Mile
Zero
know better, learn faster
March 8, 2007
Sound Games
These experimental games from GDC sound incredibly cool. They use sound input, either from a music file or live from the player, to generate and control the game. I'm especially intrigued by this:
Designer Sean Barret created a Tempest style game, where the player has
two shooters representing the bass and treble. As enemies come down the
field, your shoots created the notes according to the row you were at (the
bass blaster had five or so lines reserved, while treble had eight or
nine). In this scenario, the game was forcing you to play the song. To
prove this point, we witness the horrible sounds made when shots are fired
randomly or targets missed.
I once thought it would be cool to make a rail shooter that worked in a similar way, but where the environment was generated from the wave--bass sounds might create the ground landscape, while treble would create enemies or obstacles. Barret's take is more interesting, because it lets the player trigger the music from a landscape generated from the sound file, thus giving the player a real investment (similar to the incentive of finishing a Guitar Hero song, not because of the score, but because you want it to sound good).
