Music Machine

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  Active point score display

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  Buttons and hands from player's perspective

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  Player's cockpit

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  Final score and hit results as captured in unity preview

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  A few of the four hit types (hit, good, perfect, miss)

Inspiration

We were inspired by a favorite pastime of college students everywhere--karaoke! When it comes to video games, this inspiration comes in the form of rhythm games à la Hatsune Miku Project DIVA, or more relevantly other XR/AR games such as Beat Saber and Pistol Whip. By combining this gameplay with the unique setting of a steampunk-inspired mecha-battle, we hoped to create a one-of-a-kind experience.

What it does

In this XR/AR experience, the goal is to press the arrows in time as they fall onto the screen in order to defeat enemies. Narratively, this is in the form of the player piloting a massive steampunk-style robot, using its unwieldy controls to defend against incoming waves of enemies.

How we built it

Creating this experience required putting together multiple dynamic parts, from converting a 2-D beat map to the third dimension, to recognizing player input in the VR play space. One of the defining parts of our game is our custom made music.

Challenges we ran into

Creating this game never seemed to go our way. However, this didn't stop us. One of the very first challenges we ran into was setting up the quite-obsolete Oculus Rift around a small dorm room, and attempting to make a hand-tracking program for our game. We were trying to use the newest installation of unity. For us this was a mistake. We were following tutorials on how to get XR working in unity. We didn't find a comprehensive tutorial about setting up what we wanted in Unity 6000. This was after we had made a couple assets for our game, luckily we were able to salvage all of our work. We used Blender to create complex models with textures, only for the exported .fbx file to be missing a material. This was frustrating, but we were able to fix this by saving a png of the texture.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to show how we extended a gameplay concept commonly only shown in 2-D into the third spatial dimension using custom buttons, custom hands, and custom music. We are very proud of the beat map and music, as the song was composed by our team during the Hackathon, specifically for this project.

What we learned

We learned valuable skills in 3D creation/game engines like Unity, as well gaining experience with C#. We also learned our caffeine limits.

What's next for Music Machine

We hope that even after this event we have the opportunity to fine-tune and expand this XR/AR experience, broadening this relatively-untapped area for rhythm games.

Built With

• blender
• c#
• flstudio
• unity