A musical experiment

[davidn]

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)

Comments

[kjorteo]

I'm digging the concept of this, though for whatever reason it's not really obvious in the execution. I mean, think... oh for hell's sake, I just had the name, but... think... you know, that one other game that generates levels based on the song, in the form of a sort of roller-coaster-y "dodge these colored blocks and pick up those ones" deal. Anyway, that one makes the correlation between the song and the level immediately obvious, as you go faster or slower with the tempo, the road gets noticeably bumpier in machine gun drum segments, etc. I won't dispute the fact that you took the song as a seed for the random level generation, but... I don't know, it doesn't really show up in-game as much, I guess!

Also, the laser is obviously the best weapon because it's the only one with which you can hold down the mouse button for continuous fire. What is this, Cosmic Gate? :)

[davidn]

Curiously, someone else said that they could see how the song affected the level (even though it doesn't really, because the data comes from reading the contents of the file and not the characteristics of the music). The level generation gets more obvious when you see it working with different songs, but I'll have to have about fifty more different possible elements before they become really distinct.

I was thinking of Vib Ribbon when I made this (which seemed to have the habit of making really slow songs extraordinarily fast and difficult), but I remember what you mean - it's Audiosurf. Now I wonder if I could flavour the level data with things taken from the ID3 tags of the file or something...

And yes, I should probably recommend a reinforced left mouse button.

[kjorteo]

Audiosurf, thank you, that was driving me insane.

But... yes. :)

[davidn]

As I'm back here just now - I suppose what I'm going for is more of a Vib Ribbon (or... Monster Rancher) approach, where the music is used as the seed and for the background music for the level. I'm getting similar comments on TIGSource, though, about having some connection to the music - so what I might do is have a visual indicator of that at some level (pulsing to the beat as far as I can do so, or something) to make the connection clear to the player at some level.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

How much interaction does the clickteam thingie have with the Flash environment it's running in? People have made entire 'spectrum analysis' libraries in Flash...

[davidn]

It runs on top of a sort of Flex wall, but you can include Actionscript if you package it into an MMF object. That could well be worth looking into.

[davidn]

Or if I were to continue this as primarily a Flash project (I had imagined doing the main thing as an EXE so that you could get to a song library locally, and this just being a quick demonstration) I could allow uploading songs and pre-analyze them with something else on the server side, and then use the game to read the song and generated data file without having to process it whenever a song is played...

Though this is rapidly becoming something I should push off until existing projects are finished!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

If you were thinking of making it an EXE, maybe look into AIR! Though, yeah, this is getting more complex ;)

[pookatimes.livejournal.com]

Clever game, very addictive.

However, on an accidental right mouse click the Flash menu appeared and wouldn't go away at all. I couldn't get it to vanish and all control was lost. I just watched my little spaceship blow up a few times before having to end Firefox.

[davidn]

Having to end Firefox, that's... bad news! I think there's a way to get rid of the right-click menu, but doing that to prevent something as severe as that hadn't occurred to me.