Live demo video

A sad, blurry photo

Recombinant Serendipity Exhibition Information

Information on the gallery exhibition’s finally finalized. The show is called Recombinant Serendipity, and though I have no idea what that means, what I do know is that you will be sad if you don’t come by and see it, and you will be deathly sad if you don’t come by and fiddle with its touchable parts. The show will be at four locations on the UCSD campus, but if you’re gonna be coming by to check out my project, you’ll be wanting to find the Mandeville Annex Gallery.

The opening reception is on Monday, June 8th, 2009, and the show runs until Friday, June 12, 2009. I’ll be giving a talk on Wednesday, June 10th at around 6 PM at the Calit2 Auditorium, so come by if you want to listen to my voice, which by my own admission, is pretty great.

Again, the website for the show is http://icam.ucsd.edu. That’s right, put your cursor over it, you know you want to, and move your little pointer finger on that button, yep, now flex your little pointer finger a little bit and make magic happen.

8-BITARHERO is now “complete”

After a week of unfaltering sobriety, I’ve gotten the project more or less “complete.” Of course, there are still some bugs — namely, sometimes the game puts in one or two notes that don’t really belong in the song in the note chart — but the game is basically playable, and it doesn’t look too bad either.

I think most importantly, the bug that was seen in the past videos I’ve put up — the long stream of notes that would appear when there was nothing actually playing — has been fixed. I’ve also added the drum support. One small modification I made to my original idea is that the DMC channel, which basically stores and plays back samples, is no longer mapped to the drums — this would require me to do a FFT on the sample, and find out what kind of drum note to map it to, which I don’t really think I have the time to figure out. Also, because I’m going to be showing the project off in a week long exhibition, I decided not to include a kick pedal note, as I’m going to be using my own controllers during the exhibition and I don’t exactly want to have to go out and find a new pedal every day.

All in all, it’s not perfect, and it could be better, but the project is more or less done, and as I find time throughout the next coming weeks I’ll be working on making it work better.

As for the exhibition, it will be taking place sometime early June at the University of California San Diego campus at the Mandeville Annex gallery during the ICAM Senior Art Show. There is also a possibility that I will be showing off my work at the UCSD Senior Art show that will take place in about two weeks. As I find out more details about both shows I’ll put them up on this page, and if any of you are around the area and would like to check the project out, feel free to stop by!

Super Mario Bros 2 Video

Stage Display

So today I decided to sit down and work on the presentation of the game a little bit — mostly because I was sick of looking at essentially the same thing that I had since the beginning of the project, but mostly because I’ve promised myself to two weeks of sobriety.

My original test for the display looked something like this:

Not too great, but it was a start. The characters move their arms up and down the neck of the guitar while you play the game, and their arms strum when you do. The crowd moves around a little.

Anyways, after a few hours of work, this is what I’ve come up with:

The whole thing is rendered in 3D (even though everything is more or less a 2d plane), and there’s no filtering done on the textures, so that it still looks pretty chunky and retro.

While working on the texture for the circular black fade around the edges, I had an idea that would help me reward good playing and punish bad playing without adding a win or lose state. The idea was this: if players continually play poorly, the screen fades out into TV snow, and a white noise sound effect begins to fade in over the music. That way, the better you play, the better the picture quality is, and the better the sound. The poorer you play, the less you can see the background, and the less you can hear the sound (though it never completely gets overtaken by the white noise, as that would make it impossible to get yourself out of a failure streak).

Here are some screenshots of the effect:

Doing badly.

Doing really badly.

The drums stuff and the bass stuff still don’t work perfectly, but hopefully I’ll be able to get that figured out by the exhibition.

Megaman 2 Intro + Wood Man

I recorded myself playing Megaman 2’s intro and Wood Man stage. I accidentally turned on “normal” mode (as opposed to the default setting of ‘hard’), which accounts for the use of only the first four frets. There are some bugs in how the bass and drums are charted sometimes, as you’ll see in the video. Also I suck at Megaman. Also I suck at Rock Band at 5 in the morning.

Some clarification about the project

So now that 8BITar Hero has hit Kotaku and Joystiq, I sorta feel the need to clarify a few things about the project.

First of all, I guess it’s worth repeating that this isn’t a commercial product — 8BITar Hero is a project I’m doing for a future exhibition at the University of California San Diego, as a part of my studies in Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts and Media (ICAM). Whether or not a downloadable version of the project will be available depends entirely on how satisfied I am with the final, finished version, but the project will be on display at UCSD’s ICAM show, which I’ll be posting the details about as they surface. In the meantime, you can keep checking back here for information on opportunities for you to check it out!

Secondly, you CAN actually use your plastic instruments with the game provided you have a way of connecting them to your PC. For the exhibition, I’ll be using a set of 2 wired Rockband 1 controllers, 1 wired Mad Catz Precision-Bass, and 1 wired Rockband 1 drum kit. The emulator will be controlled with a PS2 controller via a Trio Link, but I’d really like to use a USB NES controller if I can find one (any help with this would be appreciated!).

The video I posted before was just a work in progress proof of concept and doesn’t work entirely correctly (for instance, the drum track doesn’t quite work the way it should right now, and occasionally, there will be more notes than should actually be played — you know, like overcharting [you know, kind of like Guitar Hero 3, ooh, low blow!]). Also, the visuals are kind of bare-bone right now, but that’s something I’ll be refining after I’m done with all the dumb technical stuff.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and feel free to leave a comment request for games you want to see demoed in the future!

Demonstration Video

It’s 6:07 AM

So strumming and hammer-ons/pull-offs have been in the game since last week. I’ve just spent about 8 consecutive hours trying to get the emulator’s image displayed in the 8bitarhero window and after 8 hours of failure I think most people would rather just go to sleep. Like most people, I am most people.