APD WK2 - Time

Drum Beat Sprite Game

Proof of Concept video

Theme:

Time

Context:

In this exercise I was conscious of my years of thinking in a linear narrative fashion and wanted to try and break away from these habits by focusing on a playful, interactive, non-linear concept.

I also took inspiration from the Heraclitus quote “you cannot step into the same river twice for other waters are continually flowing in” (Heraclitus quoted in Plato’s Cratylus, Section 402a). Meaning that the idea of 'flux' would be key to my concept  (ie the only constant is change).

Building a lack of certainty into gameplay (which could help to result in something new without the user hardly having to try) might be a type of play that overrides the analytical mind or the 'survival-mode' mind, which is the mindset we need to find “brilliant news ways of doing things” - as Jane Hwangbo puts it in her article The Myth of All work and No Play.

In addition to these concepts, I'd had a more concrete idea that involved clapping and rhythm cycles earlier in the week.

Other influences for this exercise included:

“In B Flat” by Darren Solomon (2017)

The app called Keezy Drummer by Keezy Corp.

Method:

I came up with a single player computer game that uses a combination of different four-beat, four-bar music loops of various beats and percussive instruments.

In the game the ideas are:

You can hear only the Player Sprite's beat when you start the game.

The Player Sprite can be moved around the screen using your keyboard arrow keys.

Other drum beats are assigned to other objects/sprites, but these are turned off until the Player Sprite touches them (and then they are active ie. their audio turns on).

This way the rhythm builds over time as you play… and the resulting 'song' is never exactly the same each time the game is played because: the time it takes to move around is different each time and; the order you touch the sprites may be different, plus you might be in a different mood or be distracted, or tired etc.

I also started playing with the idea that one of the sprites was a moving obstacle (the ‘Moving Sprite’) that you had to avoid. If the Player Sprite touches the Moving Sprite all the beats except that of the Player Sprite turn off and you therefore have to start building your song again. Alternatively, you can deliberately touch the Moving Sprite for intentional ‘rest time’ in your song.

I used Construct 3 to start making a very basic (and fairly ugly) prototype of the game, but then, after getting the Player Sprite's mobility to function, I did a screen recording of this.  I don't have the engineering/coding skills yet to make a full game like this myself, so instead I decided to demonstrate the concept and made/recorded the beats in Garage Band which I added to the screen recording in video editing software.

Note: This ‘Proof of Concept’ doesn't yet demonstrate what happens to the audio if the Player Sprite touches the Moving Sprite. I also tried to use a Construct 3 template that allows users to save their game (as a means to the users of this game being able to save their 'songs' and hopefully to share them too - which I believe could make the experience more meaningful.

Response/Reflection:

In conclusion: I designed a game which combined a number ‘loops of sound that repeat themselves’ together with other ‘loops of sound that repeat themselves’ using a silly and semi-random method, resulting in a rhythm that builds and changes over time as you continue to play.

I'd love to build in the ability for the sprites to stick to one another so that the main Player Sprite can carry the others it comes into contact with around like an ever-growing molecule. Prehaps gravity could come into play so that after a while some of the sprites start to come unstuck or slip away. This would support a sense of flux/randomness that is outside the user's full control. Therefore the focus becomes less on skill and more on your ability to 'go with the flow' - to make something out of the chaos. That something could be beautiful, it could be dissonant, it could be fun - the only certainty is it would be new, every time.

Maybe the name of this game could be based on the idea of 'New Again'.