Hello everyone, DinkDonkStudios here!
For this week, we want to shed some light into the programming aspect of MuPo - Musicians of Portugal, as well as share some updates regarding the Art and Game Design that were done these past two weeks.
Screenshot of MuPo's gameplay
Before being able to start working on the game itself, a strong foundation needed to be built in order to support adding songs more easily, with the end goal of allowing players to even add custom songs. In order to reach this, and due to Unreal Engine's own limitations, with it not being able to read Midi files, a parser in python was made which converts Midi into txt files, which can be then read and interpreted by the engine.
Parser to convert Midi into txt files
On the art side of things, the environments have been worked on, with the idea of making assets for two separate scenarios, with the possibility of mixing them after in order to get a third scenario. These will be the backgrounds of MuPo's levels.
As for the Game Design, it has mostly been finished, with some polishing still required.
In terms of making music for MuPo, using sound design and taking into account note values used for programming, below is a table of the possible values each instrument ranges from, in terms of Midi values. In terms of music composition, the Marimba and Piano instruments are reduced to a range of two octaves. The drums aren't really affected, as their sounds are correspondent to separate inputs.
Table of Midi values of each instrument
Thank you for taking your time reading through this post, as always, here is a sneak peak into what has been done. Expect next week's post to be about -
