The Finished (Experimental) Products

So here are the three experiments, what I was trying to accomplish with them, and how they differ from the original concept.

Speed Freq
Every game needs a good pun in the title, amirite? So I had to change the name to Speed Freq.

The concept has also moved away from the complexities of F1, and onto a nice straight piece of highway driving, featuring lane changing. The actual game layer (with points and goals) is not explicitly defined in the final app, but it is certainly implied by what is fun to do and what is not. With more space and a better sense of position, I found this view was more involving yet also encouraged experimentation, and it isn't too punishing. Making a sound that rises or falls continuously in pitch will make the car slow down or speed up accordingly, and this takes the majority of the brain effort, so the lane switching is kept simple - just tap the button and the rest is automatic.

The idea is less 'clinical racing precision' and more 'make silly car noises and have a laugh', which is indeed what happened a lot in testing. I demo this by whistling, the purest way to make a clean frequency with your mouth, but making various loud and strange car noises works just as good in most cases.

The cars are sprites from the original GTA, just so I could concentrate on the experiment itself rather than on graphical production values (which is not the point here) while still communicating the theme as best I could.

Tune Flyer
This ended up more abstract than it started out, but that just proves that this game concept needs no setting to anchor it, it just makes sense. There are 5 colours involved, all mapped to a specific frequency range. When the app hears that frequency (it ignores low ones to cut down on noise) it changes the colour of the player (the ball) to be the corresponding colour. Collecting blocks of the same colour gives a point, whereas crashing into other coloured blocks will take away points. Again, as with Speed Freq, there is the option to display mastery of the sound input or move the player out of harms way in many situations, providing a nice judgement call for the player but also different styles of play.

Ear Drums
This was earmarked to be the simple app that had some character, and initially I was planning to make a sort of multiplayer fighting game, but the further I got into detail with that system the more pointless and not-fun it seemed as a game. Basically the system just wouldn't work, and would always degenerate into all players recognising their cues successfully, and luck determining the winner every time. Lame.

So Ear Drums is a return to a previous idea about interacting with an on-screen character via audio. Whistling above a certain frequency will start to annoy him, and continuing to do it will aggravate him more and more severely until his head explodes. Sadly I lacked time to make the head explosion more satisfying, as this was the last app I made and the others were much more demanding to even make playable.