Asterism

Full Moon
Dev Blog #05

12 August 2022

Music Video Game Jam

At the end of July I organised a small game jam for a few friends to explore the idea of music video games. The jam took place during one day, and the jammers were told that the theme would be around making an interactive music game, and that they could prepare a piece of music in advance if they liked.

At the start of the game jam I shared some slides on some of my inspirations and thoughts on creating mechanics curated to music - which you can find here if you are interested.

After that, we got jamming! There were two teams of two, and seven solo teams, with around half of us in-person and half remoting in.



It was a lot of fun! I really enjoyed seeing the different styles of game that everyone made. Some people made games in a similar style to the ones I have been making for Asterism, using jump-cuts between song sections and mechanics that match the pace of the song. Other people made more rhythm-oriented games such as platformers and hitting keys on the beat. There were also a couple of games created that worked as playable sound environments, where you as the player were more in control of the audio. It certainly made me consider how the idea of an 'interactive music game' could be interpreted in many different ways. Here's a video compilation of clips from each of the games created at the jam:



Something interesting is that in almost every game the rhythmic/musical-visual feedback was very important. There were always events that occurred on the beat or at specific points in the music, which helped players to connect to the gameplay. During the greyboxing stage of Asterism that I'm currently in I've focused a lot on switching between sections of songs, but I think this element of 'stuff that happens on the beat' is still missing so I'm excited to think about how to add more of that in. My own game ended up being a bit odd, I think because I wanted to do something very different from Asterism. In the game you play as Barbie searching through three 1990s toy adverts to find a specific timestamp where an object is mentioned, e.g. in the Super Soaker advert when the Super Soaker itself is mentioned it appears as a collectable item. You swap between the adverts, so it's kind of like a looping time-based hidden object game? I actually made something very similar for a previous game jam so it must have been an idea that's been floating around in my head for a while. As with many game jam games, the actual thing I created is quite awkward to play and not well tutorialised, but it's kind of funny. I don't know that I'll be using that mechanic in Asterism, but it was fun to play around with!

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