our fans back.
I think because we were just stuck in Vinyl City, and I know that a lot of fans are very interested in the lore of the game. Rather than just going through Vinyl City itself, because it's a pretty small city, we tried to break out of that to see where we can go in terms of exploring new genres, exploring new storytelling, and now, spoiler alert, they're no longer the villain.
You've touched on exploring new genres - were there any genres in particular that you thought you needed to put your spin on going into the sequel?
We have already announced jazz. We not only look at the genre, but we are very, very interested in music and how it was born and how people create music. Especially my cousin, the creative director, he likes to see how and why people create music. As you see in the first one, right, we had DJ Supernova. He was very self-centered. He wants his music to reach the far edges of the galaxy, and that's how we represented him with the solar system. We are going to do the same thing for this one, but because we are not limited only to EDM this time, we can explore the histories of other genres.
How are you expanding on the feeling of that in this game, about the creation of music and its effect on people?
Ah, that's very interesting. So before this, it was more of a rock with EDM kind of thing, and it was an EDM empire. We were being pressured by them to ban rock. This time around, we're trying to explore not only the power play part.
I don't know how [much] I can say [here], but music can transform people in many ways. Not only to convince people, because the first one was more about convincing them that your genre is better, that your policies are better than this. In the second one, we're trying to explore a bit more of that motivation of why you're fighting them and why they are fighting you. Sorry, I can't say much more than that!
In terms of fan feedback, we want to know more about the world and the lore - were there any particular things that you thought you needed to expand on, or something you didn't quite touch on in the first game, that you've now got an opportunity to revisit?
We only took around two and a half years to make the [first] game - and it was during COVID, so we had to sacrifice a lot of things. So there were a lot of ideas, and when we created Metronomik, we had five ideas for music-based, but not rhythm game, kind of aspects.
I can assure you that, first of all, it's less linear than the first one. We can explore more about quest lines and side dungeons. Then we also have the van. I think a road trip is part of the experience of music, especially when you are performing semi-professionally. I came from a background of making Final Fantasy 15, bringing in that road trip aspect into play [was easy].
It's funny that you bring that up because we're all fans of Final Fantasy at Pocket Tactics. Especially our boss, she's a massive Final Fantasy fan. I'm curious to see any learnings from that experience you brought over to this?
You won't see that many similarities, but the fact that even the AI characters are moving in the space is also something that we did for Final Fantasy 15. I guess ours is more chaotic because we want to make it more stylistic, so we want to make sure that the band performs together, whereas Final Fantasy 15, I think, was more about camaraderie.
In the demo, there are new kinds of combat mechanics, like the stun system. What's it been like for you toying with that and finding that balance between having satisfying combat that also blends into the world of the music?
That's actually one of the toughest parts, because nowadays there are a lot of great action games [which are] very accessible as well. Some of them are free to play. For example, the Mihoyo games. The action is fantastic, but at the same time, we have to come up with a differentiation from Zenless Zone Zero. Because of that, we thought to ourselves that, first of all, our biggest chance is music and rhythm. We have explored many, many gameplay mechanics.
In fact, the game designers were like, 'No, this is too much, we've gone way over budget. ' So we chose the best mechanics, like the perfect dodge, the stun, and counterattack. Those are the kind of things that feel like you're playing a rhythm game, but not really. For example, in a rhythm game, you see a bar falling down, and you know when to press. Then you know that you have to press the play button in order to stun. That understanding of playing an instrument without needing the knowledge of playing an instrument is a game concept that we feel very strongly about, even for NSR 1.
Everybody loved the first game. Was the plan always to do a sequel, or were there other ideas that you thought maybe you could do first?
We have a lot of fan support, but we are so lucky to have found Shueisha Games to support the idea of having a sequel. We already had the idea of the sequel - the road trip thing and all that - but we didn't know whether we had the means to make a sequel. So we're like, okay, let's work on another game first. But eventually, we found a party that was very interested in our game, especially in terms of IP.
Shueisha Games does a lot of comic IPs. We also believe that our game can be an IP where the characters stay consistent. Our game has always been about the characters, even the villains, so we thought that a character-centric company would be perfect for the publishing.
The first game is on Nintendo Switch - is it likely we'll see No Straight Roads 2 come to Switch or Switch 2?
It's under consideration right now - there's no real confirmation yet. Obviously, it's a new platform, everyone wants to have their game on it, [so it's] definitely in the talks. We will say we have PC that is confirmed - that's also the reason why we say 'consoles', because we still have to figure out which console.
When you say PC, does that factor in the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally, and other handheld PCs?
I think that the main target is to have it running on Steam globally. When the game comes out, it will also depend on whether we have a new Steam Deck coming out. It would be very dependent on the time it comes out. For now, Steam - a PC version - is top priority.
What was it like getting the first game to run on the Switch?
Oh my gosh. It was tough! Obviously, it came with a lot of sacrifices, like graphics. It was tough to be honest, because at the time, our company comprised many newcomers to the industry. Understanding how the Switch works and all that was not easy.
Because it's a handheld device, we also give special content - we had the third player as well, controlling Ellie the alligator. When you want to point to many, many consoles, that's the kind of thing that you have to deal with. All the different consoles have different strengths and weaknesses.
On to our last question - for you, what's your favorite part of experimenting with the music in this game?
Oh, that's a very, very interesting question. One thing I like about the Unreal Engine, and also Wwise, the middleware, is that there are so many things you can do now compared to when we were doing No Straight Roads 1, because now you can even compose music just by stepping on some buttons. It's quite crazy. Then you can have a machine gun that can actually follow music. It's more like shooting and creating music.
Some of these things are being experimented [with]. I had a lot of fun doing that. For me, the fact that the engine makers are looking into how to make music work with their game, with the games that they are running on their platform, I think it's amazing. Usually, audio is always one of those things that people don't consider as their first priority, so it's hard to sometimes pursue technology that can support what we want to do.
At Metronomik, we want to make games that are music-based, but not rhythm games. Music has a lot of things to explore that aren't exploited in video games. If you explore music theory, it's obvious the abundance of things you can play with.
Thank you again to Wan for taking the time to talk to us, and we hope you enjoyed getting an in-depth look at No Straight Roads 2. The game is sure to be a banger of an indie game - maybe even one of the best Steam Deck games out there.
Additional reporting by Sam Comrie.