A Tempo
Bravura has returned to work from another one-week break – this time, the team was off at GDC from March 25 to 29. This past week, the team has gotten right back to work and is making steady progress to complete our app in the next three weeks. Our main priorities for the current sprint are to bring in the last pieces of our core experience: UI, level generation, sheet music conversion, and accompaniment.

UI
The team’s pipeline is really flowing in terms of completing UI. We had a UI design meeting on Monday to finalize the look of our interface, and with that settled, we were able to create our UI graphics early in the week for the programmers to begin implementation. As of now, the in-game UI is in and just needs to be linked to the correct functions. Menu and title screens are also being designed and the whole system should be functional by next week.

Levels
Our procedural level generation system is coming together as well: the building art has been cut into tile-able pieces, and our app is already able to generate structures with a few of those building styles.

Moreover, the file-reading system for the level generation is something we’ve begun to think about. We’ve started designing different possible levels, and being able to get them in to the app will be important for testing. A particular level that we are giving attention to is the tutorial, which we might make to be “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Accompaniment and Sheet Music
The accompaniment system is going to be efficient. Because we are designing the levels anyway, we have decided that the accompaniments for those will be pre-recorded as well; this is as opposed to relying on the app to generate the rules for a multitude of music al styles. For the free-play mode, we are considering having the phrasings be simpler, perhaps even just block chords. All-in-all, we’ve decided to make the accompaniment system only as complex as it needs to be.

As to the sheet music system, we’ve made great progress in rendering our data to musical notation, and are also tackling rhythm analysis which will be important for converting data in free-mode into regular notation.

Cleaning
Otherwise, the team is continually cleaning up small tasks from our backlog as well to polish the experience. The train now tracks with playback so that people can see what note is currently playing while listening to their melody. We’ve also made the hitboxes of the people a little larger so they aren’t so frustrating to connect. And general bug-squashing is going on as well; the memory leaks that used to cause the app to crash occasionally are fixed, though new bugs continue to arise from the new systems being built.

Looking Forwards
We anticipate even more great progress next week. With all four of these systems coming together, our core experience can expand in to a complete experience, and we anticipate that we can even begin the implementation of our free play mode.