Dissonant
Prototyped a rhythm, Zelda-like game starring music genres where battle theme music is diegetic. By conducting a troupe of fighters, players enchant the noise created by their attacks to cast spells.
Skills:
Icon Design, Programming, Motion Design, Wireframing/Lo-fi Mockups, Visual Scripting, Visual Design, Game Engine/Widget Editor, User Testing, Figma/Adobe XD, After Effects/Adobe Animate, Photoshop/Illustrator, Internal Tool Development, Sketching, Button Mapping
Tools:
Unreal Engine 4, Adobe Creative Suite
Languages:
C++, Python, Visual Scripting/Blueprints
DESCRIPTION:
This game is a long-term, Unreal Engine rhythm-action game about the fluidity of music taste after the advent of music streaming.
Inspirations for the design (game and visual)
DAWs (spell casting) & MIDI Pad Controllers
Music Streaming Services
Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker
More on the original UX design can be read at old.jasminechapin.com/dissonant and more of our work can be seen here.
GAME DESIGN:
Spellcasting is functionally like adding sections of a loop to a DAW. Each track in the image below are like the genres in your party (e.g. Chiptune, Symph and Trap). Although the entire composition for a spell is eight measures long, spells and their associated rhythm game, only last for two bars. If a spell is set to be cast during measure 1, that spell's rhythm game will occur on bar 2 and the notes from measures 2-3 of the spell will appear during the rhythm game.
When two spells are playing at the same time, a magic chord is triggered. For example, at Bar 1 in the image below, Disrupt and Heal are playing at the same time. This would trigger the spell Silence. To limit the amount of music playing at once in the game, only two spells can ever play at once.
MIDI to DataTables Python Script
I wrote this script to produce the MusicScore objects used in the rhythm game. The buttons pressed by the player are based on the relative pitch of each note (the contours). For example, if the current note is lower than the previous, the lower contour button is to be pressed.
UPDATED UI DESIGN:
To further push the art style of the UI, I've focused on making the game's graphic design more dynamic than it was previously. Here's some of that in-progress work (with some placeholder backgrounds).
ICON DESIGNS:
I didn't design the original icons I used in the game. Instead many were supplemented by sorasak21. I thought the rounded shapes and minimalistic, glyph style would be perfect for the UI. So, the set I created is inspired by their work.
UI IMPLEMENTATION:
Implementing for Keyboard and Mouse & Controllers
HUD Animations
Health Bars:
I wanted the health bars to be a little more interesting than just basic progress bars. So, I drew inspiration from SoundCloud's scrubber. To draw players attention to the bars when health is low, I decided to add an animation to them using a UI material that gets progressively faster and jerkier.
Metronome:
The radial progress wheel on the bottom of the screen (or bottom right) is the game's metronome. Given that the tempo of the game's music (not audible in these videos) is 90 beats per minute with four beats per measure, the progress bar is filled every 2.67 seconds. The related "time" can be seen in the top left. It displays the current bar/measure out of a cyclical eight the game is in and the current beat.