Log #20: Dec/11/2024

• "Relentless" Game Jam!
• Music Theory
• Surprisingly Good Drawings of Thumbs
• Punch Out!

As you may have read from the above bullets, this week kicked off a game jam of the theme "Relentless." I believe the deadline is the 16th, so we've got work to do!

For this project, I ended up hopping on a programmer's idea to make a Punch Out -inspired "thumb war" boxing game, which we're calling World Thumb Boxing. To be perfectly honest, I've had some concerns because the idea doesn't seem to perfectly fit the prompt, and it seems very similar to existing games. However, the prospect of boxing with a little thumb character is silly, and I think we have the opportunity to make a relentlessly optimisstic, agressively motivating, boxing game. After seeing some of the art come together and after fleshing out the mechanics in more detail, my spirits have raised, and I hope we're able to pull off something cool together!

I helped document the ideas of our project. I'm not sure how necessary this has been, but at the very least, it has helped me understand what's in the rest of the team's heads. I think asking the rest of the team a million questions has actually been pretty productive, though.

I also came on the team hoping to put a lot of focus into music. After messing with some composition in GarageBand today, I have my worries. I might just have to throw some garbage together to get something finished. One of the programmers advized copying a chord progression someone else used, and I think until my compositional skills grow, I'll have to start by copying others.

Wish us luck as we work on this project!

MATH SEGMENT: Numbers and Quantity

As I've been working on music for our game jam project, making the events of my song fall into the prominent beats of a strong rhythm help give the song more momentum and power.

Having a steady beat is important for making a song, and softwares like GarageBand are set up with this idea essentially built-in. But taking the care to use the "strong" beats in a rhythm for the bigger moments in a song is something that can really improve how a song sounds.

For the pieces I have been writing, the rhythms are divided into successive divisions of two. This idea of taking a small unit of a song, the measure, and dividing it in two's brings about the rhythmic note names "whole notes" (which last one measure), "half notes," "quarter notes," "eight notes," and so forth, following the powers of 2.

Interestingly, when you write in a measure that lasts four quarter notes (or one whole note, one common way to organize rhythm), a heirarchy commonly emerges in a lot of music. The first note is considered the strongest beat of the song. The beat halfway through the song, at the third quarter note, is the second strongest. Then the first and fourth quarter notes hold weaker beats. Interesting, as we divide the measure into smaller parts, the beats that don't lie on broader divisions of the measure come across as 'weaker,' and aren't typically used for the big moments of a song.

At one point while writing today, I thought a melody felt particularly awkward. After tweaking it so that the notes I wanted emphasis on fell on the broader divisions of the measure, I felt that the sound felt more natural, and more powerful.

Of course, dividing things in two isn't the only way of thinking about rhythm. You can also divide the measure into thirds, and even more complicated numbers as well. It's interesting how much you can change about a song with the rhythm. So remember, put your big moments of the first beat of the measure!

MATH SEGMENT: Data

As we were working on designing our thumb fighting game, the question came up: how many "hits" should the player have to work through until a minigame ends? For the particular game, each hit contributes to damage that the player can deal to the opponent. This question has many parts.

Each "hit" amounts to a final amount of damage that is inflicted on the opponent, and once the opponent's health is reduced to zero, you win the level.

This will take playtesting to actually work out, but we can think about the factors involved beforehand. Each "hit" the player achieves in this minigame deals an amount of damage to the opponent, and our opponent has a base health number of 100 right now.

If we give ourselves 10 hits, each worth 10 damage, then if the player achieves each hit in the minigame, they will deal 100 damage to the opponent, and completely defeat them. If each hit lasts one second, this minigame should take about 10 seconds for the player to complete.

As you can see, all of these factors are connected, and it makes an interesting puzzle.

If we make the opponent have more health, or the minigame have less "hits," then the minigame is less powerful. If we give the opponent less health, or the minigame more potential "hits," then the minigame gets more powerful.

And inside this, the number of hits versus the worth of each hit can be used to make the minigame award the player the same amount of damage in a shorter amount of time, or with a greater amount of risk (because the player has to make each "hit" in the minigame).

Because we have so much freedom here, we should ask how we want the minigame to play. If we want the minigame to feel super fast paced, but we don't want it to be overly powerful against the opponent, then we could make more hits in the minigame, and make each hit come faster, while decreasing the damage awarded per hit.

On the other hand, if we want the minigame to feel slow and methodical, we could award less but more powerful hits, and cause them to take longer in the minigame.

And on top of both of these ideas, we could simply tweak the opponent's health if we like the current set up of the minigame, but we want to change how powerful it is.

Some of these ideas will simply take playtesting to work out, but if we take some time to look at the relationships between similar game stats, we will have a better idea of what could be tweaked to invoke different feelings in the player.

Thank you for reading this post, especially you, Mrs. V!

-Luke Knotts