Inspiration
As members of the Catholic Center, we were inspired by the Catholic Churches' mascot for 2025, Luce. The mascot had become somewhat of an inside joke among team members, and at the encouragement of our priest, we were motivated to make a game starring her.
Additionally, one of our members is in a Korean drumming club, and wanted a good way to be able to memorize the beats of his pieces. This inspired us to created a drumming/rhythm game.
What it does
Our program parses a .csv file containing hit types and speeds for two drums. From there, a level is generated, where different note shapes, note speeds, and key requirements correspond to the csv data.
In terms of gameplay, there is a drum hit-box that determines how well the user is timing the notes and whether they are hitting the right keys. Correct hits increase the score, while misses cause an animation of Luce falling to trigger.
How we built it
We built this project entirely in Unity. We also asked for some 8-bit designs from our friends. A lot of this project's process involved thinking of an idea, looking at various tutorials, slowly figuring things out.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest problem was our lack of experience with Unity, causing various bugs that took hours to unravel. In terms of design, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to represent the drumming sheet music as data. We discussed various versions that were very complex, before settling on the current version that only uses 3 columns of data. There was also a lot of discussion about the difficulty of the game such as how fast to make the notes, and how generous to make the drum hit-boxes. We ultimately settled on something that we believe is fair and challenging
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the fact that we built this project without knowing Unity beforehand. We were impressed by the rate we were able to learn new skills through this project. Finally, we were impressed with how much more fun and motivating this project was compared to school projects. We are also proud of the fact that we were able to engage our friends at the Catholic Center, and take their feedback into account as we made this project
What we learned
We learned a lot about Unity and C#, but we primarily learned how to complete a project end to end. The open-ended nature of the project required us to make countless design decisions. We learned about the importance of thinking through everything before just coding. We also learned about the importance of user input. All of the friends that we asked to try our game gave us a new perspective that we could never think of, showing us that technical prowess is only a fraction of what it takes to be a good developer.
What's next for Luce's Pilgrimage
This project is mostly finished, but we hope to make some improvements on graphics as well as a feature that allows users to upload custom .csv files to play unique songs. We also would like to survey users to see if the game is an appropriate difficulty, and create different ending screens based on if the user achieves a target score (currently, all users are routed to a positive screen because we have not correctly determined difficulty level)
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