Headliners

The bass player fumbles a run, and the whole room hears it. The low end drops out of the mix, the headliner flickers half see-through, and the crowd goes quiet. Four clean hits later the groove fades back in, and the band has its star again.

Headliners is set at the Grounds, a small festival ground at dusk with a Soundcheck ring, a Bill board for the weekly vote, a Wardrobe, a Listening Booth and three venue doors. Every act starts in The Room, a basement club with a knee-high plank stage and one bare bulb, then climbs to The Tent and the Main Stage. The headliners are fictional virtual musicians with a sound and a look of their own: a singer with jade beads and a green umbrella, a duo in arcade-orange knitwear, a lighting technician with glowing shoulder bars and a smoked visor, and a hyperpop act in a lavender sticker jacket.

Pick a layer and a difficulty at a venue door and play a set of three songs. Your lane is one highway with three columns. The drummer taps the kick, the snare and the hats; the bass player holds and slides along the groove; the keytar plays two-thumb chords; the voice follows the melody's shape as long ribbons, with no lyrics on screen. Three to five times a song a spotlight hands the best phrase to one layer; hit the gold baton at the end and it passes cleanly on. Every bar with all four layers lit raises the crowd meter, and a loud enough room after the third song earns an encore.

You are the band, never the star. The headliners are virtual on stage: they stay solid only while the band holds them up, turning see-through as layers drop and fading to an outline if all four go. A miss never ends a song on Easy or Normal. It thins your layer, then drops it for everyone, and four hits in a row bring it back. Session players cover any empty pad, so you can play alone, and friends of different skill share a song at different difficulties. On the Main Stage the encore puts a giant figure of the headliner, drawn in light, across the back wall.

The first release plans twelve songs by four acts, The Room and The Tent, with the Main Stage opening soon after, plus liner cards and Wardrobe items earned in play. Bands are one to four players, and up to eight more can join the dance floor. It plays on phone, keyboard or gamepad, every lane has a shape as well as a colour, and assists such as auto-hold and wider timing are there for anyone who wants them.

Players choose who headlines next. Every week the Bill board puts three acts on the ballot, everyone who finished a set that week gets one vote, and the winner takes the stage with three new songs on Saturday. Fan marks move each of your favourite acts from The Room to The Tent and on to the Main Stage, and liner cards light up a quarter at a time as you finish each layer of a song. There are no streaks and no daily rewards, and songs never leave the game.

Based on the Origin Story virtual musician programme: the acts, their looks and their original songs come from it. No real artist, song or lyric appears anywhere.

Headliners is a complete game design for Roblox. Development has not started.