Yo!

Another fun and intense week at The Drop office. We will keep this quick, but here is what has been going on for us. Up above you can find our project poster made by the incredibly talented Yeongmin Won (Elizabeth.)

Photo Shoot

We had a great photo shoot on Monday also and learned how incredibly photogenic Tao is. It was hard to pick just one photo of him. Above you can see our final team photo, also edited by Elizabeth. While looking through the hilarious photos, we noticed some potential dance moves from the static photos. We considered making some funny GIFs, but since we are a music game, silence goes against what we are all about. So we threw together a very quick video showcasing JD’s dance moves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRN4u_IUiLo

Local Mode

A very hard decision was made this week about local vs. networked play. All along we had been preparing for both with the idea that local was the safer option. While there were a ton of positives with networked play, we decided that focusing on local play is the smart thing to do for now. Some of the biggest challenges that are introduced by committing to local play are using Xbox controllers rather than keyboard and mouse, splitscreen play, and only having one audio output.

We did a lot of research about how to make Xbox controllers feel as manageable as possible. One of the most useful resources was listening to the developers of Halo and how they became one of the first successful FPS games on console: http://podbay.fm/show/399713903/e/1314229383 They start talking about the transition at about 8:45.

After experimenting with a few things and doing some research, we implemented some changes to the gameplay such as adding aim assist and reducing the sensitivity of the camera movement (especially in the vertical axis.) This helped a lot, but we are still playtesting and fine-tuning things.

Musical Experimentation

This week, we also started integrating FMOD Studio and creating exhaustive plans for all of the different things we can do musically using one audio output. Right off the bat, we are having some issues with latency in FMOD Studio, making it so the beatmaps go out of sync which is a very critical issue. Back up plan would be to do everything right in Unity, but FMOD gives a lot of flexibility and added features that can aid in mixing the music better, so we are going to do our best to solve it.

That being said, we were able to deliver on the music mixing dynamically and shifting according to who was winning. Even though the beat maps were out of sync, it was an exciting moment and likely will feature into the core of our experience design the rest of the semester.

That’s it for now.

Thanks for tuning in.

The Drop