Midi

This game kept calling us back to it out of interest and surprise, it was just such an interesting concept, and something we haven’t really seen in the game scene. As someone who taught themselves piano as an adult, I was really interested in the concept of fun, immersive education, that could teach people fluency in something without them bashing at theory. It seemed a few other people were too.

Vai had an idea to turn this into a MIDI game, as there was a lot of thought about this turning into an immersive music theory game. After going to the SFA, it inspired us to think more about custom controllers or input mechanisms for games. Some of that turned into the thought of an immersive keyboard learning game, so we wanted to see if we could get MIDI working and possible code up chords to player input controls (like spider movement directions)

We thought we’ve have to do a whole bunch to implement midi in Godot, but it turns out it’s built in, so we only had to add the chords to be recognised!

The idea was to use a midi instrument to control the spider, and essentially teach people keyboard fluency, hand eye coordination, muscle memory and note reading immersively through the game. Using our Akai Mini and Roland to prototype. We would love to add an LED strip in the future.

Since this video we have mapped playing chords to move the spider, and specifically chords placed on the web, so that spidey jumps around to spots. We wanted this for one of the game play modes, where you can only jump on certain chords, and if you miss them the prey escapes.