Jam Unity/C# Development Learnings

Some learnings in creating a music game for game jam. And appreciated all the feedback.

Key topics:

• Handling musical notes and pitch
• Multiple cinemachine cameras and using a "ghost" middle player to track
• C# Enumerated types
• Scrolling UI text field
• Using raycasts and containers to guide AI to specific targets within a set of objects
• Jam lessons learned

Game summary:

• Navigate through musical notes for the tune "Ode to Joy"
• 1-2 players. If 1 player, the "AI" chooses the harmony notes.
• There are "correct" notes and "incorrect" notes
• Hitting an incorrect note causes player to rewind to the last checkpoint
• Checkpoints are the musical measures
• Notes turn color based on the player that touched them and plays sound. Notes turn red if wrong.
• Hard mode has high speed and no showing successful notes if player has to replay measure.
• Play through the end and then hear the full song plus players can swap paths
• Hearts appear when players cross paths

Technical approaches and highlights:

• Notes are gameobjects which have a correct/incorrect status, a note value (C4, G3) corresponding to their pitch. and a display string such as "C" or "G" for the note name.
• When player collides with note, if its correct gameplay continues, if not it triggers an event for a wrong note
• A Gamemanager handles most events, although towards the end of the jam I was shortcutting object references.
• I learned that in many music games and synthesizers, you don't load separate note sounds (just like not loading individual sprite graphics but use sprite sheet). The convention is to have a few notes or note and then vary the pitch. This worked very well. I loaded a "middle C" note and then adjusted the pitch. It took a while to get right. There is in theory a fixed relative value for note steps, such as C to D, etc. I didn't get perfect but sort of found some that worked and used as baseline for others.
• I have a struct enum that has the various note to pitch comparisons. So C4 had pitch of 1.0 (since it was the note I loaded). This had one issue listed below in learnings. For example, used middle C (C4) and then changed pitch for other notes.
• C4: 1.0f
  
• D4: 1.12f
• E4: 1.25f
• F4: 1.33f

• Checkpoints are based on measures. Used a hidden (0 alpha) checkpoint and the player has a "last_measure" which resets once reached. Each measure has a visual, a checkmark (which somehow got messed up with order layers), and spawn points for the players.
• I struggled but am proud of the approach to the harmony "AI". So the way the computer harmony works is:
• Musical Note gameobjects are children of a note "Set" gameobject that serves as a collection.
• To figure out how to harmonize, the AI player sends out a raycast to find the next Set. When found, it asks the set for the highest and lowest correct note. The AI player checks are they positioned higher or lower than Player 1. If higher, they take the path towards the higher correct note. If lower, they choose the lower correct note. This creates the "harmony" by balancing the actions of player 1. The Set also has a collider child at the edge so once the AI player goes past it, it then raycasts again to find the next set. This probably could have been done by also checking the rect size of the Set. But overall this worked well to group objects together and then have the AI raycast and the set reports the correct notes. 
• Using cinemachine between two players: it worked out well to create a third "ghost" player, that has alpha=0 and is invisible. Its position is always in between the two players and then I have the cinemachine camera track the "ghost". This worked really well to scale the view and include the two players and position nicely in between.

Technical learnings:

Game design learnings (and thank you for people that played and commented so I learned)

• Everything takes longer than expected
• Play test early
• Don't lose track of the beginner player. Should have made it easier to start, like either simpler note level, or highlighting correct notes to get the player used to the song.
• Originally I was going to just have the player travel up or down but then thought having other notes might work to learn. But I think it became a bit too niche for someone who knows something about music already. To introduce more slowly could have taught.
• There were bugs if player skipped notes it didn't stop. It was better to skip than hit wrong note. I ran out of time to address.
• As always, the game mechanic is most important and I would spend more time on this before jumping into other visuals.
• Take more breaks. Tendency to push through working and sometimes break was a good reset to better solve problems.
• It was hard work but fun.