I’ve been wanting to make a sound-generating game for a while, I’m always inspired when I play games like Rez, Every Extend Extra, and ElectroPlankton. However, what I don’t want to do is make a Rez clone where there are already constructed songs that you just trigger new layers in and I don’t want to do a beat matching game because Harmonix already has that market cornered. So I’ve started working on a little sound-generating game/toy. It plays like a really simple shmup, but the mechanics are really just an interface to building up sound over time. You can fly a little ship around with some amoebas and they will just harmlessly bounce off of your ship. If you shoot an amoeba it will add a note to a music loop that plays throughout. This loop starts out with nothing in it, so the beginning of the game is silent. The color of each amoeba directly maps to the pitch and velocity of the note that they will create, but it is a narrow range so it is not immediately obvious what note you will get.

Play it.

There are still a few things that I want to add, both visual and aural, but the basic idea is there. I will probably also be writing my own Sequencer implementation because the one that comes with Java hiccups sometimes and doesn’t do track muting properly. Or, rather, it probably does track muting exactly how the author of the implementation intended, but that intent is not one that I agree with. If Processing didn’t make it so easy to create visuals I think I would have totally given up on audio/midi in Java by now.