I'm Done (User Guide)

Right, the game. I have been working on this in the background mostly, I’ve had a bunch of other big assignments for my major units just one after the other and it tends to get quite overwhelming. This is why I did not provide any other devlogs, (sorry).

Ghost Notes is a combination rhythm puzzle game where you have to help the ghost Clef escape from a maze. Unfortunately, Clef is only able to move if notes conveniently correlating to the cardinal directions hit a bar at the bottom of the screen, that means that you have to use the arrow keys to destroy the notes in time with the music to help direct Clef out of the maze, before the song is over.

I am quite happy with how Ghost Notes has turned out, I had to pull back the scope of the game quite a bit. I originally planned to give it three levels, this was changed because I realized that doing so would be beyond the scope of my abilities. 

Still, I learned a lot through doing this project. I feel that I now have a far better grasp on how games function under the hood and I have come to the realization that I am not cut out for coding in any way shape or form. 

A bit of a downer I know, but I am honestly quite bad at programming, this game is just barely holding itself together and for a while, I was worried that I would have to change course entirely and just make it a rhythm game, without any of the puzzle elements. I would say that the part of the process I enjoyed the most was making the music, though, I am a musician so that does make sense. I think that the most difficult thing about making a game for me was identifying what I actually wanted to do. I was able to easily say what I wanted the end result to be, but figuring out how it was actually done and how to make that solution work was a long and arduous process. 

As mentioned before, all of the music present in the game was made by me as were the sprites. The part of the game that took the longest to make was definitely the rhythm game part, but it is also the aspect that I felt was the most important to get right as the whole idea of Ghost Notes was based around being a rhythm game. Thankfully, there were plenty of tutorials online that I was able to base my work off of. This is also the first time I’ve properly gotten my head around the idea of changing scenes in unity and playing audio, both are quite simple, they just require a bit of setup. I’m still not 100% sure about events and event callbacks but I understand how they work in principle, even if I don’t quite know the practical. 

Ghost Notes is controlled by using the arrow keys, you can hit any button to start the song, and the start game button has to be licked with the mouse. 

Asset List:

Music was all made by me using the plugins that come as standard with FL Studio.

The majority of the sprites were also made by me using an online pixel art tool.

The only sprites I didn't make were the arrows and the circle notes. the arrows were taken from here https://pngtree.com/free-png-vectors/arrow. And the notes were taken from here https://pngimg.com/image/87370. the change in colour for each of these sprites was done using the fill tool in ms paint.