Oktojam

This is a little music toy for Android that we made at the Berlin Mini Game Jam on October 2014.  As usual, I coded it in Löve2D (the Android version).  The developer team was formed by Desiree Ludewig, Max Heyder, Cedric Douhaire, and myself.

The original idea was to create some sort of toy or game that would explore links between movement and music.  It would read data from the phone’s accelerometer and use that to modify the sound of various instruments.  The technical side of it was very straightforward, thanks to the great versatility of Löve2D.  Figuring out the right sounds to use and the right mapping between the input data and the sounds kept us busy for most of the jam.

It’s pretty simple to use: just move the phone to explore the different sounds.  There are four colored boxes that you can tap: they function as switches for mute / unmute the different instruments.  The sounds are tied to the orientation of the phone.  Even though our original idea was to tie them to gestures, we finally settled on a simpler implementation which is orientation-based.

We didn’t think of a proper name for the project, so the original placeholder name stayed: “Oktojam”, since it was the game made at the October game jam.  Coincidentally, I already made another game called “Oktoberjam” a few years ago.  I think that already I know what will be the name of the game I’ll do a year from today.

I uploaded the program as an Android APK file in the downloads section of the Bitbucket repository.  You can download it from there.

Now that I take a look at code I uploaded, I only made 6 commits during the jam, and 3 of them are tagged “uploading new sounds”.  The other 6 commits are just some cleanup from a few minutes ago.  Least amount of coding ever 😀

• Download APK for Android
• Source code (Bitbucket)

Update 28/Oct/14:

Here’s a video that qubodup made, testing the app on a Samsung device

And this is a video of us presenting the project at the end of the jam.  The uploaded version uses a different color palette than the default colors we had at the jam.