Guess The Genre
Completed: In progress! Started in 2023.
Genre: Music Trivia/Guessing Game
Platform(s): PC/Mac
Description: Listen to a snippet of a randomly selected song and guess what genre you're listening to from a series of options
Unusual elements:
- Includes music from over 6,000 microgenres of music
- Over 100 game modes with themes relating to level of obscurity of genres, country or region of origin, and mega-genre
- Competitive gameshow mode using a physical buzzer I made using Phidgets
- Tournament mode: great for parties!
My roles:
- Solo Project (mostly game development and game design)
This is a solo project that was meant to be just a quick and small prototype, but was met with such overwhelming praise from players that I made it into a big huge thing.
This game really tested my skills as a network engineer, since I previously had very little experience or education around network programming, but it was vital to use the Spotify API and data from everynoise.com to retrieve playlists, song audio, album art, artist information, and more, as well as information on different genres and what was contained in each. The networking in this game relies on the use of cURL requests using the Spotify API and downloading raw webpage data from everynoise.com to get full lists of genres and information about their levels and locations of popularity.
From a game design perspective, a big piece of the work for this was making sure the game was very customizable for different types of players; I had to make sure this was fun for people with very different music tastes and very different levels of experience with musical knowledge. This was a big reason why I split the game into so many modes, so everyone could find something that made them feel like an expert. For instance, one player, a Hawaiian woman in her 50s, struggled with the less specific game modes, but did very well in the Native Pacific Islander mode, since she could easily distinguish genres other players couldn't based on what felt like home to her.
I tried with the UI design of the game mode select to nudge players toward modes that would include very many and very diverse genres. In "Recommended" mode, players will hear music and see options from any of the over 6,000 genre options possible, and even if that includes many genres the average person may have never heard of, like kizomba, tin pan alley, tallava, or neue deutsche welle, most genres sound like something one can make some educated guesses about, like funk ostentação, south african deep soulful house, kazakh indie, croatian pop, or winnipeg hip hop. This means even those who don't know much about music can usually eliminate many options right away (e.g. if the song is someone rapping, it probably isn't balinese traditional, deathgrass, or hungarian classical piano, but it might be tanzanian hip hop).
The game also automatically scales difficulty based on how well the player is doing, either decreasing options if the player wasn't doing well or increasing them if they were very successful. This and the lives system (start with three, lose one for each wrong answer, potentially gain one for correctly answering occasional "hard" questions where all answer choices have something in common) had to be balanced a lot for more experienced players to make sure they never reached an equilibrium of difficulty, since at that point they'd be playing the game forever.
My biggest plans for the game center on improving the UI and overall visual presentation of the game, as well as making the competitive mode work without the physical buzzer I made. Once this is done, I plan on doing a full public release. Many people, including some who have worked in games for decades, say this has the potential to be a viral hit, so I'm excited to see how it will be received.