Constellation and Piano game concept
This is a little 3D puzzle game for child or adults who interested in piano, music, stars and constellations. The inspiration comes from my experience of playing piano and watching stars at night. I was really enjoying playing and thus playing without sheet, and I noticed my movement of hands/fingers is just like stars in constellations in the night sky – from one to the other, there is a distance, and that’s surprisingly the same of why we can hear different sounds with different keys from a piano. So I had this thinking of what if we can play out the constellations just like we play piano, or how would a constellation sounds if it can be played on piano. I think it is a very fascinating idea so I want to make it to be a game.
Game mechanics:
The mechanics are quite simple, simply eye-balling the distance between each star in a constellation shown by the game, think about their relative distance compared to each other, then play the virtual keys according to this relation of distance to make a piece; for example:
The Big Dipper constellation:
Blue number is the order to be played on keyboard (will be defined by the game), red number is the relative distance ratio through eyeballing, so the Big Dipper will be played like this on piano:
A -> F -> D -> B -> F -> B
since:
Two stars will be chosen at the start of the game to indicate the start position as well as providing the base unit of distance for eye-balling, for example in the above instance, star #1 and #2 will be given at the start of this puzzle. Also the first piano key will be given at the start to tell the player where to start from, for example, the A key above.
And if the ligature of the stars goes down, then the keys must be played downwards (to the left) on the keyboard, if it goes up, then played upwards (to the right). The virtual piano keys will be mapped to keyboard to simulate the real piano.
Mechanics introduction in game:
I tried this on my own piano with different constellations and it is very enjoyable to hear how different constellations would sound, they make good arpeggios. Although for the simplicity of game play, I discard the sharp and flat keys (black keys on piano) and assume all distances between white keys are equal (which is not entirely true in music theory).
Comments