Spacebar Shuffle (one-button game jam)

In our games development module we were tasked with developing a one-button game in groups of two. My main contributions were towards 'mapping' out the music my partner made, creating a way to load 'maps' in-engine, and synchronising the notes displayed on screen with the audio as best as possible.

We used Godot 3.5.1 as it was the only engine both of us had worked with in the past, to save either of us from having to learn something entirely new within our already limited timeframe. I do regret not using Unity, since I have much more experience working with it, and prefer Visual Studio to Godot's built-in IDE.

I took a bit of a gamble and used a tool that was entirely new to me to map out the notes in the song, called MBOY Editor that output JSON files containing information about note positioning. This paid off since I've worked with JSON (and dictionaries in general) extensively in the past when working on web API related projects.

The bulk of the code I wrote was for the 'NoteSpawner' node, mainly decoding the JSON output by the mapping software, and converting it to time data. I had to spend some additional time tweaking offsets and multipliers to keep the mapping as accurate as possible throughout the song. In hindsight I would have added a settings menu within the game that allowed the player to alter the offsets themselves, but for this game jam the defaults I made seemed to be adequate.

We struggled with time management, barely managing to submit the project with just 7 minutes remaining before the deadline. This was mostly the consequence of jumping right into the project without making work allocations or mini-deadlines for milestones. This primarily impacted our graphics, just simple shapes with minimal visual feedback and lack of an end-game screen / leaderboard after the song had played through.

Itch.io submission page: https://itch.io/jam/game-development-one-button-game-2022/rate/1737429