Mines Davis: Kind of Green

Description

A software toy for playing goblin saxophone solos!
Keyboard keys 1-8 correspond to the notes on a standard music scale, with 1 and 8 being the same note separated by an octave. The right and left keys increase or decrease your current octave by 1.
This project uses FMOD heavily to support the modulation for the notes you play. It also features a system that changes what key your notes play in to match the backing track that plays throughout.

Background

Mines Davis: Kind of Green was made for the Winnipeg Game Collective's PegJam 2026, for which the theme was "Goblin Mode."
Olivier came up with the idea of interpreting the "Mode" part of the prompt in the musical sense over the night between the prompt's reveal and our first session the next day. I arrived to our team having already committed to dedicating the weekend to two words:

Goblin Jazz.

Goals

The team's goal here was simple, create a good looking, well scoped Jam Game that gave us some room to experiment. I knew my time would be even more limited, so my goal was to lurk around the project and fill wherever I was needed. This worked out pretty well, given that Olivier's main goal was getting to experiment with FMOD.

Reflections

I'm pretty satisfied with how this toy turned out! It's an amusing thing you're meant to play around with for a few minutes, and I think we succeeded in pulling that off quite handily. We got a number of compliments on the overall polish and visual presentation of the game given the short turnaround, though our artists Anna and Rain are mostly to thank for that.
In the end, I mostly wound up working on how the player controls the actual game. Implementing controls and making sure they worked seamlessly had a couple of hiccups, but I think I did a solid job on it!

I took it upon myself to add the coloured note particles, which are a small detail that I think add a lot of personality to the final project. Getting them to play nicely with the controller so their colours matched up with the note played was more frustrating than I would have hoped, but I got it working and that's what matters!

A Fun Fact About This Project

I got a little hung up on what exactly "Goblin Jazz" entails, so after much deliberating, I figured it would be funny if playing certain note combos made crude sound effects play. I made it my final mission to add that to the game, if only so that I could say "Spamming the A note (6 on keyboard) makes your guy do a Tom and Jerry scream." Because that's really funny to me. There are a few more to find, and I have them stowed away in a notebook. Actually getting to show them off in front of an audience reminded me of teaching my friends cheat codes at sleep overs. Anyways, try spamming 5 and 1, the goblin will start laughing maniacally.