Release and Reflection

Shout for the Moon is the second game in my self-imposed one-game-per-week summer jam.

This week overlapped with my schools grading deadline, so I actually shelved a more ambitious idea in favor of this one which is relatively straightforward and basically only required me to develop one new system, the mic input (but more on that in a moment). Even so, I had even less time than anticipated so my tuning / testing time got truncated down to just a few hours this morning.

Originally I had planned to release this using webGL so it would be playable in browser. That, of course, raised big complications in terms of actually accessing a microphone. I ended up not being able to get it to work within my time constraints, but I don't think it would be an impossible task based on some of the resources I've found. Still, the big takeaway lesson is that setting up the project for your target hardware should be one of the first considerations, not the last.

The mic input itself was easy enough to work with. I'm using loudness rather than pitch. The game takes a calibrating sample, then detects whether you are louder than that sample to fire the rocket. That "loudness over threshold" factors into speed, particle emissions, and rate of fuel consumption. Overall, I think this was pretty elegant, but does rely on a bunch of variables that I more or less just tuned to taste...

The gameplay here is pretty slight. You have a sort of gradual challenge scaling of shooting for further and further moons. The later moons are not telegraphed until you get close to them and move substantially faster so you really just need to get a feel for where they might be and shout just the right amount. I think it mostly works.

Some of the best moments are when you collide with space debris and get off the y axis. You still have control, kind of, but everything goes haywire super fast. It feels appropriately zany and I felt like a champ when I did that then managed to navigate to a moon nonetheless by freak coincidence.

The names and appearances of the moons are randomly generated from an array of sprites and a fun dataset of astronaut surnames. This was cute at the time and fun to implement, but actually I think to the detriment of the final project. It would be better to have a series of known, handmade moons. That way a diligent player could get a sense for their orbits and try to time their launch with practice. The orbits remain the same, so you can kind of do that, but I think the visual confirmation of seeing a recognizable moon would be nice.