The Game

This is a rhythm game that's pretty much based on Taiko no Tatsujin (known in English as Taiko Master.)

The Design

Simply put, this game requires that you hit the right button at the right time. Objects will move from right to left on the screen towards a "hit area" at which point the player needs to press the corresponding key. In this case, we'll use "Up" for the red circles and "Down" for the blue circles.

The placement of these circles will be according to the beat of the music, which is predetermined (doing this using beat detection is ridiculously complicated so let's not.)

Engine Systems

My Engine System:

This project makes use of my Audio engine system since, well, we need to play audio for a rhythm game. There will be a background track, and SFX when the object is hit to give the player feedback for hitting on time.

Other Engine Systems:

I'll be making use of Luis's 2D collision detection system for this project to detect the overlap of the hit objects and the hit area. Doing so will allow me to tell if a player pressed the right key while the two are overlapped.

Link to that project is here.

The Progress

This week was spent fixing a minor bug in my Audio engine system (whoops!) and integrating Luis's collision system into my codebase.

I actually ran into a little bit of trouble with Luis's ColliderBuilder because it wouldn't build (irony???) The problem was about modifying the output file path string, since it's a const value, but Luis's code assumes that it isn't.

Anyway, that was a relatively simple fix.

For the game, my goal was to have the metronome working this week. So basically I played a sound at a constant rate (eg. 120 bpm= playing a sound every 0.5 seconds.)

That was a pretty simple task, but I am a little worried about keeping my audio thread, render thread and compute thread synchronized once real gameplay happens. Especially because we don't directly control the audio thread in our engine. 

I might need to mess with that in the future.

One thing I really like about this project is that it gets people talking to each other and collaborating when we might not have worked together before. I think we engineers make way more cool things when we work together rather than work in our own little bubbles.