post mort

Process

For me, this prototype was mostly an experiment in synthesizers and sound-making. I hadn't done a lot of it before so I had wanted to play around with making sounds to use in this toy - recording things and trying to make them into instruments. Those experiments didn't bear much fruit in terms of sounds I felt okay with using, and in the end I ended up leaning more into sampling a digital synth, where I felt I could experiment a lot more easily to get interesting results. The sounds I started making was what shaped the theming I went for, of space and stars and all that jazz.

As for the system itself, I'd checked out Musyc before and was partially inspired by the way the physics works there, with sound upon impact. That general idea is pretty close to the basic prototype we were given, but I also wanted to control the pitch of the objects, as in Seaquence, for example, and their position, which is why I changed the objects that make sounds to circles instead of drawn platforms.

Where it is now

I ended up being proud of that extra control I gave the player, because I think it allows people to make some pretty interesting sequences and loops, that can even be longer than the time between particles spawning. However I do think that it could be improved, and that control could be expanded, with more features. One thing that I had planned when thinking about the system were regions that play a sound when a ball passes through them, which I abandoned simply because I didn't have the time to test how it could work. Another was more control for the particle spawners themselves - I wanted to let you create more, change the rate that they spawn, and maybe even change the ball's starting trajectory. At least some of that I definitely want to do in the future.