This week, our team made progress on finalizing and debugging our subsystems as well as starting integration. Lucas added audio playback to the game loop and worked on integrating his components with Yuhe’s main menu. Yuhe worked on the beat map editor, adding waveform viewer and interactions to edit notes. Yuhe is also working on migrating the game to a Windows system in order to solve audio card reading issues when using the Linux virtual environment. Michelle continued testing and refining her rhythm analysis algorithm, moving to a new method that has yields higher accuracy, as shown below in a test on a test piano piece.
After integrating the subsystems we will do some integration tests to ensure all the components are communicating with each other correctly. There are several metrics we will need to focus on, including beat map accuracy, audio and falling tile synchronization, gameplay input latency, persistent storage validation, frame rate stability, and error handling. Both beat map alignment and input latency should be under 20ms to ensure a seamless game experience. The rhythm analysis should capture at at least 95% of the notes and have no false positives. Error handling should cover issues such as unexpected file formats, file sizes that are too large, and invalid file name inputs.
For validation of the use case requirements, we will do some iterative user testing and collect some qualitative feedback about the ease of use, difficulty of the game, accuracy of the rhythm synchronization, and overall experience. During user testing, users will upload their own choice of songs and play the game with the automated beat map and also try out the beat map editor as well. We will want to validate that the whole flow is intuitive and user-friendly.