Author: lstorm

This week, I continued to put finishing touches on our game and made some final design decisions. I did some debugging to clean up the game’s code as well as adding a color palette and correcting the code that fetches JSON files, ensuring that it fetches the file with the right name from the correct location in the user’s filesystem.

This coming week I’ll need to focus on making sure the game works as a unit – this’ll take lots of debugging and playtesting. I’ll also try to connect a midi keyboard to make the game a bit more engaging for the player. I’ll also need to focus on finishing up the final documents – the poster, video, and final report.

This week I finished up integration and improved on some basic game mechanics. I completed the transition between the main menus and the game itself, with a selection in the menu fetching the corresponding JSON and song, and beginning a game accordingly. The game will also return to menu when complete.

I also added some basic improvements – animations on hits, score display, and synchronization with the music. I tested on a number of different audio/json files generated by Michelle’s algorithm, and thus far the music seems to synchronize well with the game.

In the future I want to have others play test the game and make adjustments based on their comments, as well as adding better and more engaging UI. Next week I’ll continue to debug and improve the game’s general design, as well as implementing any changes suggested by playtesters.

This week, I worked primarily on integration and debugging. I added an audio component to the game loop itself, allowing the music and game to play simultaneously. I was primarily focused on integrating mine and Yuhe’s parts of the game, adding some way to transition from the menus into the game itself by selecting the song the user would like to play. On a song request, the game must read which song was selected and then fetch the associated audio file and json representation of the game, which I still need to find a way to efficiently store.

Next week I’ll finish integration and audio synchronization, allowing for a seamless transition from menu to game and ensuring that the game itself is exactly what it needs to be for the user request.

As far as testing and verification, since it’s a bit more difficult to quantitatively test a game like this, I’ll start by having some user playtesting – I’ll then gather feedback and try to deploy it within the game. I’ll then try to measure performance, primarily FPS, and ensure that it meets our desired 30+ outlined in our initial design requirements. Further, I’ll likely need to just play the game with a number of different audio files, ensuring that the notes and music are synced, and making sure that there are no errors in parsing the JSON file.

This week I focused on finishing integration of my game with the signal processing by adding a functioning JSON parser that will allow for the output from the music analysis to be played as a game. I also added a result splash screen that displays at the end of each game, with a few more detailed statistics and graphs that I plan to add to later.

Next week I’d like to finish integration to allow for a gateway between the main menus and the game itself, ensuring that each song saved by the user can be clicked on and played. I’d also like to clean up some UI and make the game more visually appealing.

This week, I continued to make the game into an actual game utilizing the new engine. Like I (maybe) said last week, the engine doesn’t cover much of what Unity did, which means there’s a lot more tedious work related to drawing and keeping track of data structures containing info about game elements. I was able to add back things like timing, scoring, tracking multiple note blocks at the same time, and the beginnings of a JSON parser that will generate the actual beat map.

The game looks and feels a lot more like an actual game now, barebones as it is. Next week, I’ll finish up the JSON parser to fully integrate the signal processing aspect into the game and add more visual feedback to the game/UI elements that should make it more engaging for the player. I’ll also add a gateway between the main menus and the game itself, allowing for more seamless transitioning between parts of the game.

This week, I continued to work on the core game loop in Unity. I was able to add in a scoring system, and began work on implementing a json controlled beat map instead of dropping randomly generated notes. I also spent considerable time debugging a few things that ended up (mostly) being due to misunderstanding some Unity stuff. I also worked on writing the design review, and had to write up a few sections for it.

Next week, I think I’ll have to spend most of my time integrating; switching my sections of the game to use the game engine Yuhe developed, and writing it up in C++. I’d also like to do some work on the game’s visuals, as right now it doesn’t look great and could use some UI updates.