next »

[Glassmoon]

Sound Shift is a high speed racing game set to your music.

It's inspired by future racers like wipEout and F-Zero as well as music games like Rez and Audiosurf.

It's still fairly early in development with just a single track while I work on the basic handling and music visualiser, but the hope is to eventually have procedurally generated courses that are created based on the player's music collection.

[Christian]

Looks cool. Will there be obstacles on the track, hazards to avoid?

[{VeTeR}]

Nice!
I see here beat synchronized obstacles and other moving elements like riding on EQ:)

[oodavid]

Looks awesome, how are you going to approach the music analysis?

[Glassmoon]

@Christian + {VeTeR}
I've not yet put much thought into different game modes but dodging or collecting objects on the track could be interesting.

@oodavid
I'm currently using FFT analysis and averaging the sample values into 24 bands, which is currently controlling the track EQ and lighting. The really tricky part will be somehow using the audio sample values as a seed number for the track generation.

[Triple-Eh?]

This looks right up my street. F-Zero-esque, but looking lovely. Can't wait to feed this some serious techno

Great work

[Glassmoon]

It's been a while since I updated the game as I've been busy with another project but I've slowly been adding bits and pieces.

The primary thing I've added is a system for taking audio samples directly from the soundcard's output and loading them into Unity as an audioclip. This means that there is no need to load songs into the game, it will simply use whatever audio is currently playing on the machine for the visualisation. This saves me time developing a file browser and supporting various file formats. Also it allows players to use their own music software with nicely tagged libraries etc. and stream music from Spotify or Youtube as well.

I've also made a few visual tweaks adding in a 48-band line visualsier around the outside of the track, made the strobe light much quicker to respond and added real time reflections on the track shader.

Here's a new video;

If anyone wants me to go into more detail on the soundcard audio streaming code, just let me know.

[oodavid]

That video looks amazing - maybe you could map the frequency to a hue-based filter, bass = red, midrange = green, high-end = blue and use that to knock-out or highlight different elements in the background... If you can figure out tempo changes you could use that to modify the speed of the craft (boosters etc)

One of the things I've always enjoyed about rhythm-action games is that when you perform well you are in-time with the music and vice-versa - with a racer like this, I could imagine collecting powerups / boosters / coins could help keep your ship in sync with the music, doing badly makes you discorded.

[Glassmoon]

@ oodavid

Yeah mapping frequency balance directly to the colour scheme could have some interesting results, I'll try it out.

I'd like to have a go at creating a basic BPM detector and tying elements of the visualiser/game to the tempo, but it might end up being quite a complex problem.

It's tricky to know how much influence to let the music have on the game play (if any) as I'd like it to be quite a competitive time trial game. I could maybe split the game into different modes with some 'just for fun' modes that tie song intensity to the craft's acceleration etc.

[Cyman]

This means that there is no need to load songs into the game, it will simply use whatever audio is currently playing on the machine for the visualisation.

That's amazing, will you be able to hook up a microphone and race to people's conversations?

[Glassmoon]

@Cyman

Yep, just tried this with a USB headset mic and as long as it's set to output through the main soundcard out instead of the headphones, it seems to work.

[GrahamOfLegend]

Very slick looking game! I haven't played anything akin to this in a while, so i'd love to get in on this . I like the idea of having your trail to show how yo did in the last lap btw.

[Glassmoon]

It's been a while since I've updated again but I've been busy re-doing some of the fundamental code for the game. I've removed gravity and re-done the physics for the game so that the tracks can be more interesting shapes and added a Bezier spline system so I'm able to create tracks in the editor. The track geometry is new being generated inside Unity at run-time so it can very easily be shaped and tweaked using its control points.

After messing around with some shaders and post processing I've found that the game also makes quite a good music visualiser.





It's using a mirroring effect combined with bloom, colour inversion, de-saturation and motion blur to create the images. Various parameters are tied to the controller so it's good fun to play with, although the patterns it generates are maybe a little too repetitive at the moment.