CPS - Week 5 - Object Oriented Ontology

CPS - Week 5 - Object Oriented Ontology

In response to this week's theme, I designed a game concept that related to constellations and piano because I found that both of them share the same natural property of having distance between their inner parts. This property lies without human's interference and, personly i think, is one of the reasons of why both of them are beautiful and fascinating. By doing this I showed that the natural aspects of objects can be converted into very interesting and challenging game mechanics. Similar work that inspired me is 'What Will It Be Today?' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3237Tc00a8Q) from our lecturer Max which he showed in the lecture.

Constellation & Piano Game Concept

This is a little 3D puzzle game for child or adults who interested in piano, music, stars and constellations. The inspiration comes from my experience of playing piano, I was really enjoying playing and thus playing without sheet, and I noticed my movement of hands/fingers is just like stars in constellations in the night sky – from one to the other, there is a distance, and that’s surprisingly the same of why we can hear different sounds with different keys from a piano. So I had this thinking of what if we can play out the constellations just like we play piano, or how would a constellation sounds if it can be played on piano. I think it is a very fascinating idea so I want to make it to be a game.

Game mechanics:

The mechanics are quite simple, simply eye-balling the distance between each star in a constellation shown by the game, measure their relative distance compared to each other, then play the virtual keys according to this relation of distance to make a piece; for example:

The Big Dipper constellation:

Blue number is the order to be played on keyboard (will be defined by the game), red number is the relative distance ratio through eye-balling, so the Big Dipper will be played like this on piano:

A -> F -> D -> B -> F -> B

since:

Two stars will be chosen at the start of the game to indicate the start position as well as providing the base unit of distance for eye-balling, for example in the above instance, star #1 and #2 will be given at the start of this puzzle. Also the first piano key will be given at the start to tell the player where to start from, for example, the A key above.

And if the ligature of the stars goes down, then the keys must be played downwards (to the left) on the keyboard, if it goes up, then played upwards (to the right). The virtual piano keys will be mapped to keyboard to simulate the real piano.

I actually tried this on my own piano with different constellations and it is very enjoyable to hear how different constellations sound, they make good arpeggios. Although for the simplicity of game play, I discard the sharp and flat keys (black keys on piano) and assume all distances between white keys are equal (which is not entirely true in music theory).