A musical experiment

Something that I'd been thinking of doing for a while:



The graphics (the good ones) are taken from Tyrian, but the main idea of this experiment is that the behaviour of the enemies and the level are generated from the music that's playing. I'd had this around as an experiment for a while and had abandoned it because I couldn't get consistent data out of a music file each time it was played, but I suddenly realized that I could do it by reading from the file itself, instead of relying on the current position of the music.

This Flash demonstration just uses one music file (and even then it's a bit of a cheat, as the data is pre-loaded instead of actually read here) but it's already quite fun to zoom around and watch the fireworks. It's going to be interesting to see if I can get appreciably different levels to come out of different songs.

Music shooter (yet another product of my lack of good name ideas)