Music Mash

Smart Speakers are a perfect fit for this game.

Comment

Inspiration

My whole career has been in the videogames industry. Then, one day, my son was diagnosed with epilepsy. It was awful. He loves videogames. But it is known that screens and videogames can be dangerous for people with epilepsy…

I wanted to do something for him. For the people with epilepsy.

Was in the music videogames genre. Then, I heard about Alexa. That was it! A fun music videogame that could be played with - or without - screen.

As we advanced in the game design, we noticed that the game was also very appealing for blind people. And musicians loved it. And then, friends loved it too.

So, we spent more time, we partnered with indie musicians & bands, and it has become a game for everybody, a family game, a challenge-your-friends game.

What it does

It’s like spot the differences, but with music. There’s the original song, and two other that are mashed up. Those other two sound bad.

We’re not talking about music tastes, it rather is like seeing the picture of a cow flying in the air. That’s just not possible.

Musical sense is universal, everybody has it.

It’s amazing to see that people can guess the incorrect pieces without even knowing the songs. Of course, as the player advances, it gets harder. I guess only musicians and blind people are able solve Level 10 pieces.

How I built it

Got help from two programmers, plus some other people who helped me contacting/dealing with artists. Then two musicians helped me “mashing” the songs. We ended up being a lot of people working on this title.

Then a lot of focus groups!

Challenges I ran into

The biggest difficulty wasn’t technical, it was to tune the modified songs and to sort them by difficulty level. At the beginning, they were either way too easy or way too hard. It’s not perfect yet. But the game has an integrated learning system that will auto-adjust the difficulty as more and more people play.

Another challenge was that as this game design is new, we could not copy-cat an already-existing game logic. This forced us test many times with people, grab their feedback and bring the changes into the code. Then, the node.js code became quite hard to manipulate, we would have programmed it much faster if the logic had been defined at the beginning.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

So, there’s this game now that is not based on knowledge, like most of the quizzes do. And it’s not an interactive story either. It’s something new, I’m proud of that.

And if it can provide fun to families, and to people that have been excluded from modern entertainment, that would make me happy.

But my biggest satisfaction is that my son loves it.

What I learned

I learned that things that look easy (like the game’s logic), can be hard. And that things that seem impossible, are possible.

What's next for Music Mash

If the game gets traction, we’ll add the Alexa’s buttons implementation, and tons of songs. Also thinking about porting the game to future cars systems if the opportunity arises.

Share this project:

Updates