This is a game I made in Unity for my Game Design Practicum class. We were asked to come up with a novel game mechanic and develop a game in a couple of weeks, so I ended up creating this game. It’s a rhythm game that uses the growth game mechanic that games like Katamari Damacy use. You control a string of notes, and can ‘absorb’ notes in the environment. Based on the order in which the you absorb the notes, your string will grow and you will be able to listen to your current rhythm in a loop. As seen in the gameplay video below, the notes are colored differently based on their length. Red blocks are quarter notes, blue blocks are eigthth notes, green = 16th and white = 32nd. When you get close to a given note, you will be able to listen to it. The goal of the game is to match a specific combination of notes and pass the current level to move on to the next one. In the video, you’ll see that I approach a purple cylinder and hear a specific combination of drum beats. The only way I can pass a level is by collecting the correct notes and going back to the cylinder. At that point the player advances to the next level, and the beat to match gets longer by one note and gets randomized as well. This was a pretty fun project since I got to come up with my own game mechanic and prototype it in a very short amount of time. You’ll notice that the art assets don’t look very polished, and this was because I was more focused on implementing the actual game mechanic in Unity than finding or creating assets. So in the end I settled on a minimalist look for the game. I thought my game mechanic was pretty interesting and could potentially help teach people how to keep rhythm and how notes work, but I still had some questions for myself that I couldn’t answer at the end. For instance, I really wanted to come up with a way to design the levels so that it was more interesting to navigate the environment and not just a matter of looking around on a flat plane surrounded by random notes. I also thought it could be cool if I added rests along notes, which could result in more complex and fun rhythms.