Fifthsnyte

Fifthsnyte: Command Performance Royale

A First Person Symphony.

The circle...of fifths...is closing!

This is a disaster! The most important performance of your orchestral career and this happens...

All the Roadies just...disappeared? Instrument road cases left strewn everywhere. And where's our conductor?

Looks like it's up to you to save this performance.

First up, find an instrument. Any instrument. Good thing you're a talented & respected multi-instrumentalist!

Then it's time to entertain Royalty...

Here's hoping they're not pseudo-random & capricious in their musical tastes.

Photosensitive Advisory

Unfortunately the current lighting implementation for Godot 4 Beta 8 (GLES for web export) appears to have one or more bugs that may lead to sudden lighting changes when a character is moving in this game.

Due to this issue you may wish to consider not playing this game at this time.

Changelog

• v0.1.0 - (18 Dec 2022)
  • Final pre-deadline submission.
  • (Original submission available from Download section below if you would like to view it for some reason. :) )
• v0.1.1 - (20 Dec 2022)
  • Update with fixes & improvements:
    • Mission task list now updates when you complete the first two tasks.
    • Improved handling of mouse motion when entering & leaving game window.
    • Audio feedback on certain mission events now works.
    • Improved audio volume level handling.
    • Exported with Godot 4 Beta 9 which fixes some lighting issues.
    • Possibly improved situation with light flash issue.
    • Gratuitous graphical & lighting changes.
    • Thanks for playing Fifthsnyte!

Known game play bugs & issues

• v0.1.0 (final pre-deadline submission)
  • Mission task list does not update when you complete tasks.
  • If you find a Cello in a road case you will not be able to use "Quick Select" to select it again, if you Quick Select to another instrument.
  • Due to lack of "mouse capture", player control can be a little tricky in smaller windows, you will likely get best results within full screen mode (click icon in bottom right corner).
  • Audio feedback on certain mission events does not work.
  • It is not possible to finish the task of Monarch entertaining.
  • Various graphical & collision-related issues.

Missing features

As seems to be common with game jams & me :) many of the intended features didn't quite make it in by submission deadline:

• Further game play. :D
• Win state.
• Actual procedurally generated music when you play, rather than just the same notes. :)
• Any type of rhythm detection.
• Local, or indeed, any form of multi-player.
• Additional hilarious music/FPS-related puns & jokes. :D

Maybe later? :)

Credits

Made with:

• Godot 4 Beta 8
• Tonal.js
• soundfont-player JavaScript library with Fluid Soundfont (via midi-js-soundfonts)
• Includes procedural music generation code based on my AI and Games Jam entry "The Conductor".
• itch.io & #7DFPS

My thanks to them all! :)

The Brief Post Jam Debrief

What worked well?

• Despite still being in Beta the Godot 4 editor experience was still remarkably stable. Still enjoying the many "quality of life" improvements.
  (Overall I think one of the most unexpected parts of Godot 4 development has been how many of the quality of life improvements have ended up being back-ported to Godot 3. I think this was a huge positive for the community and also important for accommodating the extended development time required for version 4.)
• My convoluted Godot + WebAudio approach for (more) precisely scheduled audio events didn't seem to make things any more complicated than they were when I used it previously.
• I still like my music/FPS puns/jokes even if I haven't managed to include most of them. :)
• When rendered via Vulkan I quite like some of the visual aesthetics in the game.
• This entry probably has the most custom models of any of my recent Jam entries?
  Even though I restricted myself to in-engine primitive mesh instances for modelling various props, I'm relatively happy with the results & trying to model with simple shapes is probably good practice for developing the skill further.
• The Note/Chord/Arp "Fire Mode" thing still amuses me & I managed to implement it (though I would have liked having icons too).
• While I still end up wondering where the time has gone :) the Jam duration covering two weekends is nice.
• I included in-game PLAYER CONTROL INSTRUCTIONS! :)
• Edit: I actually wrote a debrief. :D

What didn't work so well?

• It's unfortunate that the Godot 4 renderer (GLES3) that's most suited to creating Game Jam entries that get played (i.e. in browser) seems like it is also the renderer that's been the lowest priority for development. (And it's understandable.)
  But I definitely appreciate all the effort that is going into the GLES3 renderer.
  Definitely looking forward to shadows & anti-aliasing one day though! :)
• Got caught out a few times by an editor crashing bug which unfortunately coincided with last minute audio-related development/debugging issues & a little bit of lost work.
  Which just goes to show how apparently Godot 4 Betas are so stable that I get lulled into not saving every three seconds. :D
  (But when I hear stories of the crash frequency developers experience with some other engines' released versions...)
• Would've liked to have made more progress on the procedural music generation side of things (especially when being reminded late-Jam that #procjam was happening) but can't do it all, I guess! (I actually made some progress with this after the "AI and Games" Jam deadline & at some point I'd like to get to updating the browser version with that work.)

Thanks for playing (& reading this far)! :)