Music Zoo

Music zoo is, uh, a tech demo about singing animals, made for Music Game Jam 2018.

I hoped I would have time to implement some actual gameplay, but some IRL stuff got in the way. My list of goals for the project may also have been a bit ambitious for a 15 day jam.

At any rate, I'm quite happy with a few things about this and I'll tell you all about it.

The animal synthesizer

Each animal in the game has a single sample, and can pitch-bend notes from that in 2D positional audio. The samples are simple mouth-sounds with a known frequency.

I intend the core gameplay to revolve around the dynamic arrangement of a core melody and the vocal/rhythmic limitations of animals. For now, they all just sing notes exactly as they are on the midi track. They sound pretty much like I hoped. :)

Many thanks to @arlez80 for making the awesome Godot Midi Player asset, which does the heavy lifting of reading midi files.

Made with Blender

I got quite excited with the reveal of the new Grease Pencil on Blender 2.8, so I did all of the game's graphics with a nightly build.

There was jank at times, I admit, but generally it was pretty pleasant to work with. I can totally see it having a place in my 2D graphics pipeline.

Future stuff

I'm far from done with this game. I could probably have reached having some gameplay if I worked on greyboxes, but hey, I wanted to fool around with Grease pencil, no regrets.

Anyhow, most of the stuff I started this project for lies ahead. It looks something like this:

• Animal fumbles and mistakes
• Teach godot MUSICAL THEORY!
• Musical arrangement gameplay
• Animal-collecting gameplay
• Procedural pentatonic melodies
• Dynamic accompaniament
• Percussive foliage
• a few more animals
• More absurdist comedy

Ok, yeah, that's a lot. Oh well, next jam I'll have a smaller idea (and work faster!).