[Dev Log] Jungle Bell Joyride

[Synnah]

My game is going to be largely based on this diversifier:

 

• Tone Control: The audio in your game is reactive and directly manipulated by the player’s inputs and actions.

 

My initial thought was of moving Santa's sleigh up and down to produce different theremin tones. Then I figured that any enemies that appear could produce music as well. So, my intention is to make a kind of side-scrolling shooter where everything happens in time to the music, and produces the musical elements. Oh and it's going to be Jungle music.

 

I'm going to be making it with UE4. The audio aspect of it is a bit concerning, though; I've done timing-specific things in Blueprints before, and it's really hard to get everything completely accurate (I wasn't even doing anything particularly clever, just moving from one piece of music to the next and keeping the timing). So, I'm probably going to look into using FMOD or Wwise.

[zerofiftyone]

Theremins! Jungle music! Exciting!

[Synnah]

Okay, finally got something worth showing! For one reason or another, I haven't really spent a lot of time on the game, but I've got some of the basics up and running now.

 

 

Your sleigh is constantly moving forward, and you can move up and down. Doing so changes the pitch of the theremin. Next order of business is setting up a music manager, which I'm going to use to trigger enemies/events at specific timings; these will in turn trigger bits of music, the intention being that I'll be able to build up a full track from samples and loops in this way. I'll need to put some thought into what kinds of obstacles will make sense, though. At the moment all I've got in mind are angels that trigger a DnB drum loop when they drop things on you.

[Spenny]

There is definitely something pleasing about watching the boxes ascend and descend and hearing the music do the same thing.

[Synnah]

Yeah, I'm not finishing this! I haven't even done any work on it since the start of this week or something. Unfortunately the timing was pretty bad, what with this being a week of Christmas and Birthday parties, and also for crunching on the game that I'm working on full-time, to get that out before Christmas. It doesn't help that Xenoblade Chronicles X came out, and I bought it, and I've mostly been playing that in the evenings, but it's just hard to spend a day sitting at my desk playing a game, and then have to keep doing that into the evening. So yeah, here's what I ended up with:

 

 

I've already got an idea for what I want to do for the next Wizard Jam, so hopefully I'll be able to spend more time on that! Looking forward to seeing what everyone else does.

[Dinosaursssssss]

That's really cool! How are  you generating the audio? Is it built-in UE4 tools or somethin' else?

[Panzorfork]

The idea of using level design to influence the players movement and thereby coercing them into making great sounding music is fascinating. Great progress, I'm looking forward to seeing this!

[Synnah]

That's really cool! How are  you generating the audio? Is it built-in UE4 tools or somethin' else?

 

It's just a looping theremin sample that I dynamically changed the pitch within a UE4 Blueprint. Because UE4 stores pitch as a float, though, I had to use a table to find out what the specific pitch multipliers needed to be to produce the notes I wanted.