Calm Spirit Prototype
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Explore the playable prototype and supporting system documentation.
Music is a skill that anyone can pick up with enough practice. In games, good design makes music a skill that anyone can learn.
In Calm Spirit, you recreate enemy movements through beats using one of your three instruments.
Designing Music For Everyone
Music is an auditory skill. In my prototype, I extended it to be both visual, and auditory. By breaking music down into instruments, mapped to movements categorized by Impact, Flow, and Precision, the accessibility layer for learnig music extends to those who are rather visual in their gameplay approach.
The Musical Staff, inspired by the musical notebooks, breaks down each instrument based on pitch(High to Low), and 8 separate beats for each of them. The final goal was to allow players to recreate the enemy movesets with their own sound combos.
The Musical Bar Staff breaks down intro 3 instruments, each color coded horizontally, with 8 beats and a half measure sign at the 4th beat.
The Musical Bar(see aboe) moves vertically across the 8 beats in tandem with the metronome beats. This takes place both in the Enemy turn and the Player Turn.
Good Feedback is visible. The next logical step for better feedback would be making the vertical bar follow the colors of the enemy movement, without overwhelming the player visually.
After the Enemy Turn, the Player recreates the moves on the bar using the 123 alphanumerical keys. Damage is calculated based on missed hits and how much Spirit the Player and Corruption the Enemy has.
This acts like a damage multiplier for each of them, 100 representing 100% of base damage per hit/attack. The enemy's Corruption meter doubles as it's health. Once the beast is calmed(0 Corruption) the win condition is reached.
Tension you can Tune
Because Damage is based on the total amount of Spirit(Mana) and Corruption(Health/Mana), mapping out the math behind the combat was an important step. Since the battle takes up most of what Calm Spirit is about, I estimated the TTK times using a % of beats correctly recreated by the player, and item combinations(Health Potions, Helper Ally), using an optimistic model, where the player's self preservation instinct would kick in and he would use all the tools at his disposal to win the match.
In the end, simulation and reality are two different outcomes. Damage numbers that feel good on paper need adjustment in-engine. Part of the design process is intuition driven. Test—>Implement—>Test again until it feels good is part of the process, when the game loop works.
The simulation of TTK times implied coming up with some formulas and looking through how such things are handled in other well known games. In the end, I sorted the formulas from most basic to complex, and I organized the rows in such a way to allow me to use previous formulas for the next, more complex calculations.
For a more detailed breakdown, access the full Design documentation, including the word, excel, and game build at the top of the page.
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