Shred Solo or with Friends in ‘Band Space,’ Out Now on Meta Quest

The roar of the crowd. The glare of the spotlight. The adrenaline rush as you take the stage. Few things compare to the thrill of delivering a flawless live performance. And now, thanks to the work of developer Smartmelon Games and publisher Fast Travel Games, you can live out your own rock god fantasies from home with today’s launch of Band Space on Meta Quest.

Band Space lets you master the guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard with individual beat maps for each instrument per song to keep you on your toes. Launching with 30 tracks, Band Space also offers integrated Mod.io support, so you can find and upload some of your favorite songs to shred to solo.

We sat down with Smartmelon Games Founder & Producer Declan Zheng to learn more.

Declan Zheng: I majored in electrical engineering at university and have loved playing video games since I was a kid. After graduation, I worked as a game designer at Tencent. I participated in the development of an MMORPG and a mobile MOBA game.

DZ: After trying the Oculus DK2 in 2014, the 3D interaction sparked numerous game design ideas in my mind. The design paradigm was different, and the gameplay felt very natural. I decided to quit my job and start a VR game studio, Smartmelon Games, at the beginning of 2016. Fortunately, our first demo won some game prizes and received angel funding afterward.

DZ: I’m not a professional musician, but I’ve been learning piano for four years in my spare time and have performed at some events. Also, from elementary school through college, I’ve hosted a bunch of performances and concerts both on and off campus, and I’m a part-time host for a youth TV show in our city. I’m really familiar with the concert stage and thought that bringing that experience into VR would be a great fit.

DZ: Band Space’s development team includes many folks with professional music backgrounds. Both of our beat map composers are arrangers: one has experience composing for multiple indie and major games, and the other studied arrangement at Berklee College of Music. They’re well-versed in music theory and instrument techniques, and they’ve put in a ton of effort to make learning instruments easy in the game. They’ve made every beat in every song feel like you’re playing them yourself, with super smooth and natural hand movements during gameplay.

On the visual side, we have a professional lighting designer who creates immersive performance scenes and designs lighting for every single beat of each song. Before joining us, he designed live house lighting for top bands in the country. So the lighting design in our game follows the same production process as real concerts. Fun fact: He’s also a professional guitarist who toured multiple cities nationwide with a signed band.

The team also includes our client-side programmer, who’s a fingerstyle guitar expert.

Outside the team, many of the community’s mod song creators are arrangers or skilled instrumentalists.

DZ: The initial spark came from the question, “What kind of experience can make people go ‘wow’ within five seconds?” What came to mind was becoming a rock star—the moment you step onto the stage under intense lights.

Getting more specific, we wanted minimal interaction but high replay value—that led us to a rhythm game. Following the success of Beat Saber and many other rhythm games, we thought VR players were probably looking forward to a multiplayer rhythm game where everyone plays differently—that could be a band game. The success of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and similar titles also shows people’s love for band games. And that’s how the concept of Band Space came together.

DZ: Visually, we’ve significantly enhanced intuitive cues for hits, misses, and combos.

For gameplay, we’ve optimized interactions for all four instruments and introduced more precise judgment logic to make playing more comfortable. We’ve added more customizable settings for parameters like instrument height, position, rotation, and audio latency. We’ve also added single-hand mode and MR mode.

We’ve made extensive performance optimizations, reducing load times by more than half.

And we’ve added direct mod support. Now you can use and share mods directly within the headset, greatly enhancing the experience with custom songs.

DZ: When choosing songs, our top priority was making sure all four instruments—guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard—have significant parts to play. We didn’t want any player to have nothing to do or end up with a dull part throughout the song. Next, we focused on music genres: We wanted rock and metal to make up a big chunk, but we also included pop, electronic, R&B, hip hop, EDM, funk, jazz, and others to cater to different tastes. We also needed to ensure that each instrument could offer songs at various difficulty levels, so selecting the songs took a lot of thought.

Many of the tracks are now available via the official Spotify OST and YouTube OST, which feature tracks from artists including Jason Bowld from Bullet For My Valentine, Johnny Lloyd from Tribes, and Thorr, the composer for the latest entry in John Romero’s Sigil series.

DZ: Yes, we’re planning to add songs to the library through both free updates and paid DLC.

DZ: More than three years, since 2021. Our studio’s packed with electric guitars, basses, keyboards, and drum sets. We’ve got mixers, speakers, mics, and lighting equipment. The one thing we’re missing? Soundproofing. And since our team is full of some pretty quirky musicians, when we’re chilling, we’ll jam together. When we’re super stressed, we really rock out. You can imagine that, in an office building, we’re probably not the neighbors’ favorites.

DZ: Some people practice each hand separately when learning a new song before playing with both hands together for physical instruments. In the game, advanced players aiming for a perfect score also find it necessary to focus on one-handed play. So the one-hand mode meets our players’ needs.

DZ: Many people are reminded of their time playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

The biggest request is about custom songs, so we’ve done a lot to make that happen. We’ve directly integrated mod functionality into the game, eliminating the need for complicated PC operations. We built our own beat map editor from scratch and continuously updated it. Besides manual beat map creation, we’ve added the ability to automatically generate beat maps from MIDI files. Professional musicians can import their own music into our tool and instantly generate playable beat maps.

Players can design lighting manually or automatically. We’ve developed an algorithm to automate lighting effects, so custom songs can have unique stage light shows.

Some players have even started using AI to generate music, then create beat maps and play them in the game.

We’ve also received various specific suggestions about the game. Many of our improvements have come from player feedback.

DZ: Our beat map composers essentially rearrange the four tracks of each song. They start by analyzing the beats, pitches, musical phrases, song structures, and lyrics to capture the essence of the piece, then decompose and redesign these elements.

In the detailed design, almost every note in the beat map corresponds to the actual sound of that instrument in the song—a process we call “sound sampling.” We arrange these notes to be played with simplified instruments while keeping the feel realistic, like mimicking cymbal and tom positions on the drums or chord transitions on the guitar.

We add small variations to repetitive sections to keep it engaging. After multiple iterations and adjustments, the team tests to ensure smooth and comfortable gameplay. The ultimate goal is to make players feel like they’re truly performing the song with the VR instruments.

DZ: Custom songs for multiplayer. You create a song you like, make a beat map manually or automatically, team up as a band and perform on the stage with your friends with a unique lighting show. That’s what rock stars do.

DZ: Being in a band is all about connecting with people—you share music, joy, fame, failures, and passion. We created this game to shout it out loud: Rock never dies!