For this week’s Digital Foundations assignment, we had to use Makey Makey to create a new musical interface. I immediately thought of one of my favorite games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In the game, players have to learn a number of songs in order to be able to access new areas and perform special actions. I wanted to create a Makey Makey instrument that would let players in a Unity game unlock a puzzle.
I used a piece of foam to serve as the basis for my instrument, and then I applied a conductive ink because Makey Makey’s magic comes from completing circuits. The foam itself would not conduct electricity, so the conductive ink is necessary to make it work.
From there, it was a process of developing the scene in Unity. I used an existing library of temple blocks to construct the dungeon area, but I designed the character myself in Adobe Illustrator.
I had not worked with skeleton animations in Unity before, so that was a new experience for me. I have a fair amount of experience working with Unity code, so that was not a significant challenge. I am also rather inexperienced with sound effects in Unity, which made this all the more challenging since it is all about making music.
In order to get the tones for the flute, I had to use a program called Bosca Ceoil, and exported each note out as its own file to put into the Unity scene.