Sign in to follow this  
jennegatron

[RELEASE] A Very Meowy Christmas

Recommended Posts

Here's my idea:

Basically a little toy that will have a series of cat nuns sing a Christmas carol.

I'm going to build it in Python because that's the language I'm most comfortable with.

I would like these cats to be able to meow out one, so if you're interested in recording yourself meow singing a christmas carol (in a .wav file format), or draw a cat dressed as a nun (in a gif file format), I would be thrilled to have your contribution.

Here's what I have after a couple hours of noodling around.

 

post-34173-0-39720700-1448766643_thumb.png

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not sure what game-programming with Python from scratch is like, but if there is a simple way to make the audio-file play back at various speeds, you could make a chromatic scale by multiplying the speed of playback by simple fractions.

 

M_Equal_Just_Aristoxenus_Chromatic_Scale

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks Clyde! I'll look into that.

I now have mouths that open and shut on my cats. I'll start in on the music part tomorrow.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That how I'm making my chords. Just playing the same file but with a pitch ratio applied. If only my code worked it would be very impressive.

I'll meow later in the week.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I couldn't find a clean way of doing that in python Clyde, so i just took a few minutes and made distinct meow files of a chromatic scale

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It says something about me that looking at those cat nuns gives me a creeping sense of guilt.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I did a very poor job of keeping this updated, and only worked on it for about 4 days of the jam. I couldn't figure out how to make it so that if you push the keys too fast the cats don't just repeat the same sound over and over.

 

It's not perfect, but I'm pretty proud of how goofy it turned out. Thank you all for being so great. http://itch.io/jam/winter-wizard-jam/rate/47182

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If you try and run this and only get a flash of a command line come up and it just goes away immediately, please let me know what operating system you're running and if it's 32 or 64 bit.

I was only able to test this on 2 separate windows 10 64-bit machines, so I have no idea if it'll run anywhere else, and had someone on windows 7 64 bit be unable to get it to run.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Ty spenny. I had a lot of fun making it, even if i couldn't solve some of the problems that really impact playing it.

Also, I hope everyone who plays this isn't too disappointed that there isn't an actual singing of little star of bethlehem. Finally, I would recommend NOT selecting a song and picking dibs's voice for nice treat.

 

I would like to add in all the other goofy meows that super_jogurt did as well. I hope I get a chance to do that.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Worked for me and I got a good laugh out of this, nice work! One little thing though, you should probably mention the controls and the fact that you need to click the window with the cats somewhere (maybe on the itchio page).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

(Also I'm sorry to anyone who doesn't understand the little star of Bethlehem version I did. I included my star based source material as a pdf in the zip folder with the game. also apologies to my meow voices for making you complicit in my crimes against song-manity.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I have a lot of trouble getting this to work and the few times it has, it plays the same song with the same voice and then crashes if I press another button. Reading the comments above, it seems that it may be specific to my setup (still it's a bit disappointing to not be able to play your game).

 

I remember you saying that you were going to build the game in Python, but I didn't see many reports in this thread of what that process was like. The reason I mention it is that when I saw that you weren't going to use a game-engine, I had absolutely no concept of what the process of making the game would look like (and I'm slightly curious). I've briefly tried Processing, that was the closest analog I could visualize it with.

I'd really like to hear your description of what the process of making this game in Python involved if you have time.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm sorry that you couldn't get it working. It is very much amateur hour and I tried really hard to correct some of the fundamental flaws with it but was totally unsuccessful.

 

I really only worked on this for about 4 afternoons during the wizard jam. Like I had mentioned I had the most familiarity with Python, and was going to use that unless someone needed my help I wasn't going to use another toolset.

I had never really used Tkinter before, which is the main UI package for python. I spent much of my first day doing tutorials of how to create windows and add in images. I spent some time making place holder meows to start building songs. (I thought it would be super funny to have someone pick Little Star of Bethlehem and for them to actually sing All-Star by Smashmouth, so I definitely did that.)

 

The #1 problem I encountered was that no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it so if you interrupted a meow with a key press it would queue up the next meow rather than repeat the one that had played. It was incredibly frustrating and I made no progress at fixing this despite my best efforts.

 

Basically I just named the sound files as the note they represented, then strung them together into an array that i called the song name, and as notes were sung they were deleted off the front of the array.

 

If I was better disciplined, I would have done an easier restart rather than closing and re-running the game. (If you haven't done so, if you pick dibs & no song title, Dibs will sing for you.)

 

Basically because there's so little interactivity, all I needed were key listeners and when someone pressed a s d or f, the corresponding cat is redrawn with an open mouth, and then when the note ends goes back to a closed mouth.

 

Do you have any specific questions about what I did or how I did it or how I approached problems? As I don't have any experience with traditional game making toolsets I don't really know how it differs.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Tkinter was the piece of information I was missing. Thanks.

 

I also enjoyed reading a little bit about how you went about doing things.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this