Experimental EGP post
Posted by Kerry on August 11, 2010 | Permalink
Filed under: Work in progress
Switchbreak blogged about creating a game for this month’s Experimental Gameplay Project. I liked it – in fact, I always like reading about other people’s workflow and creative process. I thought I’d have a go at doing the same.
You join me about a day and a half into the challenge. This month’s theme is “zero buttons” – that is to say, no mouse clicks, no key presses. I don’t have any ideas for theme, tone, etc., upfront, but I’m not worried – I decide to let the interactions suggest all that, in keeping with my current interest in games where the actions performed by the player are somehow analogous to the actions performed by the player-character. (Note to self: there’s got to be a catchier name for those.)
I originally planned to adapt a hover interface that I’ve been thinking about for another game, but I scrapped that idea in favour of using the microphone because I’ve never used the microphone in AS3 before. Holly Golightly, eat your heart out.
It turns out that you can’t analyse microphone input frequency on the fly unless you want to mess around with Flash Media Server, Red5 and the like (which I don’t, obv). This leaves me with timing and volume to play with. I think of a singing game that measures volume rather than pitch – which would be a shouting game, I suppose. Promising enough.
I crack on and knock up a rough and ready microphone input handling class that’s friendly with the Flixel framework. So far it’s just spitting out traces – nothing graphical – but I’m pleased with the responsiveness. I extend it to record average volume over a period of time and to ignore short silences, allowing it to respond to sentences – or, more precisely, noises with gaps in between. I’m still not sure exactly how this game is going to play, but I’m enjoying shouting at my laptop.
With five and a half days to go, that’s where I’m at. I estimate I’ll spend another two and a half days on core dev/design stuff, then three days on polishing. Join me after the weekend to see how poor my time estimates are.
PS: I’ll try to throw together an actual demo – or, at the very least, a picture – by then.
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