My piece is going through the last bit of fine-tuning as I prepare the visualizer for a presentation. Today I will be organizing everything for a quality box submission, then tomorrow a presentation will be the end of this project (for now).
Since the beginning of the semester I had a firm idea in my mind of creating something in Unity or an equivalent game engine that involved terrain or landscapes reacting to music. The goal was for this to augment my Capstone project in some interesting way, and while I did not end up using any part of my visualizer in the project, the potential is definitely still there in case I want to further this visualizer or the project down the road.
Professor Hamilton pushed many times for the consideration of certain game mechanics related to a musically reactive landscape -- ideas such as using spikes of terrain reflecting audio volume to propel one's player character up a certain height and over a certain obstacle. The reverse is true, and maybe certain kinds of musical frequencies or lack thereof would be needed in order to silence an obstacle that is too visually raunchy to get by. There is a lot of potential for a new kind of musical "Temple Run" with a focus on music here, and it is definitely something I will be reviewing in my personal game design pursuits.
Overall, I am happy with the quality of the project. I think it's important to give credence to the small steps that made up the journey, and the blogs definitely helped with that. Towards the end (now) I began to run into functional issues with Unity and my computer trying to update arrays a few thousand items long and averaging tens of thousands of values across different kind of queues. A short reflection on what I think the project could benefit from most would include ease of access to different parameters in the editor. I want the user to be able to define the number of samples actually taken from audio files, and more importantly, how that information is reflected on the face of objects in the scene (such as the cube in my final product). The arrangement of information on tiles is hard-coded in and I believe locking down what the user can actually organize and giving them access to that is the most important consideration for the future. Fine tuning color would be another great first step, and making colors easily understood to a user would also present a bit of a challenge.
In a selfish final self-reflection of the course, I will simply say that I enjoyed this course very much. The independence inherent in the way progress is made in this class can be quite daunting due to the online format we all have had to deal with, and I feel like attending this class in person would be much more delightful, especially when it comes to learning new techniques, using new facilities or watching other people present their work. Regardless, the independence of the course also made for an easily adaptable online format. Some small part of me will miss waking up at 6am to drive to a Starbucks to attend this class, and I hope all of the great projects I got to witness continue to develop under the oversight of their talented developers.
And with that, I bid everyone, Adieu