The placeholders (1) being, of course, quite underwhelming, it was time to move on to creating proper target units. This was a decision that the team had come to several weeks in, since we wanted to make it a pacifistic game. However, the grading team kept pushing to make a clearer, easier to identify objective, so we eventually decided to use enemy drones to signify which notes the player would have to hit.
I drew inspiration for the cores of the drones from jet engines and the Mono Eye drone from Elsword. The wings were designed to mirror given note values (3), since at the time we were also playing with the idea of having held note scores. Unfortunately, the Piano-to-Computer interface wasn’t able to handle this in a way that could be accurately moved into Unreal.
One last idea I wanted to work with, but that didn’t make it into the graded cut of the game due to importing complications: I wanted the drones to have either two or four wings, based on their note’s position on the musical bar (4, 5, 6).
For example, middle C is a note that sits on the line in sheet music, and would therefore have only two wings (4). The D above or the B below it, however, sit between the lines, and would therefore have two pairs. (5)
The bright colors on the drones were also intended to match to the key that needed to be pressed to destroy them (more on that later). The red here is a placeholder meant to indicate which parts of the models were intended to be recolored.
