Headline Harmonies — Turning the Daily News Into Something You Can Sing

It started with a pretty simple question: can you make a game out of an AI that generates music?

Suno had been blowing my mind for months. You give it lyrics and a style description, and it spits out a fully produced song — vocals, instrumentation, the works. It felt like magic. But every time I played with it, I kept coming back to the same thought: this is incredible as a tool, but could it be a game?

The obvious answer — "let players prompt their own songs" — didn't work. It was too open-ended, too slow, too much like using software. A game needs constraints. It needs a reason to keep coming back. It needs stakes.

So I started experimenting with different angles. What if the AI wrote songs about things happening in the world right now? What if the player's job wasn't to create the song, but to complete it?

That was the thread I pulled on.

Finding the Game in the Music

Here's what eventually clicked: every morning, Suno generates original jingles based on real news headlines across seven categories — Technology, Business, Sports, Entertainment, Health, National, and Science. Each one is a tight 60-second track, fully produced, with lyrics pulled from the day's biggest stories.

But the last line of every jingle? That's the game.

We strip out the final lyric and give you a handful of pre-selected words to choose from. Your job is to pick the right one — and you've got to figure it out from context, from rhythm, from whatever clues the rest of the song gives you. It's part quiz, part crossword, part guessing what a slightly unhinged AI songwriter was thinking when it composed a pop-punk anthem about today's GDP numbers.

The Word-Picking Thing (Or: Why You Don't Have to Be Creative)

This was the design decision that took the longest to figure out, and I'm weirdly proud of it.

The first version of Headline Harmonies had a text input. Type the missing word. Simple, right? Except it wasn't. People would freeze up. They'd second-guess spelling. They'd type a synonym that was technically correct but not what the song used — and then feel cheated when it didn't match.

Giving the player five pre-generated words to drag-and-drop changed everything. Suddenly it wasn't a spelling test or a creativity challenge. It was a puzzle. You're not composing — you're solving. The words are there, you just have to figure out which one fits.

That shift — from "create" to "solve" — is what made the game actually fun. You can play it in 60 seconds. You can play it while your coffee brews. You don't need to be clever or musical. You just need to pay attention.

Meet Harvey the Hyena

Every morning radio show needs a host, and Headline Harmonies found one in Harvey.

Harvey is a hyena — specifically, a DJ with the energy of someone who's had three espressos and genuinely loves his job. He introduces each category, cracks jokes between tracks, and reacts to your answers with the enthusiasm of a morning show personality who's way too invested in whether you get the sports jingle right.

I didn't plan for Harvey to become such a central part of the game. He started as a framing device — someone to explain the rules and keep the energy up. But as we built out his dialogue, he developed this ridiculous, endearing personality that players latched onto. He's the guy who's thrilled that you're here, genuinely disappointed when you miss a lyric, and absolutely beside himself when you nail a perfect category.

He's also the face of the sticker collection system, which I'll get to in a second.

The Daily Loop

Headline Harmonies is built around a simple daily rhythm. Every morning, fresh jingles drop across all seven categories. The first category is free — pick whichever one interests you most and give it a shot. If you want to unlock the rest, there's a subscription that gives you full daily access.

Those seven categories cover a lot of ground. One day you're finishing lyrics about a tech IPO, the next you're guessing the punchline to a country ballad about yesterday's hockey scores. The variety is part of the appeal — you never quite know what genre or topic you're going to get, and that unpredictability keeps the daily check-in feeling fresh.

The sticker collection is the long game. You earn stickers based on your performance — from a "Bruised Ego" when you completely whiff a category, all the way up to "Platinum Record" when you're on a hot streak. There are four tiers total, and filling out the collection gives you something to chase beyond just getting the answers right. Harvey, naturally, has opinions about every tier.

We also quietly built a in-joke into the scoring system: if you somehow get a perfect score, Harvey will tell you that it's impossible. Like, he will insist it's a bug, and offer to have his intern look into it. Because no real morning radio DJ would believe a caller got every single trivia question right without cheating.

Why This One Feels Different

Infinite Scribe is our deepest game. Doodle Doo is our funniest. Headline Harmonies is our warmest.

There's something genuinely nice about starting your day with a little musical puzzle. It's not competitive. It's not stressful. It's a minute or two of light engagement with what's happening in the world, set to a tune you might find yourself humming later. The AI part — the Suno generation, the lyric extraction, the word curation — all of that is invisible. What the player experiences is just Harvey, a song, and a handful of words to drag into place.

That's the thing I'm happiest about with this game: the technology disappears. You forget there's a generative AI pipeline running behind the scenes. You're just playing a morning puzzle game with a hyena DJ who really, really wants you to get the science category right.

For the full experience, there's a subscription that unlocks all seven daily categories and the complete sticker collection. We also put out a limited Founder's Pass — a lifetime subscription at a reduced rate for the first 100 people who grab it — because I like the idea of rewarding the players who show up early.

But honestly, the free daily category gives you the full flavor of the game. One song, one puzzle, one chance to make Harvey proud.

Headline Harmonies is available now on iOS and Android. The jingles are fresh and Harvey's already in the booth.