next »

[Elwood Sharit]

So this is a small little project just to show myself I can follow through with something and to see how it's received. This is sort of a game and sort of a music app.

Harmoniums will let you raise a cute little creature that has a distinctive "voice" this voice will be supplied by the POKEY chip.

You will be able to feed, breed, and raise these little creatures to have different note pitches/colors and distortions. And then bring your little guys together to create small tunes with. Then be able to save/load and export these tunes to '.wav' files to share with your friends. :3

Here's a little sneek peek at one of the fellows.

[Inanimate]

Ah, fun! Monster sims always occupied lots of my time as a kiddo. What a genius idea, too - like Tamagotchi mixed with Elektroplankton. I like!

[Happy Shabby Games]

Oh man tamagotchis were so good! Looking forward to this. It would be really cool if you could lay out the midi in the sequencer then watch your little guys perform it huddled up like a choir.

[Ashkin]

This sounds adorable.

[Elwood Sharit]

Mkay, so things are going well. Just finished off all of the eggs.

Now I'm trying to mess with different ideas for the sounds these guys are going to make.
I have a couple of different ideas in mind.

1) Each one will have one note that is specific to them. And the sequencer will just allow you to arrange all of the ones that you have raised.
2) Each one will have a range of notes that they will sine-wave through back and forth.
3) Each one will have a couple of notes in a beat that is generated by some algorhythm. (OH HO HO)
4) Each one will have a range of notes and the player can teach them a short melody of those to memorize.

[Ashkin]

How in-depth will you be making the caring stage? Somewhere between instantly getting creatures that will make music and raising them from a baby, taking care of their every need, etc., until you have a perfect note?

[Elwood Sharit]

How in-depth will you be making the caring stage? Somewhere between instantly getting creatures that will make music and raising them from a baby, taking care of their every need, etc., until you have a perfect note?

This will entirely depend upon their music generative abilities.

If they are able to create only a single note or tone, then care would probably be much more rapid as you'd want to be able to quickly breed them and get to more specific notes.

Where as if each had a nice but different procedural melody then their existence would be more complex. And so would be their care. Watching them grow older and gain more knowledge of their melody. Example being that the baby may only know the first note of the melody but as it matures it learns more and more of it.

Edit: It could even be that the type of care could help to shape the melody.

Think

.

[Ashkin]

Sounds like you've got things figured out! I really like the idea of more complex creatures being harder to take care of, and it's an especially cute image to have a tiny creature who can only sing a few off-key notes develop into a beast that can sing a beautiful melody.

[Elwood Sharit]

A tiny creature who can only sing a few off-key notes develop into a beast that can sing a beautiful melody.

That's the idea. I'll probably skip the idea of any sort of complex algorithm, and just let the little fella's have simple random notes built in. And then the player can raise and train them to change these, not completely but just enough to make them sound better.

[moi]

is that a homebrew or what?

[delete me]

I like it already chum. Good luck. Hopefully you get a demo up at some point. :]

[namragog]

Man, oh man. I can't wait.

[grayfox88]

This is a much more manageable idea for a one man team. I wish you the best, sounds like a unique and fun idea.

[motorherp]

Sounds sweet .. or at least I hope it will  .  Good luck mate

[Elwood Sharit]

Thanks all!

And woot more progress in spite of illness!

So, nothing new graphically, but I've programmed the harmoniums to have 32 notes (0-31) that each signal off at 1/10 second intervals.

So a small example below here depicts the harmonium if he had 8 notes.

[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]

Now when the fellow is created, one of these becomes filled with a tone value. (0-255)
So.. grab a random note position 0-7.. let's say 5.. and then get a tone value, lets say 214..
[0,0,0,0,0,214,0,0]

Now every time the beat reaches note[5] it will play tone 214, however after 1/10 of a second it will progress to the next tone which is 0 which will mute the note. So it gives us a short beep.

Now the fun thing here is I've made it so you can feed these little fellows to influence the current tone. That is, let's say you have a harmonium who is level 1 that means he only has 1 note available to edit. And the things that you feed him will affect just that 1 note.

So let's take our example harmonium and give him a "Pitchup Berry".. (om nom nom nom)
[0,0,0,0,0,215,0,0]

Great! The pitch of our note is increased from 214 to 215.
But this note sounds a little late in the phrase...
Let's give him a "Sooner Smoothie" (om nom nom)
[0,0,0,0,215,0,0,0]

Great! Now this note is exactly where we want it, so we decide to leave his vocal diet alone and level him up.

Level 2 comes and he gets a new random tone at a random position
[0,0,56,0,215,0,0,0]

Now the first value is set in stone. That 215 is going to stay a 215 and it's going to stay in the note[4] position forever, but that doesn't mean we can't shift the 56 around or edit it to accommodate!

Anyway, I have all of this working, just no names for all of the foods and stuff and also no plans for any of the other side of raising them yet.


Edit: oh also, a value larger than 255 will be used as a sustain for the previous note, so the phrase [0,0,56,256,215,0,0,0] will hold note[2], (tone 56 here), for two counts instead of just one.  

[Ashkin]

Oh wow, I was just thinking that it would be a great idea to be able to feed them to change the notes they make. Sounds like you're two steps ahead of me!

[Elwood Sharit]

Hey guys just got five teeth extracted today so progress on this has slowed. Though, truthfully most of it is finished.
Just the sprites left really and food names.

I would appreciate any and all suggestions for design and layout , or if any of you want to take a shot at spriting for it then I will open a thread in the art area or if someone would do that for me it would be appreciated. Just something like "build your own tamagatchis" with sizes of 16x16 for the babies and eggs 24x24 for adolecents and 32x32 for matured harmoniums.

Again this is more a chance for people to see some of their own work in the game. I'll knuckle down and pump these out myself if it's not well recieved but things will get ugly I assure you. 

[Ashkin]

I would appreciate any and all suggestions for design and layout , or if any of you want to take a shot at spriting for it then I will open a thread in the art area or if someone would do that for me it would be appreciated. Just something like "build your own tamagatchis" with sizes of 16x16 for the babies and eggs 24x24 for adolecents and 32x32 for matured harmoniums.

Sounds like a great community project, heh.
If you start up a thread I'll be sure to contribute something.

[Inanimate]

Making your own sounds fun! I will try it sometime later. You got an example of each stage to go by?

[Elwood Sharit]

Thread here.