Heartbeat
Spring 2019
This game was made for an algorithmic music class. This is a tech demo for an endless runner platformer game. The major focus of the project was to get sound effects and music to play using the program PureData. There was an emphasis on creating synthesized sounds. I focused on doing the synthesis and composition for this project. I also made the player character sprite.
It was a fun challenge to compose the four different song sections to be played in any order and still sound good. The bell sounds that the player plays by landing on the platforms are all the same sound, just pitched differently. I needed to make sure that these sounds also fit within the context of the background music whenever they were played. In addition, I made the heartbeat sound that plays during the main menu.
The biggest hang-up that we faced at the end of our development was when the PureData files were converted into Heavy files for Unity, some of the data, including the pitch data, was distorted. The sounds didn’t translate perfectly. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to fix this major bug before the game was due.
Art
The art that I contributed to this for this project was the player character sprite. I had the idea to make the sprite a music note, but the dot of the note would be a heart. I was currently learning pixel art, so I used that as the art style.
Ideation & Prototyping
In the beginning of our development, we decided that it would be easiest to model our game after an endless runner, because two of us had just finished working on an endless runner game and it was the format that we felt the most comfortable making in 2.5 weeks. I loved the idea of making a game that played musical tones whenever you landed on a platform. The scope seemed small enough, so Heartbeat was born.