Music-STAR

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  main menu

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  input screen after pressing enter

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  input screen

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  basic game loop. i still need to work further on the graphics lol

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  a view of the prize window

Submission: Make Anything but Make it YOU strand!

Inspiration

As a music lover who loves a wide variety of music genres from pop to metal, and vocaloid to jazz, I thought it would be fun to make an app that can recommend music to you. Most of the time, music is recommended by others, by algorithms or humans. But at some point it can get a little boring scrolling through website top lists, forumns, or the nth result in Spotify and Youtube, so I decided to add a little fun twist to the whole thing.

Music recommendation via Claw machines! And I find claw machines are pretty fun, although im terrible at them in real life :( . Thankfully, Musical-STAR's claw machine is a pretty reliable one. Perhaps it'll even help you discover a new artist that you like.

What it does

You, the player, control the claw in a claw machine. You input three artists that you like and the game will generate a number of prizeballs for you. Each prizeball contains info of a similar artist to the ones you inputted using LastFM's API.

How I built it

I used pygame for the visual interface and handling the behavior of the elements. I also LastFM's API to generate similar artists and info about them such as their top tracks and top albums.

Challenges I ran into

I wanted to use Spotify's API but apparently they only allow 25 users whose spotify accounts you have to whitelist. It's annoying, but the real killer was the fact that they apparently don't allow you to make quizzes, trivias, or otherwise "gamified" experience through their API. That was really surprising. I had to pivot to using Last FM's API instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is my first time building a full "application" and also my first time using APIs, so that was a rabbithole! I tried to prep by watching tutorials before the hackathon started so I could get an idea on how to use it, but it was definitely a new experience. LastFM also does not have many yt tutorials about it, but thankfully the docs were pretty simple to understand.

What I learned

I learned how to use API, and half-entered a rabbithole about security and OAuth and everything. I also got to use a few functions in pygame that I never got to use before. I had to ask chatGPT some clarifications on how some of them were used because pygame docs are a bit simplistic for me and I wasn't completely sure with what I was doing. It was pretty fun, all things considered! Now that I know how to use APIs, it's like a whole new world has opened up for me.

What's next for Music-STAR

Add album images and maybe some more info about the artists. DEFINITELY improve the graphics, it's pretty rushed as is -- and probably add more fonts lol. I didn't work too much on how the game looked since I was focused making it functional as soon as possible. I have so many nitpicks about the window size and the image scaling, but I'm still not super experienced with pygame to do what I want lol.

Some nice features for the future would be a bookmark to remember recommendations that you really liked, or maybe generate songs instead of artists. Might even be nice to expand the reach from music to something like book reccommendations or comic recommendations, but I think I'll focus on polishing the music part first.

And also don't forget to clean up the code, I do believe it is a mess at the moment. I hope I didn't leave any embarrassing comments in there.

Built With

• lastfm
• pygame
• python