Advance Play Design Week 8
Theme: Play and Sound
Context: A Virtual Reality Game. Actually it contains 2 seperate ideas that I could not keep one and abandon the other so I made both of them and simply put them together in one single game. The first idea is the VR Drum Kit. I thought play a instrument in VR should be fun and won't disturb anyone else when you practice, which often happend in the real world. The reason that I choose drum kit is the way to play a drum kit with VR controllers is similar to play in real world with drumstick, compare to guitar or piano, etc.(I will try piano if I buy Valve Index in the furture)
The other idea is the music cube. I think DJ is very cool and I know a little little little bit about how they works with turntables and DJ mixer. And I have watched a video about designing different kind of User Interface in VR, which impressed me a lot. So I got the idea of combine the turntable and creative UI that can only works in VR together, to make a VR turntables. It leads to the idea of Music Cube. The three axis of the cube represent Volume, Pitch and On/Off of a piece of music, the player can change any of them with hand. It is pretty fun to play with the cubes, and I think size of a cube is a intersting way of displaying data.
Method: Unity 2020.1.0b1, HTC VIVE, Steam VR
Response: I don't have any experience with music except listening... So it was hard for me to choose appropriate music pieces for the Music Cubes, as well as tones for the drums. I even don't know what kinds of drums should a drum kit have. I tried to search from Wiki but it's hard to understand... So I just chose some music pieces and tones that I think is good enough. The result is better than my expect although it might be terrible for musicians... It was very fun to play with the drums and cubes although I can only produce some noise, that's the reason I named the game as Noise Maker.
Reflection: With experiences of VR developing last week, I worked very smoothly this time. (Although there was a accident that my VIVE Pro Headset stopped work with no reason, I tried to fix it but failed. Fortunately my old VIVE Headset still worked, so I was able to finish my project.
It was very fun to play with this game although it has no goals. I think it gives me a new direction of design games: Have fun is the main goal, no need to set some conditions for win or lose.
Reference:
Drum Kit Tones: https://sampleswap.org/filebrowser-new.php?d=DRUMS+%28FULL+KITS%29%2FREAL+LIVE+KITS%2FOsama+Qureshi+DrumKit%2F&getall=1
Free Loop Musics
Download:
The folders are too big to upload so I upload them to my goodle drive.
By Deno Zhang
Email Deno Zhang
Published On: 05/05/2020