A Rhythm Game in a Week
In December 2023 I had another go at introducing rhythm concepts in a video game using Godot Engine. This time a more traditional, 'Guitar Hero' style gameplay style, where the 'notes' fall from the top of the screen and the player is in charge of pressing the corresponding button in time.
In traditional games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, these 'notes' don't really mean anything from a musical standpoint, aside from abiding to the rhythm of the song -- they're not representations of real musical notes in any kind of scale and quite often the player will find themselves pressing the same button but hearing a different tone within the song being played. The player isn't actually playing an instrument, just playing along with the track.
This project, 'Jingle Hero' (I couldn't think of a good name!) was my attempt at going against this established concept a little bit, by actually having the player's inputs play actual musical notes -- essentially they're playing a very basic keyboard, so instead of just 'playing along' to a song they're the ones actually in control of the melody. This is much more akin to softwares like Synthesia, aimed at teaching piano by providing visual feedback on the notes to be played.
Naturally, this comes with some limitations -- if the player really is to have control of unique musical notes while still playing the game with a traditional computer keyboard or game controller, they're still only going to be able to play a handful of notes intuitively before you actually need to have some musical training to begin to enjoy the game. Already this means that the music has to be tailor made for the game, taking into account the fact that the player has only a pentatonic scale's worth of notes - it definitely doesn't scale to programming in popular songs very well at all, and difficulty levels would be more complicated than just limiting the number of notes in play a la the aforementioned games.
It may sound like I'm downplaying the idea a little, but I do think there is a version of this concept that could work, provided that it's in a more linear and tailor made fashion, closer to older rhythm games like Gitaroo Man or PaRappa the Rapper.
You can see the final result above. In the final version here I carefully chose a few Christmas songs that only utilise a few notes in the scale (quite a challenge when it comes to Christmas songs in particular). It's a proof of concept more than anything, and for a week's work as part of a community charity event I was fairly happy with the result.
Details about technical aspects of making this all work with Godot and FMOD - when I get around to writing it all up - will be found on my GitHub.