Euphonics

When I was a kid, my mom sent me to the store to buy her a Mr Pibb, almost every day for a while. For my effort, she gave me a quarter. As it happened, the back of that Wolfpack convenient store had one arcade machine; it was Gyruss for a while. Each day I paid one quarter, and each day I learned one lesson. With brief but persistent practice I discovered that learning happens. And I learned to love Gyruss.

Twenty years later, I found myself revisiting that arcade cult classic. I designed a videogame demo for a 3D arcade shooter, that would have the basic topology of Gyruss (or Tempest), a 2D-plane mapped onto a 3D cylinder. But I also had aspirations of procedural art, of beauty procured from algorithms. A colleague in the Interactive Media program at USC, Dooyul Park, showed me his work and others, and talked about music, procedural graphics, and interactivity. That inspired me to map music-synchronized gameplay and procedural graphics onto my childhood passion.

With the help of three programmers and a composer, the five of us programmed an arcade shooter that is generated procedurally, from cues scripted by the composer. Edgar, the art director, made a modeller that exports C++ Ogre code, and then he made the environment and some animations with it. For my part, though my background is game design, I mostly programmed. The geometry was easy to implement, but the music synchronization system, which forms the skeleton of all the game and visual events, was the most advanced programming I've done.

In the end we made an engineering demo. The semester didn't allow time for design, as we spent most of it programming the tools that would enable us to then create the game, much less refine its content. Yet the demo was a hit, and I see the potential. So for the last two weeks I optimized its performance to play on computers (like mine) that are older. It's no 96k Kriegger, but it is reasonably compact. Setting Ogre aside, the executable, which includes the procedurally generated graphics and level, is a megabyte and a half.

But is it fun? I think it's hard for most, but worth a try. Play and find out. http://www.finegamedesign.com/euphonics

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