Weekly Progress

This is a little late; we've already had our last meeting for the term, so I'll use this opportunity to reflect on what we've accomplished so far.

The original concept for the game was a bit different from where we stand now (see Original Concept Document). We've mostly kept the general ideas and three different "modes", but we've significantly altered the concept for "Battle mode". The original concept for this feature called for a system where players would be matched against eachother, each with a musical composition. The compositions would be scored/judged/voted on by members of a (presumably online) community, which would determine the winner. This concept centered around being more of a composition tool rather than a game.

Before we expanded on/modified our concept of Battle mode, we asked ourselves if there were ways in which to rate "good" music using computer logic so as to have the game determine the player's sucess instead of other people. Unfortunately this is somewhat of a complex field of research, and there doesn't seem to be any feasible solution, which is probably why the original concept used people. From there we weren't entirely sure where to go; and then someone mentioned having the player fighting back hordes of monsters using music, and this idea sort of just became the general concept behind Battle mode. And so, we focused on this aspect of the design for most of the term. I think the appeal of this decision was that it made the project feel like more of an actual game, and not just a musician's tool.

Throughout the rest of the term we came up with a lot of ideas: Monsters approach a line of the player's instrumentalists, the player must compose patterns to defeat the monsters, monsters will have different attributes that determine how the player must respond to them and could possibly be used to guide the player to compose something that sounds good, etc... We were also originally undecided as to whether the gameplay should focus on composition or performance (real-time). It seems we decided on somewhat of a combination of both; composing patterns that the player can turn on and off while the battle plays out, and perhaps the possibility of the monsters interfering with these patterns and forcing the player to make compositional changes during the battle.

With all of these ideas, it seems impossible to try to invision just how all of these ideas would work once in a functional game. So, we decided to push forward the development of a prototype. We started off simple; just a field with line of blocks for instrumentalists and a quickly thrown together GUI to allow the player to select patterns for each of them to play. Next we added monsters that approach the player's instrumentallists from a point far off on the horizon (see Prototype Progress Screenshot). We worked on the prototype for several weeks and ultimately we added different types of monsters (eg. flying monsters, underground monsters) that needed to be defeated using specific instruments, a simple composition mode prototype, and started throwing some early art assets in. The prototype provided a good idea of how the basic gameplay would work, and from there we decided to create a more comprehensive list of monster types, as well as sketch out some ideas for the Upgrade system and to get an idea of the artistic style.

At the end of the term, we are left with lots of great ideas and a prototype that gives us a good idea of how to start creating a functional game. One of the challenges for the next term however will be deciding which of those ideas to actually start implementing, and coming up with a plan for how to do this. Overall, I think we are all pleased with the progress we have made so far, and are looking forward to actually turning our ideas into a playable and fun game.