Jhonny, Filip and Johannes doing some final tests before the presentations.
A quick, yet long overdue, debrief about our game ‘Panflute Hero’, created during the Way Out West Hackathon 2013.
During last years (2012) WayOutWestHack, we made a multiplayer 3D space shooter, playable from inside Spotify desktop client, where you fly around in a spaceship and shoot your pals/foes using your favorite songs as ammunition. This year, we wanted to up the ante a bit and decided to add hardware into the mix. Except for one electronics course in college (where most of us flunked the tests a couple of times), none of us hardly know anything about hardware. Nonetheless, the idea of a guitar hero-esque panflute game was too stupid and silly for us to pass on.
All in all, getting all the hardware and piecing together the first flute took us about two weeks in total. All of us are full-time employed at various places, so finding time in everyone’s busy schedule was more challenging than actually building it. The core backend software was developed simultaneously, where most of...
The game idea is based around a simple space shooter. The goal is to fly around in space and avoid obstacles in forms of moving asteroids and other players. Your ship is equipped with a weapon that uses your top tracks as ammunition. Health is lost when you’re hit and health is gained if you get hit by one of your starred/favourite tracks. The connection between the hack theme ‘Music Discovery’ is that the player will hear and (hopefully) discover new music while playing the game with different people all over the world!
Pre hack
We knew before the hack started that we wanted to do something fun, not just a straightforward interpretation of the theme (“Music Discovery”). Since everyone on our small team loves game development, we had a direction we all wanted to explore that was both fun and challenging. What could be more fun than...
