Zacharyejohnson

Rally Car Hero is an excellent little browser based SEGA Super Scaler styled retro arcade racer!

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Oooo, I need to play this.

Shadows of Doubt is an open world Sci-Fi noir stealth detective game set in a fully simulated city, where every NPC has their own job, apartment and daily routine!

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Machine Dream is a stylish and inventive 2.5D puzzle platformer where a tiny magnetized spider-bot makes their way through a huge robot factory!

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Stay woke.

Yeah, let's all go back there...

Don't actually try to change my mind...

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Nintendo 64 (1998)

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.