Final Project: Stuck in the Cave (Audio EscapeRoom wip)
This is a video "Trailer" of my final project for Music 256a, an escape room game where all the puzzles are strongly related to audio cues. Due to the limitation of time (and my programming speed), by the due-date of this project I have completed only a portion of the puzzles and the story. Therefore, I think making it into a trailer might be the best choice for presentation.
(I presented one of the puzzles at 220a finals and have gone excessively over time :0)
In this project, I focused on making tools (audio and visual) that could potentially help the players piece together the clues. There are still a lot of game logistics (like what triggers what) that will need to be worked out, but I really enjoyed working through them and am looking forward to making this a long-term project beyond this quarter.
The files are currently separated as below:
1. A toolbar file (room.ck) which contains all but one tool used in the trailer.
2. A sketchPad.ck file that contains the "twinkle twinkle little star" puzzle with pads (basically Andrew's drum_machine) that the player uses to reveal graphical cues.
3. story1.ck and story2.ck which shows the animation at the beginning. I could probably combine them but I was too tired (and desparate to get something done for the ddl).
Going forward, I would like to include more of the pixelated vibe into the game, so that it doesn't just show at the beginning and then disappear.
For this milestone, I focused on keeping to develop my toolbox, because I believe this is essential for the puzzles to be entertaining. Below is a list of tools as of now:
1. A compass that indicates which direction the ambisonic sound corresponds to.
2. The simplified version of Sndpeek that the player could use to visualize the waveform and its FFT.
3. A slider tool that can be used as a "torch" on the FFT spectrum to "highlight" a certain frequency (connected to a Bandpass Filter).
4. A magnifying glass that can change the playback speed of SndBuf.
And below is a list of tools that I plan to add:
5. A cat that the player can hold that can "translate" a frequency to 1/4 of its original (because cats can hear up to 85kHz), used to help player hear some hidden audio clues
Final Project Brainstorm
I think it was clear to me from the start that I want to make an audio-based escape room, an idea that popped into my brain in one of the earlier VR lab meetings. I know that it's probably too big of a project for this short period of time, but I hope to get something working which can potentially be turned into a long-term project.
Therefore, for my brainstorm, instead of 3 contrasting ideas, I tried to think about 3 ways to tackle this project, each of which, hopefully, I will have time to develop to some extent. I have also decided to combine my 220a final project with this one, but with the focuz of 220a more on desiging audio puzzles, and this project on developing the visuals, the game mechanisms, as well as a narrative (story / plot)
