Blog - Alternative Musical Instrument Heroes: Music Based Games
Tuesday, February 19, 2008As someone interested in both designing/playing video games and producing music, I have a love of music-based games.
So, yes, I'm a pretty big fan of the Guitar Hero franchise.
The problem is, I'm not that big into rock music, actually, and have little interest in the guitar as an instrument. The games are so exceptional, that I can easily overlook that.
So what am I into? Well, I did say in my bio that I produce electronic music.
(I also have been learning to rap...)
Now this has two recent applications of note:
1.) For my music creating purposes, as I tend to play with bizarre, experimental electronic instruments. That, coupled with the fact that I'm a tremendous dork, meant that when I discovered the existence of electric kazoos I had to buy one to try it out. That's right, you're reading the blog of a man who owns his very own electronic kazoo. I can just tell you're impressed.
Before I go on, I'll have to go back a bit:
Me and my roommate recently bought Rock Band, and I got to finally witness how microphone controllers work.
I had originally been interested in such controllers when they first started appearing, for use in a rap based game, as I was trying to learn to freestyle rap at the time. I thought if Guitar Hero could pull off making one feel like a rock star, then a game that made you feel like a battle rapper (which I already wanted to feel like) would be pretty awesome too, and appealing to a somewhat different crowd.
Of course, those controllers wouldn't really work for rap all that well, as they read pitch much better than they can determine what you're actually saying. So, I abandoned that idea for controlling a rap game.
Now, I recently was playing with my electric kazoo ("Kazooka") to test out an audio effect processor I was playing with, when I had a wacky idea. The Kazooka is basically just a mic mounted onto the buzzing part of the kazoo.
What if I just wired up that mic to the Rock Band mic?
You'd have Kazoo Hero.
Oh, sure, it wouldn't make you feel like a rock star. But it would be funny and fun as hell.
Unfortunately, I tried just kazoo-ing(?) into the Rock Band microphone and it didn't work well. A kazoo is just too all over the place to hit a note as perfectly as Rock Band requires on even the easiest difficulty mode. Even when you hit the root note, which you can do fairly well, you can't sustain it, it constantly flutters up and down enough that it just says your "singing" is "Messy" and you fail quickly.
So, if there's to be a Kazoo Hero, it'd have to have its own custom engine, tailored for interpreting the sounds of a kazoo rather than the human voice. Which would probably be better anyway, but unfortunately is above my programming ability.
2.) Long before this, or even my ideas for a freestyle rap battle game, I was a professional DJ. Admittedly, I was the lame kind that does wedding receptions and birthday parties, but I was a pro DJ nonetheless.
Because I was really into electronic music, though, I had been interested in club-style DJing, and wanted to get into doing that for a long time. As such, I studied this book that was essentially all about the "rules" of DJing, which I took to heart in my own work. Basically, it was a guide to how groups of people react to music in a setting where dancing is expected of them.
"Hey, if they're called rules," I thought, "then surely they can be adapted into a game system..."
And so floating around in my head for many years now has been a desire to do a game based on DJ theory, i.e. how to control a dance floor crowd with music. In other words, it would be a dance club sim, but only unlike a business sim as it wouldn't focus on running the club as a business or anything. It would just be figuring out exactly the right song to play that would make the largest amount of virtual club patrons go completely nuts and flood the dance floor.
It's hard to explain exactly how this would be fun if you've never been a DJ though and know the mind games involved, and the thrill of how awesome it is when people cheer when you've played just the right thing. I'm still going to insist it would be a pretty great game.
In any case, I know that in this biz, ideas themselves aren't worth much. That said, I sadly never did manage to make a prototype (which I'm sure might actually be within my programming ability to make) because dealing with how exactly I'd get enough music for that was a huge problem to tackle.
I wouldn't have the resources to acquire rights to any songs, and although I make electronic music, I don't think I could make nearly enough, and my music isn't particularly dance-y club fare anyhow. My best idea was to just troll around online music mixing communities and ask if anyone would donate free songs of theirs to the project, but I figured that'd be quite the crapshoot and would probably result in a lot of terrible, amateurish electronica.
Well, just now I found this: Activision Blizzard Trademarks 'DJ Hero'
Hmm. I'd like to see where they go with that... posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 6:01 PM
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