Motivation: I wanted to create a minigame similar to the style of Rhythm Heaven's and character art similar to Paper Mario's! Here are some references:
How the game works: The characters are dancing along to the music and the player must
follow along with the correct choreography + timing.
Controls: Press the space bar to jump and mouse click to spin.
If for some reason you want to sabotage yourself, you can also throw tomatoes by pressing the comma button or press "T". This was used for my own testing.
Easter Eggs/Additional keys I used for testing: '`' or '~' for Game over. '0' for queue spin, 'j' for queue jump. 'z', 'x', 'c' for the sad characters. 'u' for all the upset characters.
Reflection: Implementing the rhythm detection was more complicated than I thought, but I learned to use Events in ChucK better. I have a function that checks the user input in a certain time window -- if the user doesn't do the correct action during that time window, then a tomato is thrown and a bandmate falls down. I enjoyed drawing the characters but I needed to erase the surrounding white pixels for the paper mario style and ended up needing to use my computer mouse track pad to erase..that was rough. I enjoyed animating the characters though! I had trouble with making the animations and sound sync together but learning how to use BPM + spork in the right places seemed to help a bit with that.
For the audio side, I added in pitch shift and bit crushing when the user plays the wrong action and/or wrong timing. There's also specific audio queues for each character action -- technically player should be able to play the game without looking at what's on the computer screen.
Credits: Music: Battle in the Storm, a song from an album I worked on with a friend.
Art style inspired by Paper Mario and Big Brain.
Displaying meshes for each character
Displaying some of the game's mechanics:
For this project, I think I'd like to try making a small minigame similar to those in rhythm heaven.
Something like this.
Also another funny example (choir version).