If you take a quick look at our team name, I'm sure it won't come as much of a surprise to you that most members in our group are very into Japanese rhythm games. We saw this as a unique opportunity to connect our interest in music and skills with computer science to create a project that would be motivating, enjoyable, and rewarding. While brainstorming different ways to add some personal touches and fresh mechanics in a very well established genre of games, we realized that using VR, we would be able to implement more unique input methods to create an enjoyable experience for the user. While none of us have head direct experience with VR programming in the past, we were able to capitalize on the unique strengths of our team members and work together to learn new skills to produce what ultimately became a successful project.
The player, equipped with a VR headset and handheld controllers, stands in what is essentially a transparent box. Music starts playing and after a few peaceful moments to grow acclimated to the beat, they must become a flurry of rapid hand movements and button clicks - reaching in a full 180 degree range of motion - to hit all the blocks racing toward them. Each of these blocks approaches one section in the players field of view, and upon reaching the borders of aesthetic box-like interface we created, the player must move their hand to the correct section and press the trigger in time to earn points (in theory). Beyond the gameplay element, you can also create new maps to songs by following our absolutely painless file standards.
Before we had a project in mind, we were nothing. After spending several pondering on what could bring meaning to our lives - what project could push us to torment our bodies for 24 hours to usher it to a clunky completion, we were enlightened. Following this, we spent hours talking about the specifics of the game dynamics, the design, what features we wanted to include, whether to get ramen or bento at willage, and just about anything else we could think of. We also realized we would need a VR apparatus, so we borrowed from from the generous fellows at the hardware room. All of this time was indespensible in bringing our project to the wonderful state it is now in.
After figuring out what we wanted out of this project, we needed to figure out what we wanted to put into it. Like what kind of code to fill its juicy files with. We wrote pseudocode and discussed the benefits and disadvantages of different data structures and organization methods. Again, this planning time was very important in helping the coding process go smoothly.
As for the actual nuts and bolts that went into bringing this project from an idea in the hivemind of our group to an actual game I will spend all of my free time playing, there were also several key points. Perhaps the most significant being the broad range of talent in our group. Steph is a godess at the visual stuff. She took care of menus, graphic designs, logos, and a ton of other things that make it impossible to overlook our project. Edward has had far more experience with unity than any of the rest of us, naturaly leading to him being the head programmer of the game itself. Garcia is a musical genius and connosouer of rhythm games whose wizened eye guided us to the rhythmic promised land. I was a lab rat and I write the DevPost. Teamwork is great. All nighters and caffeine are too.
We used the Vive VR headset and the Unity game engine to make our game. The APIs were absolutely amazing, as anything that brings sci-fi tech into the realm of possibilites for college kids making a video game over-night must be.
Challenges, Accomplishments, and Lessons learned (because they're basically all the same thing anyway)
When you finish coding something, it doesn't seem to be very often that it comes out the way you had initially intended it to. Some ideas are unfeasable due to time restraints. Some ideas sound great in theory, but in actuality introduce more problems than they are worth. We spent a long time trying to balance the advantages and disadvantages of different interfaces and control mechanisms for our game. Over the course of the project, we were all exposed to things we didn't know. We struggled to get familiar with different conventions and languages. We struggled to find dumb typos that broke all of our code in the dozens of files we had written. We struggled to mathematically integrate Unity's time management with the beat of the songs. But in the end, we were able to work through these problems through a combination of teamwork, hard work, and untapped potential. They became our accomplishments. And computer science is great in the sense that the longer you spend struggling through something, the less painful it becomes. We are all far more familiar with unity and C# and VR and YMCA than before and this growth is something to be proud of.
There are a lot of things we are looking to add.
- User-friendly level editor
- A scoring system.
- Blocks disappear when you clear them
- Sliding note types that require you to move from one region to another
- A lot more songs
- A menu in the actual program
- A mascot character
- Get all of Stephs brilliant designs and ideas into the actual program.
- Blocks that are colored according to what hand they are to be gotten with
- Translations to other languages
- Micro-transactions (or at least a Patreon link)
Agakki was created by Edward Storey, Jackson Kjar, Garcia (Hung-Wei) Lu, and Stephanie Luo.