Inspiration
After playing and loving many rhythm dance games, I became frustrated with their shared limitations:
- You are locked into looking in one direction, and can’t move much or turn at all
- You are a puppet of the game’s preset choreography
- Music selection is limited and entirely pre-generated
- You can’t influence anything in the game: not the music, the lightshow, or the scenery
What it does
The vision of Body of Music is to solve all of these and provide a brand new musical instrument that requires no learning: you! This is a rhythm game where your dancing creates the music. Your movement sets the BPM, generates loops, triggers instruments, and drives the lightshow. Scoring works like a dance competition—variety, creativity, and expressiveness rack up points—and your energy unlocks new instruments and visual power-ups as you perform.
Use your whole space, move and turn and dance however you like!
How we built it
Prior to the competition, the focus of the last 2+ months was on creating a high-performance music synthesizer from scratch in order to support the realtime generation of 10+ high fidelity channels. The result is just 3% CPU usage* , allowing for a full-featured game. Our synthesizer generates everything from basic waveforms at 48,000 samples/second with no prerecorded sound whatsoever. We have 15 instruments, 8 of which are in this tech demo. Others include a Supersaw, Hammond Organ, Guitar and a growing variety of other instruments and sounds. The synthesizer has EQ shaping, dynamics, and many of the features of a full Digital Audio Workstation, but this is all hidden from view, focused on making an easy to step into experience that can nonetheless create high quality music.
Challenges we ran into
Figuring out the "movement grammar" that translates what people already know about dancing and music into danceable music. What is there now is just an initial proof of concept. All of the gameplay was built in the last 2 weeks.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Coming up with the idea. Creating a high performance music synthesizer entirely from scratch with no prior music experience other than starting piano 2 years ago.
What we learned
How to use Burst. So much music theory.
What's next for Body of Music
- Create a polished demo
- Add more instruments
- Allow player to select instruments, up to 10 at a time
- Allow player to easily create loops for their instruments as they dance
- Advance the movement grammar to allow the player to generate music tracks as they dance at a level similar to what they would experience in any existing rhythm game. Ok, not Skrillex, but at a good level of variety so that they would enjoy listening to the replay many times.
- Add a dance partner that will show them next steps in their dancing skill tree to generate higher and higher scores while creating more enjoyable music and dances. The partner will only ever suggest, the player's movement will always be up to them.
- Multiplayer
- Customization
Player, music ingredients, lightshow, and scenery kits to expand what is possible
note regarding CPU usage. This is an estimate based on the PC test version of the synthesizer using Burst. There is a bit more work to port Body of Music's Burst usage to Quest due to android's requirements for running Burst.
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