The Conductor

This was a student project where the objective was to make a casual mobile game for android. The game could be anything we wanted and had to be created using Unity either in 2D or 3D. I was part of a team of 8: 2 artists, 3 coders, 3 designers. I was one of the coders and also created the music within the game. 

​

The Conductor is a rhythm-based game where the player taps the gears in time with the falling gears. Players lose lives by missing falling gears and miss-tapping. Steam clouds appear and if they are not swiped away they obscure the players screen. At the final boss level, the boss can manipulate the speed of the notes. 

​

Since there were so many of us, there weren't a lot tasks to be handed out and I was at a disadvantage. I did not have access to the school computers and my computer could not build for android. This was the first time anyone in the team had build for android and we had to figure out how we were going to go about doing the input. I opted to help create the music to work with the game and when we figured out what was wrong with my setup and could create android builds, I was in charge of navigating the story map. 

​

To navigate the map, I created a simple wavepoint system and tied the animation of the conductor to his movement. When the conductor arrived at the level indicated by the player, a popup would automatically appear to play the level.

​

To make the music, the coder in charge of making the falling gears made it so that the gears would fall at random intervals based on a speed variable. Since we went in this direction instead of making it so that every level played the same, I decided to make music so that any input from the player could be played over it and still at least sound good. I made files for the gears that play a pentatonic scale, which is a five note scale that many children's music toys are based on. This is so that when children play music, it always sounds good to the ear. I asked what type of music they wanted for the different levels, looked at what the artists had made for enemies, and based my compositions on that. 

​

I had fun with this project, though I wished I had more opportunities to do coding. I want to make a rhythm game more like Guitar Hero where the notes the player has are the same every time and they can practice a song. I would like to make more mobile games in the future.