Project Legato

Today was the design expo! It went really well. Here are my thoughts on this semester, the expo, and the future of GridBeat.

Things are wrapping up as the Design Expo approaches on December 5. I made more levels (we’re now at 14) and I got Android builds to work! Turns out, it was a problem with my Windows Insider Build. I submitted my game for release on the Google Play Store!

This week, I worked on designing my poster for the end-of-semester design expo that I’ll be presenting this game at. I also made more levels, fixed bugs, and formalized the game logic more. Blog post is brief, because the work has been focused and pointed.

This week, I iterated based on feedback from a playtest session I had and continued to make progress to work towards the final design expo at the end of the semester

I spent this week doing some engineering, UI, and UX work to improve on the puzzle game idea. However, I had to struggle against a vile enemy… detecting hovering.

Last week, Professor Yarger helped me come to the realization that this game… doesn’t really seem to have any depth. If anything, it’s a visualizer that tells the player what drum beat to play to be successful. Maybe kinda helpful with the teaching of the music, but not a compelling game or rewarding to players who know drums. I spent this week doing some redesigning and I came up with a potential idea that might solve this problem.

Happy Halloween! This week, I began to focus on some non-engineering tasks and started doing some spritework for the game. I additionally added some menu things (like the ability to traverse levels after completing them), and a hi-hat (with some design problems).

This week, significant engineering progress was made in the form of horizontal scrolling in-level and re-engineering the metronome to utilize an arbitrary number of beats, and other small QoL improvements to the codebase to work towards a point of minimal engineering left and only content creation.

This week, I had the chance to chat with Chris Osborn, a DJ and indie developer who was one of the 3 original creators of the BIT.TRIP games (now called Choice Provisions, the studio that released BIT.TRIP was Gaijin Games). We talked BIT.TRIP, rhythm game design, and games in general.

Updates for this week are fairly brief; here are some updates on some decisions that have been made about this project, and small amounts of engineering progress that were made.

This week, I made design and engineering progress by working on reducing the two-tab view into a single window, and adding more instruments.

Prototyping work continued this week as I explored mapping placing instruments in the “DAW” like editor from last week to inputs given to a player on a platforming level.

This week, I began prototyping some of the elements for the rhythm game. I installed AudioKinetic Wwise, the interactive audio engine, along with its Unity plugin. I tried to prototype a system wherein one could toggle on and off various drum sounds on 4 different beats of a metronome.

In this post, I’d like to elaborate on who Project Legato can potentially help if successful.

In my previous post, I explored academic research relevant to Project Legato. Here, I look into companies and products relevant to the Project.

In this post, I detail my exploration into academic literature related to music educational video games, and educational video games in general.

Welcome to the blog! My name is Eashwar Mohan, and I’m a computer science student at the University of Michigan. This semester, Fall 2019, I’m engaging in an independent study into game development. This semester I plan to explore designing a game to teach the basics of modern music making, covering three main concepts: rhythm, melody, and harmony.