The Shade Of Eccria

Candles Update 27: Rock Band (not really)

I took some time this past week or so to enjoy playing video games. But now I’m back on the case.

Given that we can “pick up” the guitar, it’s time to play it. Using Garage Band on my MacBook, I was able to collect 25 (24) notes from a guitar instrument. These notes represent 5 frets across six strings on the guitar (frets 1-5), and excludes playing any string “open”. I say 25(24) because of the way guitars are tuned, the fifth fret on the G string is the same as the first fret on the B string…so I got confused…and it may all be ruined. I’ll check on that later.

Not the most exciting script–but it gets the job done. Using OnMouseOver and OnMouseExit, I was able to make “highlights” on the guitar appear. I thought about using rectangles on the fret board, but that didn’t feel right. This doesn’t look great either–but it’s more of a proof of concept. And now each fret plays a note.

I was really excited by how easily this came together and how well it functioned.

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Candles Update 26: Kyle’s Guitar

So I have the shade up and running. But for the shade to fulfill its purpose, I need notes: musical notes. So I hopped into Apple’s Garage Band and I tried to grab some notes.

Shhh–this is a secret, but there’s a chord we’re focused on. The notes are F, C, C#, and G#. I used to play this chord in high school, having no idea that it was an actual “thing”, or that I would reuse it for the basis of a puzzle 20 years later.

But for Kyle’s Guitar, I need more than these four notes. For this to be a “puzzle”, there must be “wrong answers”. I’ve decided to include every guitar note for all six strings within the first 5 frets. Not including playing a string open, that’s 30 notes…well, something like 12 notes in 3 different octaves…whatever.

I played every note in Garage Band and exported. As I was editing the audio to include one note per track, I remember that guitars break the tuning pattern between G and B strings–so there’s some note sharing. I think I’ve set it correctly. We’ll see…

Next step–make a playable guitar. My writer suggested using an interface. Since I had a guitar 3d model available, I opted to use that.

First, I duplicated the in-scene model and childed it to the player. I start the game with it deactivated so that it may be activated later. The model I downloaded had to be blown up to 1.5x size to be “realistic”. But because the guitar cannot get too close to the camera without clipping, I had to blow it up to 4x to sufficiently fill the screen.

To “pick up” the guitar, I’ve set a new check for the tag “Guitar”, and I can make the call in PickThingsUp:

Then in my guitar script (which is actually on the player):

Looks like I need to delete that PickThingsUp reference…

Here, I grab the necessary scripts. You can see the two functions to “pick up” and “put down” the guitar. All pretty straight forward–but I ran into a weird bug. In the if statement, I found that when holding the guitar, if tried to put it down…it uh, didn’t work. I’m not sure why this is happening, but since I’m using the same button to pick up the guitar and put it down, I thought I’d make sure to never allow the two actions in a single frame. The script was working fine previously, but the next day not so much. This seems to fix it. Next, I’ll be trying to build a canvas-based UI that lets the player click on notes…and we’ll see how well I’ve picked out notes for the game.

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