Tune Spread
This is a rough concept for a game exploring relationships between chords. You start by clicking on the Queen Bee to get her to sing and if the adjacent bees have the note she sings in their chords they sing too and send a note to other adjacent bees. You can set the direction they send notes in. You can also drag the tiles around to find ones that work together. The trick is to keep the song going by choosing a path that keeps the tune going - the bees need to have a note in common in their chord. It would help a lot to know some music theory but you can also just mess about!
This is the first game I made in Unity to get to know the environment. Would like to add some goals for the player to achieve (e.g. getting bees to fly if they get sung to the right way) or maybe a score for the time the bees keep singing.
Update from comments (thanks to those who played with it!). You can set the direction of the notes from the Queen Bee by clicking near the sides of her hexagon. You can set the direction the other tiles send their notes also by clicking near the sides of the hexagon. The tile dragging *should* work but I think it doesn't if you use a browser on a mobile device - at least it doesn't on my iPad - my apologies. The tiles are randomly assigned chords at the start of each iteration of the game so it could be that none of the tiles surrounding the Queen Bee respond to her singing, which is why you would need to drag tiles around.
To attempt to clarify how it works, from a music theory perspective, the bees will pass on the singing if the note that comes to them is one that's in their two-note chord. The Queen Bee (at this stage) always sings a C3 note. So, a bee that has a C3+5 chord (which contains the notes of C3 and G3) would pass on the singing from the Queen bee to an adjacent bee with both the C3 and the G3 notes. If that bee has any kind of C3-based chord it will sing. If that bee has any G3-based chord (containing e.g. G3+D4) it will also sing because of the G3 note it's receiving. However, if it has, say, D2+m3 which contains D2 and A3, it wouldn't. (Have done these out of my head so I hope that's all correct!). As has been pointed out, if I included some levels you could start with simple setups and then make it more complicated. Due to my limited Unity and C# skills I didn't get this far, but hoping to develop and upload some later versions once the Game Jam embargo finishes. Thanks again to anyone who took the time to play with this - much appreciated!
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Okay, so I stuck with it. I figured out I could only move bees when there was no music then I figured out that they don't have to bee next to each other; the music note will "jump gaps," and that was really satisfying - making groups of bees singing that "spit" the note to the next group.
Cool - yes, it will skip gaps. Nice find on the groups, I hadn’t tried that!
the explanations or a tutorial would be great Im completely guessing about what to do. it also says I can pick tiles up but it happens sometimes other times it doesnt. idk.
Thanks - yes, needs a lot of work, my apologies. TBH it's more like a tech demo than a game. I realise the tile dragging doesn't seem to work on mobile devices through a browser. Once the embargo finishes I will look at updating!
I'm using windows desktop in browser. Thanks for adding a quick how to in the description.
Thanks, I did put a delay on the drag so the tiles didn't move when you only wanted to click them - perhaps this is not well calibrated across all environments because it runs off the Update function so is related to frame rate - it seemed to work on mine but may well need further testing.
Update: I added some comments to the game page which were meant to be helpul - thanks again for your feedback!
Fun idea! Adding some explanations and objectives, like levels, could actually trick people into learning about music theory :D
ha ha - thanks - I thought about it harder than I had for a while :-)
I wish I understood music theory, cool idea though.