Project Overview

MidiHero's core mission is to be an entertaining game that develops musical skill. This is a primary innovation of MidiHero as well. Unlike previous music games like DDR and Guitar Hero, becoming an expert MidiHero player will actually hold some value because the player will have developed useful musical skills. This mission requires that MidiHero interface with real instruments, cultivate musical ability, and still be an entertaining game.

Much of the overall game design was borrowed from existing music games, but a few key changes needed to be made. Whereas DDR and GuitarHero can present multiple difficulties for the same song easily, MidiHero has more restrictions on what it can have the player do since all of the input maps to MIDI output. In Guitar Hero for instance, an effort is made to make the notes seem to match the song but in reality there is no one-to-one correspondence between input and audio output, and the Guitar Hero controller is in fact incapable of representing enough notes to actually play the song. In MidiHero, the song can certainly be presented at different speeds and with different grading criteria, and the game may also isolate individual tracks, wait for player input, or any number of other training features, but the notes to be played need to map to real MIDI events. However, there isn't any reason that MidiHero can't provide choice for what notes to play. This will be the other main innovation in MidiHero. Instead of providing purely single-track linear game-play, MidiHero will allow for multiple paths through timing based pattern recognition. Amplitude, another simplified music scroller, allows the player to move between tracks, but this is done using track selecting input and does not allow divergence within the note playing interface. MidiHero relies solely on the MIDI Controller interface so the pattern based selection system will be necessary but also more appropriate because it will not break the flow of the music. This will not only allow the player to choose how the song will sound, but it will hopefully provide a MIDI game interface that could be easily used for other types of games like 2D platformers or even fighting games.