October 15, 2019
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.
After much discussion and thought, I’m making the decision to descope Project Legato from 3 games (rhythm, melody, and harmony) and focus exclusively on the rhythm game which I’ve been working on so far. Here’s some of the reasoning behind the decision.
Firstly, my time this semester is finite when it comes to what I have time to work on. I am unable to commit more than ~12 hours/week to Project Legato, and in many cases, I’m unfortunately only able to contribute less than that. As a result, progress has been slower than anticipated and I must work to become more focused and have more productive work time put into Project Legato.
Secondly, quality control is very important to me. I’m approaching working on Project Legato from the standpoint of wanting the final product to have a clean user experience. If I maintain the scope of Project Legato to have 3 major components which are bound to be fairly different from each other, I am creating very high requirements for myself to make all parts polished and working to the degree that I want them to work. This is not conducive to creating a proper scope for the time commitment I can manage.
Thirdly, I see a lot of potential in the rhythm game. I truly feel that by focusing the rest of the semester on this one experience that I can push it further than I could push all three games at once. I believe that the design I have in mind and have been prototyping can truly create an engaging, fun, and thoughtful educational game and I’d like to explore that for the rest of the semester.
With the new project scope in mind, here’s the general list of things (in no particular order) that I’d like to accomplish in the coming weeks:
The metronome system should be abstracted such that I can either give it a simple meter and have it subdivide into eighth notes (1), or can give it a number of eighth notes per measure and specify which eighth notes are to be emphasized (2).
(2) seems like it’d be slightly simpler to implement, and seeing as I’ll be the one using it for level design, I think I’ll have an easier time using this (note that the second can be used to do the first - e.g. measure with 8 eighth notes, emphasis on the 0th, 2nd, 4th, and 6th for example.)
In order to let more complicated levels exist, I’ll have to create a system to scroll left-right to view more eighth notes. This will scroll both the level and the game.
In order to have enough space for all the instruments, The instrument view should be vertically scrolling to let more instruments be seen?
This will need to be explored to see if that’s the best approach.
I’m gonna reach out to friends who are percussionists to get a better understanding of what they find to be important things that I should keep in mind for Project Legato.
Currently, I have [bassdrum]/[jump] and [snare]/[shoot]. I’d like to properly determine which instruments should be included and design game mechanics and potential levels that utilize the game mechanics
The approach for this should be to first figure out the important drum beats (from part 2 above) and from the instruments required for that, do level design.
I have begun to rework the metronome to have the abstracted things I need. I was unable to get lots of time in on the engineering this week, but I have generally determined more specific requirements of the system that will require other things to change.
I have to design this with the scrolling (mentioned above) in mind.