After having done most of the ground work for all of the rooms, it’s time to program all the logic for them and their interactions with the artists and musicians. This also includes all of the menus that lead to basically the entirety of the player input. So when I’m through this - albeit, it might take a few weeks -, the game loop basically stands. I don’t think it will be fun at the end of this already - as the system will be lacking competition and goals (which make it into a game…) -, but the player will be able to control everything as they are supposed to. I’m very much looking forward to that point! :)
I now go room by room programing the menus and systems, before then writing some niftier musician AI. At the moment, I managed to “teach” the little buddies to enter the room you lead them to, leave it when they lack energy (at least for the rooms they work in), and return to their lounge (where they get back energy) automatically, at least if they have one of those assigned to them.
I code the rooms in the order of the game loop. Because I already have the musician creator done and also the artist creation (in the artist lounge), the song creation in the “creative space” is next:
The player is able to pick an artist to write the song, then give the song a name, choose a genre for it, a theme and the instruments that make up the song.
I still am in the “concept phase” of thinking about introducing a simplified DAW (digital audio workstation) for players to make their own music. I believe that just outputting generic songs is a bad idea, as they won’t match whatever the player has in mind, so I rather have them either do the leg work to make the songs sound like what they imagine, or the songs created have no sound at all… I probably should get some feedback from testers in the future, if that is the right way to go. But as said: I’m still in the concept phase on this point.
Alas, in this first phase I am happy when songs can be named and categorized, the quality of them (based on the songwriting skill and genre skill of the artist, as well as some randomization) calculated, each song be “written” over time by the artist in the room and it then being saved in a data structure, so it can be chosen to be recorded on an album (in the next room: the recording studio). That leads to a lot of potential for personalization already.
At a later point I also will make a “keep on writing songs automatically”-feature, so that the songwriting can be automized. I think some part of the player base will want to make songs and albums “by hand”, naming and choosing every song individually. But other - more managerial, “big picture” - types of players, probably don’t care about the song names that much and will want them just to be created as efficiently as possible, so that they can create more albums and make more money (quicker). So the “automatic song making” will probably take some keywords based on the genres and themes and create songs like that. For the more hands-on player, who wants to create every song individually, I’m thinking of introducing a queue of songs - so that they don’t need to go back every time one song is finished.
PS: I also made my own font for really small text:
