About this project:

Line Rider-styled snowboarding game where the level is generated by your voice.

I was a co-organizer at the Danish game jam Indie9000 in May 2013. However, I also had some time to make a little game myself.

Having studied a program in my fourth semester at Medialogy called Pure Data, I thought it would be interesting to make an Unity game that used microphone input from Pure Data. I wanted to make a small game similar to Line Rider, but instead of making the lines with the mouse, it would be done by shouting into the microphone.

However, it turned out to be a little more involving that I had anticipated. First of all I had to figure out how to send the microphone input from Pure Data to Unity. I did this via UDP networking, but since this was the first time I worked with any kind of network, it took me some time to understand and implement.

Then came the actual level generation, which also turned out to be a little more cumbersome. Based on an example project provided by Unity, I managed to create a dynamic mesh extrusion based on the microphone’s input amplitude (aka volume). The idea was originally to use the pitch, but amplitude turned out to be a better solution. The only problem was the mesh colliders in Unity, which didn’t fit the geometry as intended. Luckily, I was able to make it work more or less by re-generating the mesh colliders after the line had been drawn. Unfortunately, the colliders were not perfect, which made it very difficult to control the little character who was supposed to slide up and down the hills.

All in all, the game I made lacked proper implementation, but it still works as a proof-of-concept prototype. That idea is there, but maybe a game like this is not meant to be developed in a 3D engine like Unity. If I had to make the game again, I would probably consider either Flash, Game Maker or XNA.

Music:
Burnt Chicken Wing – ShinsukeIto